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Community colleges provide low-income individuals, including a disproportionate share of minority students, with their primary means of access to higher education. This is particularly true in California, one of the most diverse states in the nation. There, Latinos account for approximately 37 percent of the population and 29 percent of the community-college enrollments, while African-Americans make up 7 percent of the citizenry and 7 percent of community-college students. The numbers for both groups are much lower at four-year institutions. For a substantial proportion of those students, community colleges are the only option available because of the students’ often-inadequate academic preparation in high school and, especially for first-generation students, their lack of knowledge about other colleges. A community college also represents an affordable choice that enables students to live at home (or nearby) and maintain family ties.
But even though these students are over-represented in California community colleges, very few of them successfully transfer to a four-year college, and even fewer make it to one of the two most selective public institutions in the state.
Transfer is a crucial point in a student’s educational pathway since a student who fails to transfer will not be able to attain a bachelor’s degree or the benefits that accompany it, such as middle-class status and higher earnings. When members of ethnic minority groups are particularly disadvantaged in reaching their full educational potential, a state like California loses substantial income, since an increasing proportion of its residents will end up in lower-paying jobs that generate lower tax revenues.
The Problem
In this column, I identify the main transfer pathways for students to the two most selective public institutions in the state, the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). I focus on the most selective institutions in the UC system because individuals who attend these types of institutions attain higher graduation rates, higher graduate-school attendance rates, and higher earnings (Eide, Brewer, & Ehrenberg, 1998; Melguizo, forthcoming)—advantages that should be available to promising students from all groups. And given the substantial numbers of minority and low-income students who first attend community colleges, transfer is also a way for elite institutions to increase their racial/ethnic and socioeconomic diversity and to reap the educational benefits of that diversity.
Data from the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) reveal that over the past 15 years, four institutions—Santa Monica College (SMC), Diablo Valley College (DVC), City College of San Francisco (CCSF), and De Anza College (DAC)—transferred the largest numbers of students to UC Berkeley and UCLA. Students from those colleges accounted for one-third of the total community-college transfers to those universities.
Tatiana Melguizo is an assistant professor in the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education. Her work on the economics of higher education focuses on the impact of institutional characteristics and public policies on the persistence and educational outcomes of minority and low-income students.
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