Amidst the current upheavals in higher education, the needs of largely marginalized students attending community colleges garner few headlines. Last year, the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Columbia University, in partnership with the Aspen Institute, reported a national transfer rate of 16 percent—only two percentage points higher than a similar study conducted a decade earlier. Despite years of investment by federal, state, and local governments, colleges and universities, and the philanthropic community, we see no empirical evidence that we are broadly improving the odds for community college students attempting to complete a bachelor’s degree by transferring to a four-year institution.
Yet the allure of a bachelor’s degree remains a powerful ticket to the middle class for these individuals. Despite the increased skepticism about higher education, as many as 80 percent of new community college students understand the long-term benefits, and express an interest in transferring in order to earn a four-year degree.
Have we hit a transfer rate ceiling? Is the stratified structure of U.S. postsecondary education impervious to a fully effective transfer pathway as envisioned by education progressives over a century ago?
These are difficult but necessary questions. The pathway between community colleges and four-year institutions will only become more important in addressing growing inequities in U.S. education.
First, the so called “demographic cliff” is starting to scare even the more selective four-year institutions. With significantly fewer high school graduates projected in the next decade, community college transfer students are receiving greater attention as a way to plug enrollment gaps in the first-year class for four-year institutions. Second, the public’s apparent disaffection with higher education is most associated with “celebrity” institutions. The price-points, open admissions, and geographic conveniences of community colleges make them an attractive (and sometimes only) option for our most vulnerable and talented students. Four-year colleges seeking diverse and talented applicant pools are starting to recognize community colleges as offering access to such students.
Still, in light of the low national transfer rate, transfer advocates must fall back to older, more traditional policies and practices that were proven to be effective. Based on our own collective 60 years of experience, we offer ten recommendations on how to boost student transfer:
- Start locally. The most successful transfer partnerships are locally initiated and maintained. Student transfer is difficult both logistically and academically. That’s because our current higher education system values institutional independence over cooperation. Even among public postsecondary systems, where there should be overlaps in admissions, curriculum, and good will, transfer students are set adrift and often on their own in negotiating maddingly different (and often trivial) institutional speed bumps. (Alexandra Lougue’s Pathways to Reform provides a startling but not uncommon example at the City University of New York.) The advantages of local partnerships are obvious: Administrative and faculty oversight is enhanced, bureaucratic snags are better identified and addressed, and inter-institutional programs, such as course sharing, summer bridge programs, dual enrollment, and campus exchanges are more easily initiated.
- Don’t compete. The problem of keeping things local means that institutions may compete for the same sets of first-year students. This can muck-up a smooth-running transfer process. Community college leaders hate it when four-year institutions poach their students prior to graduation because the community college receives no credit for conferring a credential or degree—or even for preparing a student for successful transfer. The best non-compete agreements keep first-year recruitment unrestricted for both sets of institutions but allow community colleges to keep whoever they recruit until they graduate. The result is that four-year enrollment managers benefit from a sustained and predictable pipeline of transfer students from their local community colleges.
- Be accountable. Transfer students are rarely well served if a four-year institution only admits them because of the institution’s failure to recruit a sufficiently sized first-year class (which happens more often than you think). The result is that transfers are frequently left with less-than-optimal financial aid and course selection options. Four-year institutions therefore need to separate first-year and transfer enrollment targets. This makes the institution publicly accountable for hitting separate goals, while preventing institutions from enrolling transfer students only to plug first-year enrollment deficits.
- Adopt a common and fully transferable general education (GE) curriculum. Colleges and universities traditionally focus the first two years of college on general education courses. Skills gained in that lower division prepare students for transferring and earning a four-year degree. Local institutional networks are better able to develop a common curriculum that addresses the curricular proclivities of each institution and students gain clarity and focus on a process that currently often offers them neither.
- Create “major pathways.” Besides GE, the transfer student progress is regularly tripped up at the four-year institution because students fail to complete the lower division prerequisite courses that prepare them for the major. This is especially true for STEM majors, which require a significant number of lower-division math and science courses. Again, by working locally, faculty at two- and four-year institutions can more easily come to agreement on these pre-major pathways so that students are properly prepared for the major they seek to complete at the four-year institution.
- Collect transfer student outcome data. Both two- and four-year institutions already collect enrollment and graduation data for their first-year students. Adding transfer student data should be an easy matter. For community colleges, data collection should include counting the number of students they “fully prepare” for transfer, along with the number of those who succeeded in doing so. Four-year institutions should track the students they admit as transfers to assess the extent to which admission requirements and other completion-related metrics are met in relation to the students admitted as first-year entrants.
- Encourage students to complete the AA degree for transfer. Although research outcomes are equivocal as to whether or not completion of the AA is more likely to propel students on to a bachelor’s degree, students earning an AA degree also have the advantage of possessing a postsecondary credential if they decide not to transfer or to transfer later.
- Create opportunities for student engagement with the receiving institution. For three decades, Vassar College’s Exploring Transfer program brings two-year students from community colleges around the country to experience residential academic life at one of the most prestigious liberal arts institutions in the nation. Research reveals that this intervention has been pivotal in propelling students to earn a bachelor’s degree, and nearly 85% of Exploring Transfer graduates go on to complete their four-year degree. Other summer engagements also show similar success (see UCLA’s Center for Community College Partnerships), providing community college students with the valuable opportunity to see that they can do the work and begin to understand the resources that are available to assist them.
- Promote multiple advising channels. Each student’s transfer pathway is unique, but the cost of addressing that specialness is beyond even the most robust advising budgets. Both two- and four-year institutions are utilizing—and showing—results for data-analytic advising strategies and chatbots that cannot substitute for human interaction yet can still supplement it.
- Create seamless admission. Students who are able to enter a community college knowing that they will be automatically admitted to the local four-year institution upon completion is a powerful motivator. It also eliminates the most obvious bureaucratic entanglements that can divert students from their goal of attaining a bachelor’s degree.
Higher education’s work on behalf of transfer students has thus far been earnest but ineffective. These ten strategies can realign our focus by emphasizing solutions that reflect local needs. With only 16 out of 100 community college transfer students nationally earning a four-year degree, the risks associated with implementation appear—optimistically—low.
Stephen J. Handel is ECMC Foundation’s Chief of Staff, a former senior strategist with the College Board, and the past Chief Admissions Officer for the University of California system. Eileen L. Strempel is the former Inaugural Dean of The Herb Alpert School of Music and Professor of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles.
