Community college transfer numbers are a key benchmark of success, but they remain far below the state’s own goal
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The community college system is falling short of one of its most important benchmarks: the number of students who transfer to a four-year college or university. It remains well below the system’s own goal, and lawmakers have taken notice.
“Although most students intend to transfer to a four-year university, few do,” wrote a group of state legislators this year as they asked the state to audit community college performance.
Set in 2017, the goal was to increase the annual number of community college students who transfer to the University of California and California State University from nearly 89,000 to more than 120,000 by 2022. In the 2020-21 academic year, the most recent data available, nearly 99,000 community college students transferred to a UC or Cal State.
The Community College Chancellor’s Office responded to questions regarding the transfer goal by forwarding a letter that former interim Chancellor Daisy Gonzales wrote to legislators in March as part of an internal negotiation regarding the audit. In it, she wrote that the goal “has not been fully achieved.”
She wrote that the UC and Cal State system rejected nearly 30,000 eligible community college applicants in fall 2020 — more than enough transfers to meet the community colleges system’s goal. She wrote there was “insufficient capacity” at the UC and Cal State campuses and asked the auditors to include equal scrutiny of those systems, since everyone is mutually responsible for coordinating successful transfers.
However, there are many ways to measure transfer. To get a clearer picture, CalMatters looked beyond the chancellor’s office goal and analyzed the raw number of students who transferred every year, which includes but is not limited to those who transfer to a UC or Cal State. Those numbers are reported by four-year institutions across the country and analyzed by the California Community College Chancellor’s Office. Undocumented students are not counted because they lack a Social Security number. It’s the methodology that most closely aligns with the state’s funding formula, which pegs the transfer numbers to the amount of money a college receives.
CalMatters then compared those numbers to the total number of students who, upon starting community college, said they eventually wanted to get an associate degree or transfer.
Of the students enrolled in a community college in California who said they wanted to transfer to a four-year university, an average of 9.9% went on to enroll at a four-year institution in 2021, the most recent data available.
There are many reasons why students never transfer. The state’s roughly 1.8 million community college students are predominantly low-income, first-generation students of color. Many students, especially older students, must juggle work, children, and for some, even homelessness while attending school.
But certain populations and colleges have a harder time with transfer than others. CalMatters found:
- Students at rural community colleges are less likely to transfer to a four-year university than students who attend school in affluent parts of Ventura County, Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, and Bay Area suburbs like San Bruno, Pleasant Hill, and Redwood City.
- Colleges separated by only a few miles show stark contrasts in transfer rates. In 2021, the most recent year available, the transfer rate at Irvine Valley College was 16.7%, but just 10 miles away, at Santa Ana College, the rate was 5.4%.
- Younger community college students were most likely to transfer, and the rates drop off the older a student gets. In 2021, students over the age of 50 were more than four times less likely to transfer than their peers between ages 20 and 24.
Rural, unprepared students face biggest hurdles
Lassen College has one of the lowest transfer rates in the state — 4.5% in 2021. It’s more than 10 percentage points below the highest performer, Irvine Valley College.
The reason is easy to see, said Roxanna Hayes, the vice president of student services at Lassen College in Susanville: The nearest four-year institution is over 80 miles away at the University of Nevada in Reno.
“It feels like we’re 2 hours from anything…when you come up to Susanville and you look around, there’s no other educational institution besides us.”
“We don’t have the sort of income that other counties have,” Hayes said. “It’s not just getting accepted to school: I’ve also got to live there and afford it.”
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