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“We don’t need to recruit transfer students so much as we need to serve them.”
—Admissions director at a large flagship university
While American community colleges are highly regarded for providing access to higher education for many students, especially those from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds, many of those students never make significant progress in earning a baccalaureate degree. In order to do so, they must successfully transfer to a four-year institution. For decades, policymakers and educators have been concerned about the low numbers who make that transition successfully. A 2003 U. S. Department of Education report notes that only about half of the community-college students who indicate a desire to transfer to a four-year institution eventually succeed. An earlier report from the American Council on Education pegged the transfer rate at about a quarter of potential students. The number of students “lost” in the transfer process represents both a waste of individual talent and a failure of America’s higher-education establishment.
The inexorable demographic challenges this country faces require that we do a better job of building the transfer bridge for at least two reasons. First, the number of high-school graduates whom colleges and universities will need to educate without appreciably greater resources will grow significantly throughout this decade. Second, community colleges disproportionately enroll students from groups that have been underrepresented in higher education and that are poised to grow dramatically in the next two decades.
Community-college leaders are quick to point out that the number of students admitted to four-year institutions is out of their hands—that they are judged on a metric they do not control. The heartening news is that four-year institutions are beginning to take their responsibility for the success of the transfer function more seriously.
In a widely reported initiative, for example, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and eight highly selective institutions, including Amherst College and Cornell University, are devoting more than $27 million to increase the number of low- and moderate-income community-college students who transfer to those institutions. Meanwhile, two influential public institutions, the Universities of Wisconsin-Madison and Virginia, also have announced plans to increase the number of community-college students they enroll. Further, in light of the on-going debate about the extent to which high-achieving but poor students have access to the country’s best colleges and universities, several blue-chip institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford Universities are taking a hard look at community-college students as a way of diversifying their enrollments.
I applaud this interest in community-college transfer and hope that it is sustained. But the existing efforts still are limited. Over the next three years the University of Wisconsin-Madison projects enrolling about 150 additional community-college transfers. Over the next four years the institutions participating in the Cooke initiative expect to enroll 1,100 more of these transfers, and the additional number admitted by any one of the nation’s other elite institutions is probably measured in mere tens of students. So as laudable as these initiatives are, the combined effort will affect a very small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of potential transfer students. What we need are additional strategies that help more institutions enroll far more students from community colleges. Fortunately, recent efforts by some of California’s four-year institutions, working in partnership with community colleges, show us how to gain traction on this front. These efforts increase the transfer of community-college students in ways that are cost-effective and relatively easy to implement.
Stephen J. Handel is director of the National Office of Community College Initiatives at the College Board. Prior to his current position, he was director of transfer-enrollment planning and outreach for the University of California System. Although colleagues in the UC and California Community College systems helped shape the ideas in the article, the opinions expressed do not necessarily represent current policy for the University of California or the California Community Colleges.
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