For all its leaks and clogs, the transfer pipeline from community colleges is becoming an increasingly important conduit for four-year colleges seeking to not only fill their seats but also maintain momentum toward diversifying their enrollments.
Two-year colleges enroll a disproportionate number of Black and Hispanic undergraduates, who rely on the transfer process to save time and money while pursuing a bachelor’s degree. So community colleges would seem to be a natural recruiting ground for colleges that are now legally banned from considering an applicant’s race in admissions. The U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision, in a case involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has many colleges worried that already-low minority enrollments might slip further, especially among more-selective institutions.
But transfer plans are too often dashed by confusing requirements, red tape, and unexpected setbacks, several experts told The Chronicle last week in a virtual panel on transforming the transfer process.
The result? While four out of five students who start at a two-year college hope to complete a four-year degree, fewer than one in five do so, the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College reported in 2021. The problems are even worse for Black and Hispanic students, who are half as likely as white students to transfer to a four-year college.
So what does that mean for a higher-education sector struggling with declining enrollments and confusing signals about what colleges can and can’t consider when recruiting students?
Fixing the transfer process is an equity imperative, John Fink, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center, told our audience.
“What we see are not just low outcomes, but inequitable outcomes,” he said. “Bachelor’s degrees are important in terms of closing the racial wealth gap,” he said, and starting out at a two-year campus is often promoted as a way to make a four-year degree more attainable for low-income and other underrepresented students. Attainment gaps, however, remain stubbornly wide. Just 28 percent of Black adults and 21 percent of Hispanic adults hold bachelor’s degrees or higher, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, compared with 42 percent of white and 61 percent of Asian people.
A 2021 report from the American Council on Education called fixing the transfer process a social-justice issue.
“Low-income students and students of color are more likely to rely on transfer to decrease cost and time to degree,” it states, “but this choice requires practices and policies for the award of credit that are easier to navigate.”
Navigating a Maze
Navigating the transfer process can present significant obstacles. A student hoping to major in psychology at a four-year institution might have to wade through a maze of transfer agreements and course requirements, only to find that different institutions have different requirements. For example, the math courses they needed to take at the community college may not apply toward their major at the four-year institution. These and other courses might transfer only as electives, if at all.
Students of color are more likely to rely on transfer to decrease cost and time to degree, but this choice requires practices and policies for the award of credit that are easier to navigate.
Good advising is key, but too few students either have early enough access to it or take advantage of it, some of the speakers said. Students from underrepresented groups are more likely to be attending college part time and juggling work and families, and they’re less likely to have family members who can guide them through the transfer process. Some have trouble accessing their transcripts because an outstanding balance has put a hold on their account.
There are ways to overcome financial hurdles — some colleges are lifting transcript holds, waiving application fees, and offering scholarships to transfer students. But unless students consult an adviser, they may not know these options exist.
“Only about half of transfer-intending students have spoken to a transfer adviser,” Fink said. “So students are largely on their own, and when they do make it to a university, although many universities are making significant strides, there can be unreceptive cultures.” Community-college students sometimes feel stigmatized as being less prepared than their peers who started at the four-year college. If they’re students of color, they’re likely to find themselves in a much smaller minority and may question whether they fit in.
Such dynamics are likely to become more distressing at selective colleges, which are the types of institutions that will mainly be affected by the ban on race-based affirmative action. Most colleges accept the majority of students who apply, and are more concerned with simply filling their seats, as a looming drop in the number of high-school graduates threatens to worsen pressures they’re already feeling.
But it isn’t just the Harvards and prestigious flagships of the world that are likely to feel the effects of a ban on race-conscious admissions, some experts predict. Coupled with recent attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at colleges nationwide, it could send the message to students from underrepresented-minority groups that they aren’t particularly welcome at the four-year campuses they’ve hoped to join.
Fostering Belonging
One program that strives to make sure students feel a sense of belonging from Day 1 is the Advance partnership between Northern Virginia Community College, or NOVA, and George Mason University. A streamlined admissions process, aligned curricular pathways, and personalized success coaches help keep students on track. Most of the program’s students are students of color, and 60 percent are the first in their families to attend college.
The first-year retention rate for students who participate in the Advance program is 87 percent, far higher than the 61-percent rate among community-college students nationwide, said Rita Snyder Furr, associate director of community-college partnerships at George Mason. She’s helping expand the program to other colleges in the state, with the goal of ensuring that students graduate with both two- and four-year degrees.
While at NOVA, students who need a class that’s taught only at George Mason can take that as a non-degree-seeking student and transfer it back to the community college.
The Advance program, where students complete an associate degree before getting their bachelor’s, benefits both the two- and four-year colleges, each of which gets credit for its students’ completing. But that’s not the way transfer usually works, Fink said. “Most students transfer without completing an award from the community college,” he said. “They do that because they don’t think it’s worth completing, or because it doesn’t articulate well to the university. So I think it’s on us as practitioners, as educators, to create programs and associate degrees for transfer worth completing.”
Micol Hutchison, director of transfer for the Virginia Community Colleges system, works with the state’s 23 community colleges and public and private four-year colleges to streamline the transfer process and remove obstacles to graduation. For too long, she said, colleges have tried to “fix” students coming from the two-year sector rather than celebrating and welcoming the diversity they bring to the four-year university.
“Sometimes, recognizing a student’s cultural capital is really concrete, like it might be giving them credit for prior learning,” Hutchison said. “It might be recognizing that the students’ military experience, or that workplace credential is just as valuable as a different type of requirement that the four-year school has.”
Getting faculty members from two- and-four-year colleges together, on a departmental level, to hash out what skills and knowledge are essential, and which courses need to be taken when, is key, the speakers agreed. Sometimes, they agree to compromise when rigid requirements at the four-year level are keeping too many transfer students out.
Discussions often reflect “the tension between providing access and providing rigor” and “between wanting things to be standardized” and being flexible to accommodate students, Hutchison said.
During these conversations, Fink added, stereotypes about what community-college students are studying, and what they’re capable of, often fall away. “I’ve heard of cases where we’re concerned about the rigor, but then it turns out, it’s the same adjunct teaching at the university as in the same course in the community college,” he said.
Lia Wetzstein is director of community college research initiatives at the University of Washington, where she’s overseeing efforts to expand transfer success for nine pairs of two- and four-year colleges across the state. Much of her program focuses on helping minority and low-income students transfer into STEM majors, where minority students are often underrepresented.
One team found that a rural community-college campus didn’t have anyone to teach a 200-level engineering class that students needed to transfer into that major, so the four-year college is working to open its course to community-college students to take it remotely.
Another team co-created a 100-level course with learning objectives the two- and four-year colleges came up with together. It will be taught at the community college but apply to the major at the four-year college.
“Let’s recognize that if these institutions don’t put the work in to improve the transfer process and completion,” Wetzstein said, “then it’s on the students to navigate these really cryptic spaces on their own.”
