In 2008, I became the first person I know of to transfer from Santa Monica College, an urban community college with a student population of 34,000, to Amherst College, an elite, private institution of 1,800 students. At the time, I didn’t grasp the significance of that step. As a low-income, first-generation college student who had neither a high-school diploma nor GED, my gaining admission to Amherst was the result not just of perseverance, but also of luck.
Institutions of higher education are broadly viewed as engines of social mobility. But economic stratification among students attending different types of colleges is limiting that role. Wealthy students outnumber poor ones at the most selective colleges by 14 to one. A similar but reverse pattern holds true for the least selective colleges, including community colleges, which enroll 45 percent of all undergraduates in the nation. And while student completion rates are very high at selective universities, they can be abysmally low at community colleges. Hence, many colleges are simply not the engines of social mobility they could be.
Because of an unconventional upbringing, I never graduated from high school, and when I was 17, I began working full time. I was lucky to find a job as a live-in nanny for an affluent family in Santa Monica. Taking that job meant that I moved from an environment in which education was neither highly valued, nor even understood, to one in which education was of paramount importance and extremely well understood — especially the value of a higher education. Having been raised to believe that college was both too expensive for me and not crucial to my future success, my perspective on college began to gradually change in this new environment.
Santa Monica College was in my backyard, and so affordable that I had little to lose by getting my feet wet with a few classes. (And it offered many sections of the most popular classes at convenient times.) Among California’s 112 community colleges, Santa Monica also has a reputation for transferring the largest number of students into the University of California system.
When I had enough credits, I decided to apply to Amherst because my boss, an alumnus of Middlebury, urged me to investigate liberal-arts colleges. Amherst is among the few top liberal-arts colleges that accept a small number of community-college transfer students each year. I ultimately accepted Amherst’s invitation to attend because I liked the idea of having close interaction with faculty members, and the school’s financial-aid offer made it cost-competitive with the University of California.
Once I arrived on campus, I found a welcoming, close-knit community of transfer students, who had come to Amherst by way of diverse paths. They included many first-generation, nontraditional, and minority students, groups that are represented in greater numbers at community colleges.
Among my friends was a late-20-something who had slacked off in high school, started a rock band, and then spent his mid-20s tending bar to support a globe-trotting habit. (He will soon be graduating from Yale Law School.) Another worked as a pest controller and shoe shiner before matriculating at Amherst. (He is getting his Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) Yet another grew up in an insular Yemeni community before running away from home to pursue an education. (She is at UC-Berkeley studying law.)
My route to an elite college, and that of many others who transferred to Amherst when I did, gives the impression that social mobility is alive and well in this country. In fact, the United States lags behind other developed countries.
Many elite colleges simply have not designed policies to support a more diverse student body.
Our elite universities have blamed the poor socioeconomic diversity at their institutions on a shortage of qualified low-income students. Research tells us that the problem is not with a shortage of qualified students but rather with a shortage of applicants. Nevertheless, many elite colleges simply have not designed policies or allocated resources to support a more diverse student body, one that includes more community-college transfer students. That absence discourages talented students from applying to such institutions. (I applied to only three private colleges, all of which made it clear that they welcomed applications from transfer students like me.)
Community-college transfer students have shown that they can perform well at selective institutions. An evaluation of performance at eight highly selective colleges that received funds from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to support community-college transfer students found that these students maintained competitive GPAs compared with “native” and other transfer students and earned 95 percent of the academic credits they attempted (compared with 97 percent for other transfer students).
Although I would have been happy to go to a University of California campus to complete my bachelor’s degree, I’m grateful that Amherst was an option. While I was there, I learned a new language, had the chance to study abroad, received financial support to conduct independent research, and vastly improved my writing and thinking skills as a result of close interaction with faculty members. I also had the chance to spend time with people from different backgrounds, making me better prepared to work in a diverse workplace, and I learned about opportunities that I would not have otherwise.
If selective undergraduate institutions want to provide first-rate educations, then they need to do more to support a diverse student body. After all, a discussion-based seminar in sociology or political science will not be nearly as nuanced with students who are all from the same income level as it would be with students from a range of backgrounds. Diversity enriches experiences outside of the classroom as well.
Elite colleges need to adopt transfer-friendly policies and make sure that community-college transfer students feel welcomed, supported, and integrated into campus life. The benefits of doing so will accrue not only to transfer students but also to the wider campus community.