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  • Cal State’s online transfer planner aims to ease burden on community college students

    Cal State’s online transfer planner aims to ease burden on community college students


    Credit: Delilah Brumer/EdSource

    From complex general education requirements to early application deadlines, transferring from community college to California State University, Northridge proved to be a confusing process for Vanessa Rivera. Now, as a graduate intern at the Los Angeles Pierce College transfer center, Rivera works to support other students on their paths to the CSU system.

    “I was a lost college student, and I was really intimidated to seek help,” Rivera said. “This led me to a career path in counseling, (for the) ability to benefit lost college students like I once was.”

    With hopes of helping ease the transfer process for students like Rivera, the CSU system opened its new online CSU Transfer Planner for all California community college students in January. 

    “A large gap exists between the number of students who intend to transfer, and those who do,” said April Grommo, assistant vice chancellor of strategic enrollment management at the CSU Chancellor’s Office. 

    A complicating factor has been the lack of standards between systems. For example, the University of California has not had a systemwide transfer guarantee for community college students, and students considering transferring to Cal State have separate and different requirements for that system.

    According to an August 2023 report from the Public Policy Institute of California, only 19% of community college students who intended to transfer did so within four years, and only 10% did so within two years. Grommo said she hopes the new transfer portal will help bridge that gap.  

    “The CSU Transfer Planner was designed to create a more efficient and accessible pathway for students to transfer to the CSU,” Grommo said.

    The planner allows students to map out their coursework and general education requirements, enter test scores, view articulation agreements, explore program offerings and check if their GPA meets the requirements at their target campuses. 

    According to Grommo, the tool is tailored to help students figure out their individual paths so they don’t waste time and money taking unnecessary courses.

    “With the CSU Transfer Planner, community college students can directly connect to their future CSU campus of choice early in their educational journey, and ultimately minimize credit-loss and maximize time-to-degree completion,” Grommo said. 

    As of the end of February — less than three months after the portal launched — more than 9,500 students had created Transfer Planner accounts, according to Grommo.

    The planner is a great tool for students but has yet to see widespread use because of how new it is, according to Sunday Salter, the transfer center director at Pierce College and a member of the CSU Transfer Planner implementation committee. 

    “We want students to have some certainty,” Salter said. “A lot of students feel unsure in the transfer process. Our hope is that this tool will help them feel really confident in what is expected of them.”

    Samantha Watanabe, a third-year liberal studies major who recently transferred from Cuesta College to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, said a program like this would have really helped her while she was transferring. 

    “My last semester, I had to take seven classes just to get into Cal Poly because I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t really know that there were other requirements for Cal Poly. So I think a program like (the transfer planner) would have definitely aided me,” Watanabe said.

    Navigating transfer requirements is a difficult task for students across the nation. In Virginia, a new dual-admission program is working to address this problem and might ultimately serve as a model for California’s university systems.

    The CSU and UC systems also have recently launched dual-admission programs. First-time freshmen entering a community college can apply for the CSU Transfer Success Pathway program through the transfer portal. 

    Transfer center counselor Ashley Brackett at Allan Hancock College said she is excited about the planner, noting that it provides a huge opportunity for students. 

    “I’m stoked that they finally have created something similar to what the UC has already had for a really long time,” Brackett said. 

    The University of California system has a similar online planner for community college students to track their progress and requirements for admission to a UC.

    The UC Transfer Admission Planner is connected to the UC application, allowing students to keep track of their progress and apply for their school of choice all in one place, according to the UC admissions page. 

    The CSU planner will eventually be connected to the CSU application just like the UC planner is connected to its application, according to Grommo. 

    As the planner continues to develop, Salter said the Pierce transfer center will host events to introduce it to students who apply for the next CSU admission cycle, which will begin in October. 

    “I’m really excited that the Cal States have done this,” Salter said. “It centralizes communication between the universities and the students, and I’m looking forward to watching it expand.”

    Ashley Bolter is a fourth-year journalism student minoring in French and ethnic studies at Cal Poly. Delilah Brumer is a sophomore at Los Angeles Pierce College majoring in journalism and political science. Both are members of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.





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  • Dual admission programs a tool for addressing state’s transfer challenges, panel says

    Dual admission programs a tool for addressing state’s transfer challenges, panel says


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a7FKovXyWQ

    A group of education leaders and experts representing both community colleges and four-year universities agreed during EdSource’s Wednesday roundtable discussion that dual admission might be one of the most promising solutions to California’s broken transfer systems.

    About 2 million students are enrolled in the state’s 116 community colleges, yet just 10% of them transfer to a four-year university within two years, according to research from the Public Policy Institute of California, or PPIC.

    “At the end of the day, it’s really important for us to ensure that transfer is as seamless as possible, that students have the information they need upfront, that it’s actionable, that they’re able to take the courses they need and get through to transfer,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the PPIC Higher Education Center.

    Panelists at the roundtable — “Is dual admission a solution to California’s broken transfer system?” — agreed that dual admission should be available statewide for all interested students in order to ensure more seamless transfers.

    The roundtable included discussion of a state law passed in 2021 that sought to improve transfer rates in California. The postsecondary education trailer bill, or Assembly Bill 132, asked the University of California and required the California State University systems to create such programs for students who didn’t “meet freshman admissions eligibility criteria due to limitations in the high school curriculum offered or personal or financial hardship.”

    going deeper

    Visit the virtual event page for EdSource’s dual admission roundtable for more information about the speakers and a list of resources.

    Dual admission programs offer students guaranteed admission into certain four-year universities after completing a specific list of lower division courses at a community college. This is different from dual enrollment, a process in which students earn college credit while in high school.

    This law could potentially transform the state’s higher education pathways, given that California ranks 41st when it comes to high school graduates who enroll in a four-year university but third in its share who enroll in community college, according to Johnson.

    “What that means is that transfer students are critical to ensuring that California really provides a meaningful ladder of educational and economic mobility for our population,” Johnson said.

    While the state law calls for a pilot program, CSU’s dual admission program is permanent. It’s called the Transfer Success Pathway Program and launched in fall 2023 with an initial cohort of 2,000 students, said April Grommo, CSU’s assistant vice chancellor of enrollment management.

    “We purposely are creating a statewide system,” Grommo said. “We also know that students transfer or take courses at multiple community colleges, and we wanted all of that credit to be reflected in the system and for students to be able to accurately track how many units they’ve completed, what their transferable GPA is, and how they fulfill general education and major prerequisites so that they truly understand the courses that they need to transfer.”

    CSU’s program includes all campuses, though some of the most impacted majors are excluded, while UC’s program is limited to six of the nine campuses. CSU also goes beyond what’s required by law by offering dual admission to just about any student who was rejected or simply chose not to attend CSU.

    “Just for scale, there’s 162 community college students in the dual admission program for UC, and there’s 2,008 students in the dual admission program for CSU currently in the community colleges,” said panelist John Stanskas, vice chancellor for educational services and support at the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office.

    Roundtable panelists also discussed existing programs that could be used as a model for more statewide access to dual admission.

    One such example is in the state of Virginia, where Northern Virginia Community College has a dual admission partnership with George Mason University, which sits just 5 miles away. One of the roundtable panelists, Jaden Todd, is a current student at the community college and shared his experience.

    A significant benefit of his dual admission program, called ADVANCE, has been the clarity of knowing exactly which classes he’d need to take at his current campus and at George Mason University after transferring. A clear understanding of the courses he’d be required to take was important, he said, as he decided whether to pursue computer science versus computer engineering.

    “The fact that I’m able to see not only what classes I need to take here at NOVA (Northern Virginia Community College) but also what it transfers to and what it transfers as, I think that’s one of the biggest benefits of the program,” said Todd, who is on track to transfer to George Mason University in one year.

    “I don’t have to worry I’m wasting my money, I don’t have to worry I’m wasting my time. … I don’t have to be a junior taking freshman classes because I didn’t know that this history class was a prereq for this other class.”

    Todd said he’s also benefited from having access to a second campus.

    “That’s something that I wouldn’t have if this ADVANCE program doesn’t exist because I have access to everything a GMU student has access to because I’m considered a GMU student, even though I’m at NOVA,” Todd said, referring to George Mason University.

    Some GMU resources available to Todd are their libraries, a lab with 3D printers, and access to their student clubs.

    One of the longstanding challenges that California community college students face when transferring to a CSU or UC is the need to align the courses on their transcripts with the courses they must take after transferring. It’s a challenge that NOVA and GMU avoided by clearly outlining required courses for students enrolled in ADVANCE, but one that students in Long Beach City College’s initial dual admission program often came up against.

    In its initial iteration of the program in 2008, Long Beach City College partnered with Long Beach Unified and CSU Long Beach to create the Long Beach College Promise. Understanding which courses students were required to take at each level of their higher education journey, however, “was almost like a maze that they were trying to demystify,” said panelist Nohel C. Corral, executive vice president of student services at Long Beach City College.

    In 2019, the college relaunched a revised version called Long Beach College Promise 2.0, Corral said.

    “We mapped the courses students would need to take in their first two years here at Long Beach City College and what it would look like in their last two years at California State University Long Beach,” Corral said. “And that required a lot of coordination between the instructional faculty at both Long Beach City College and at Long Beach State, in addition to counselors and advisers in both institutions.”

    The relaunched program included 38 students enrolled at Long Beach City College who were also given CSU Long Beach student identification cards with access to the CSU library, sporting events and career services, among other resources. The following year, the cohort included 162 students, which grew to 774 by the fall of 2021.

    “We’re still tracking them and collecting data to assess the transfer rates for those cohorts, but for that fall 2019 cohort, we saw significant transfer rates compared to other populations,” he said.

    The panelists agreed that geography may become a potential challenge in the development of dual admission programs statewide, given California’s size. They also agreed, however, that regional partnerships become crucial in those areas.

    Just last week, for example, Chico State announced a dual admission partnership with seven community colleges. Fresno State and Fresno City College also have a partnership; likewise, CSU Bakersfield has one with Bakersfield College.

    Corral suggested “starting off with the data and seeing where the students are transferring to, if you don’t have a local CSU in your direct vicinity, so that you can start those dialogues and start those engagements with those CSUs that your students are going to.”

    Stanskas, of the community colleges’ chancellor’s office, said that dual admission can be “especially important for our place-bound students who can’t go a hundred miles or 500 miles to a program. They have family; they have commitments; they have lives that they are unable to move that way.”

    Grommo said, “We would love to see every student that’s transitioning from high school and decides that the community college pathway is their pathway that they need to take, really enroll in the Transfer Success Pathway program so we can support them early in their process and help them through this transfer journey.”

    This story was updated to accurately reflect Jaden Todd’s name.





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  • Trump Threatens to Transfer Harvard’s Billions for Scientific Research to Trade Schools, Demands Names of Foreign Students

    Trump Threatens to Transfer Harvard’s Billions for Scientific Research to Trade Schools, Demands Names of Foreign Students


    Trump is a petty man who is filled with rage, grievance, and a passion for retribution. His current target is Harvard University because the nation’s most prestigious university told him no. Harvard’s President Alan Garber said it would not allow the federal government to control its curriculum, its admissions, and its hiring policies. No.

    Every Cabinet department has pulled research grants to Harvard. Now he warns he might turn the billions that were going to medical and scientific research and hand it over to trade schools.

    He would rather stop researchers who are trying to find cures for cancer, tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases than back down on his efforts to stifle academic freedom and his vendetta against Harvard.

    I don’t know about you, but I would rather see the federal government fund the search for a cure for MS than withdraw the funding. If he wants to fund trade schools, why should he do so at the expense of crucial research?

    He wrote on Truth Social yesterday:

    “I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” Trump said in a post on social media. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”

    Meanwhile, Trump dreamed up another way to harass Harvard during the hours when he couldn’t get to sleep. He demanded that Harvard give him a list containing the names and countries of origin of all its foreign students. Harvard has nearly 7,000 foreign students. Why? What will he do with those names? Will he say they are spies and try again to expel them? Funny thing is he already has all their names and countries. They were registered when they applied for a visa. It’s all a campaign of endless vengeance by a petty, bitter man.



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  • Next stop on transfer students’ journey: UC Berkeley’s new, high-end dorm

    Next stop on transfer students’ journey: UC Berkeley’s new, high-end dorm


    Students move into UC Berkeley’s Anchor House on Aug. 21, 2024.

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Elizabeth Diaz was the valedictorian of her high school class in Bakersfield. But that does not mean her path to a four-year university has been easy.

    “Honestly, (UC Berkeley has) been my dream university since I was in high school,” Diaz said. “I had originally committed before, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to afford it.”

    Instead, Diaz spent two years at Bakersfield College, where she “felt a lot of stigma” for not having gone further from home for the next step in her education. “I felt like, you know what, I’m here. I’m not going to be able to make it anymore. I’m just going to stay here in my city,” Diaz said.

    Former Bakersfield College student Elizabeth Diaz settles into her dorm room for transfer students at UC Berkeley’s new Anchor House.
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    While attending community college, she pushed herself to get involved during the first two years, knowing it would take more to prepare herself for another shot at UC Berkeley than simply attending classes. “I started off getting involved with on-campus jobs as a tutor,” Diaz said. “I got involved with student government. I was a student activities manager, I created the history club on campus trying to, you know, get rid of that sense that ‘history sucks,’ because history is so cool. We’re living in it all the time.”

    Diaz also got involved in the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) because the organization is “tied … with my identity growing up as a daughter of an undocumented family … (I’m glad about) getting involved with the nonprofit CHRILA (and) advocating for other families who are still struggling,” Diaz said, adding, “Thankfully my family has been transitioning; my dad actually now has citizenship.”

    And she also took advantage of resources like Bakersfield College’s Extended Opportunity Programs and Services.  

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LMUVNQMsZY

    Watch Elizabeth Diaz move into her new dorm room with her family.

    “I kept myself accountable. Being a part of resource programs like EOPS … and the TRIO Student Support Services made me really, really, really super grateful for my community college, for allowing me the opportunity to get to know myself better and what I wanted to do.”

    Last month, Diaz finally achieved that dream, enrolling in UC Berkeley as a transfer student and moving into Anchor House, a brand-new residence hall specifically for transfer students on the university’s campus.

    Anchor House, a gift from the Helen Diller Foundation, is an apartment-style community that features high-end amenities such as a yoga studio, a rooftop vegetable garden and multiple lounge areas. It is also home to the new Transfer Student Center.

    “It’s like walking into a nice hotel,” a parent marveled when passing through the entrance.

    Immediately upon entering, the extravagance of the modern fixtures screamed resort more than undergraduate student housing. Even with ceilings akin to a cathedral, the front desk emitted an approachable warmth with the eager smiles of the resident assistants — a far cry from many freshman dorm buildings at UC Berkeley that don’t even have a lobby.

    Anchor House’s transfer-exclusive status brings both security in housing and an opportunity to grow relationships.

    “Last year coming in, I was still waiting on on-campus housing until the last round of housing offers, which was three weeks until the school semester started. It was nerve-wracking not having a place to live as the semester was approaching,” said Max Ortega, a transfer student from Los Medanos College in Pittsburg, now entering his senior year.

    Without a well-established transfer community, the transition to UC Berkeley was difficult last year as a new student, said Jonathan Zakharov, a rising senior from Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill. He noted the stark contrast between new first-year students “right out of high school,” and transfers with life experience and diverse backgrounds, saying it was “impossible” to find other transfer students to connect with after moving in.

    “If this were my first year while living at Anchor House, it would have been easier to relate to people,” Zakharov added.

    While transfer students make up 21% of undergraduates at UC Berkeley, the lack of community was clear. According to Anchor House resident director Ryan Felber, transfer students can feel “impostor syndrome,” which he hopes to remedy through a “built-in” community in students’ residential lives.

    “This space will be a literal anchor for them to hold onto and a place to call home,” Felber said.

    Jennifer Dodson
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Anchor House is open to both newly admitted and current transfers — and for Jennifer Dodson, a re-entry student who spent 20 years working in corporate accounting, living at Anchor House in her final year will be a major shift from last year’s housing.

    “As a junior transfer, I was placed in Unit 1 Putnam, which is primarily a freshman dorm,” Dodson said. “I was also roommates with a freshman student, but she was mature, and we got along very well.”

    Dodson, who turned 40 in June, is looking forward to Anchor House’s “networking opportunities,” an aspect she wasn’t able to experience in her first year living in Unit 1, in addition to building new friendships and meeting new people from diverse backgrounds.

    “It’s never too late to go back to school,” said incoming junior transfer and re-entry student Amye Elbert, who raised three children and one grandchild up until starting at UC Berkeley this fall.

    Elbert recently turned 52 years old, and is a first-generation college student.

    “Growing up, I always wanted to have a college degree, but in my aversive background, no one talked about college,” Elbert said. “I had kids early and had to take jobs I wasn’t interested in. Once my kids grew up and I didn’t have four mouths to feed, I knew I wanted to fulfill my dream of going to school.”

    After spending three years at Los Medanos College and earning three associate degrees in fine arts, art practice and art history, she will major in art practice at UC Berkeley with the aim of becoming a middle school art educator.

    “When I was in middle school, I just entered foster care and felt awful. But I had this art teacher who made me feel important and loved my artwork, and I want to do something similar for young students in situations like mine.” 

    Jo Moon is a third-year political economy and media studies student at UC Berkeley and a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.





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  • UC, Cal State, community colleges should work together to boost transfer rates, auditor says

    UC, Cal State, community colleges should work together to boost transfer rates, auditor says


    The Transfer and Reentry Center in Dutton Hall at UC Davis helps transfers get acclimated to their new environment.

    Credit: Karin Higgins/UC Davis

    Few students who intend to transfer from California’s community colleges do so successfully. To reverse that trend, the state’s public college systems will need to work collaboratively.

    That’s the finding of a report released Tuesday by the California State Auditor, which, at the direction of the state Assembly’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee, examined the state’s community college transfer system. 

    Only about 1 in 5 students who entered community college between 2017 and 2019 and intended to transfer did so within four years, the audit found. Rates were even lower for Black and Latino students, as well as for students from certain regions of the state, including the Central Valley.

    Many students struggled to navigate what critics call a complex transfer system in California, with variations in transfer requirements across the University of California and California State University systems, the audit found. 

    The report recommends that UC and CSU work with the community college system to streamline the transfer process. UC should consider widely adopting the associate degree for transfer (ADT) model that is already in place at CSU, and the systems should also share more data, according to the audit’s recommendations. The Legislature could also step in and appropriate funding to help CSU and UC better align their transfer requirements.

    Complexity leads to low transfer rates

    Students wishing to transfer often face obstacles that prevent them from getting to a four-year university. If students are considering multiple four-year universities for transfer, that often means a different set of requirements for each.

    For example, the auditor reviewed six potential four-year campuses to which a community college student studying computer science could transfer: UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, CSU San Marcos, San Diego State and Stanislaus State. 

    The course requirements vary greatly across the four-year campuses. UC San Diego and San Diego State require potential transfer students to complete a course in intermediate computer programming, whereas the other four campuses do not. UC San Diego is also the only campus to require an additional calculus course. Meanwhile, that campus does not require students to take differential equations, but UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara do.

    The audit calls out the ADT as a promising model at CSU, but even that has shortcomings, the report notes. The ADT, created in 2010, is a two-year degree that is no more than 60 credits and is fully transferable to CSU.

    Although completing the ADT guarantees a student admission into CSU, it does not guarantee students admission to a specific major campus. That’s a problem, the audit notes, because transfer-intending students are more likely to enroll if they’re admitted to their preferred program.

    UC, meanwhile, has not adopted the ADT at all and instead relies on its own transfer programs, such as the transfer admission guarantee. That program does admit students to specific campuses and majors, but not all campuses participate in the program, and for those that do, some majors are excluded. UC’s three most selective campuses — Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego — are the three that do not offer the transfer admission guarantee.

    Among the transfer-intending students who entered community college between 2017 and 2019, 21% transferred within four years and less than 30% did so within six years.

    Among Black students, between 16.1% and about 17.3% successfully transferred within four years for each cohort. For Latino students, between 14.5% and 15.6% in each cohort transferred in that time frame. That compares to more than 28% of white students in each cohort and as many as 30% of Asian students. 

    There were also differences depending on a student’s location.

    The audit found that community colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego regions, for example, had higher transfer rates than colleges in the Central Valley, Inland Empire and northern parts of the state.

    “One factor contributing to this difference may be the distances between community colleges and CSU and UC campuses in those regions. Students are more likely to transfer to a nearby university for a variety of reasons, including challenges associated with relocating,” the audit states.

    That’s true for students at Lassen Community College in northeastern California, according to an administrator there. The administrator told auditors that “proximity is a major barrier” for transfer-intending students. The closest CSU or UC campus is Chico State, which is still more than a two-hour drive. In fact, about three-quarters of students who did transfer from Lassen went to an out-of-state university.

    Streamlining transfer 

    The report offers several recommendations to lawmakers and the public college systems that could streamline the transfer process.

    Auditors recommend that lawmakers consider providing funding to the colleges to align requirements and make the ADT more widely accepted across the state. 

    The community colleges and the four-year systems could also do their part to improve the ADT. For the community colleges, that means analyzing why certain community colleges don’t offer the ADT for some majors. CSU, auditors recommend, should do the same for campuses that don’t accept the ADT for certain majors and then determine whether their reasons make sense.

    UC should either widely adopt the ADT model or, for campuses unwilling to do that, ensure that their transfer options “emulate the ADT’s key benefits for streamlining course requirements,” auditors say. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom did sign Assembly Bill 1291 to create a pilot program at UCLA in which students beginning in 2026-27 will get priority admission if they complete an associate degree in select majors. The pilot will eventually expand to more campuses, though some students and advocacy groups criticized the legislation because it won’t guarantee students admission to their chosen campus.

    The audit also recommends better data-sharing between the three systems. 

    The community college system could share data with UC and CSU about students who intend to transfer, which UC and CSU could use to better tailor their advice to those students. 

    Additionally, UC and CSU could share more data with the community colleges about the students who successfully transfer, which could help the community colleges better evaluate their transfer efforts and determine which ones are most effective.

    Sonya Christian, chancellor of the community college system, said in a letter responding to the audit that the system looks forward to working with UC, CSU and lawmakers to implement the report’s recommendations, but said there could be challenges, including with data-sharing.

    Christian said consistent and timely data remains a “persistent challenge” for the system because of its decentralized nature, which requires each of the 73 local community college districts to individually report data to Christian’s office. 

    “The lack of a common data platform hampers our ability to collect timely and reliable data on transfer rates and gaps and hinders our ability to be able to accelerate transfer for the students of California through real-time data sharing with four-year system and institutional partners,” she said.

    But, Christian added, she has made it a priority since becoming chancellor last year to improve those processes and “let the data flow.” 

    “I look forward to carrying forward recommendations around improvements to our data, research, and system-wide policy leadership,” she added.





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  • Campaign for College Opportunity’s new president on tackling the transfer process 

    Campaign for College Opportunity’s new president on tackling the transfer process 


    Jessie Ryan, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity

    Courtesy of the Campaign for College Opportunity

    One of California’s top higher education advocacy groups, the Campaign for College Opportunity, has a new leader.

    Jessie Ryan, who took over as president of the organization on July 1, has worked at the campaign for 19 years, most recently as an executive vice president. 

    Under Ryan’s predecessor, Michele Siqueiros, the campaign sponsored legislation making it easier for community college students to skip remedial math and English classes and enroll immediately in transfer-level courses. The organization has also advocated for reforming the state’s financial aid program and backed legislation intended to make it easier for students to transfer from a community college to a four-year university. 

    Ryan, who is a product of the Los Rios Community College District and San Francisco State University, recently spoke with EdSource about her priorities and how she plans to build on the campaign’s work around remedial education, improving transfer and expanding financial aid, among other topics.

    The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

    What are your main priorities as the campaign’s new president?

    I’d love to share with you a little bit about my journey because I think it connects to my priorities as well. 

    I was raised by a single mother who always dreamed of going to college, and she did not succeed in reaching her college dream. We moved around a lot and struggled with homelessness and food insecurity. She really instilled in me from the time I was 4 or 5 years old that a college education was going to be my pathway out of poverty. 

    When I went to a community college, I had no clue as to how to access financial aid, how to develop an education plan so that I could transfer — all of these key things that would be building blocks to lifetime success. And just by luck, I ended up finding a counselor who really changed my life. Because of her, instead of going into remedial math, I had access to statistics. Because of her, I got an education plan to transfer and worked 35 hours a week and went to three campuses simultaneously to transfer. 

    When I did transfer, my mother became homeless again, and I was faced with this question of, do I drop out? And I did not have an associate’s degree to show for my work because the requirements to transfer did not align with the requirements to get an associate’s degree.

    And years later, I would find out that these were the experiences of millions of community college students across the state. Students being put into remedial sequences from which they could never recover based on one high-stakes test. Or having to repeat coursework because the requirements to transfer didn’t align with the requirements to get an associate degree, and sometimes dropping out and having nothing to show for their work.

    Those have been two of the bedrock policies that we have worked on at the campaign over the years, alongside a host of other issues. The campaign is going to continue to be at the forefront of policy transformation. 

    The Campaign for College Opportunity previously sponsored Assembly Bill 705 and co-sponsored Assembly Bill 1705, bills meant to make it easier for community college students to skip remedial math and English classes and access transfer-level coursework right away. How do you assess the implementation of those bills, and do you expect there could be additional legislation?

    We are not currently looking at additional legislation, but I wouldn’t say it is off the table, should it be necessary moving forward. AB 705 was one of most significant equity levers in ensuring that students are completing college-level math and English, accessing college-level math and English. There is significant data that has supported why this reform was necessary. But despite that, what we have marveled at is the level of continued opposition. 

    We’ve been really lucky to have, through former (California Community Colleges) Chancellor Eloy Oakley and now Chancellor Sonya Christian, champions who are committed to this issue. But it has been a fight year after year, more recently with the pandemic. A lot of people want to say that because of the pandemic, students are less prepared than ever before. And yet what we have seen from the most recent data is that students who access transfer-level math and English have done as well as in the prior years or even slightly better. 

    I think that the next iteration of this work is going to be, how do we implement equitable access to college-level math and English for our STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) students and for our ESL (English as a second language) students? Because those are the last two pieces of 705 and 1705 that need to be addressed and built out. The chancellor’s office is already talking with us at the campaign about helping to guide what the successful ESL implementation would look like for our multilingual learners.

    Where I think there’s potential for additional legislation and potential for additional budget investment is around co-requisite. Students who take co-requisite courses alongside transfer-level math and English succeed at higher rates. And so I think where we are is, how do we analyze evidence-based high quality co-requisite and resource it at scale? Because then it allows us to celebrate not just a 100% access to transfer-level math and English, but stronger throughput, stronger completion rates.

    Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1291 to create a pilot program in which students seeking to transfer to UCLA will get priority admission if they complete an associate degree for transfer starting in 2026-27. The campaign at the time said it appreciated the legislation but called it only a first step. Do you have plans to try to further improve transfer to the University of California?

    We have over the years struggled with the reality that UC, while they’ve made some significant progress in meeting the needs of transfer students, can and should do more. They have had transfer admission guarantees, but they’re not at all campuses. And for community college students who are trying to prepare, they want to be able to use the associate degree for transfer, not just for admissions consideration, but for an admissions guarantee, if not to the campus of choice, to the system at large. 

    With 1291, the original bill was not a pilot. But it was amended to a pilot in the final stages of the legislative cycle. It is a first step. I appreciate that it’s a first step and that UCLA would be an important campus. 

    But at the end of the day, that pilot should be used to take the associate degree for transfer to scale. It should not live in isolation. How do we make sure that with UCLA’s new leadership, this is prioritized in such a way that sets it up for success and applicability for other campuses across the state? I hope that that will be the case. 

    Lawmakers and advocacy groups for years have said they want to reform the Cal Grant to make it simpler and make more students eligible for aid, but it hasn’t happened yet because of the state’s fiscal woes. Is Cal Grant reform still a goal of the campaign?

    We’ve been in touch, me and the new head of the California Student Aid Commission, Daisy Gonzales. She brought together a small group of partners to talk about how we can begin looking ahead to do what we need to so that we don’t find ourselves in this position again. Recognizing that there’s not going to be the kind of funding we need to actualize the Cal Grant Equity Framework this year, how do we start thinking about alternative funding sources and a multi-year approach that might allow us to take on pieces of the Cal Grant Equity Framework until we get to a place of full funding?

    What kinds of alternate funding have been discussed?

    We’re very early in conversations about alternative funding sources, but right now I’m encouraged because Daisy and the California Student Aid Commission are saying we need to think big. Is there the possibility of going after new dollars? Could we even be talking about seeing if there could be a tax that would be able to fund the kind of financial aid that would drastically expand access for students across the state? 

    But they’re early conversations. Nothing is moving yet. What I will say, though, is, for me, having done this work for nearly 20 years, sometimes the greatest innovation comes at a moment of desperation. Or a moment of budget malaise. And so instead of just standing on the sidelines, I really think there is power in folks in the education equity community, our higher ed institutional partners and our Student Aid Commission saying, ‘Here are the suite of options that we’re looking at,’ recognizing that this is going to take a few years to be able to see into fruition.

    Do you have any specific goals or priorities related to the California State University system?

    At the CSU system, we are seeing that there have been some really strong practices adopted around inclusive hiring, cluster hiring to ensure that faculty and leadership reflect the diversity of the state. There has been some really good work that has happened to support Black learner excellence and innovation. I would say an example of that right now is what we’re seeing with Sac State developing the first Black Honors College in the nation and what is going to be the house to a dedicated $2 million fund to support Black learner success systemwide. We want to really work with the system and accelerate those efforts because I think the challenge here is we know that some campuses have done well and others have not. And really the key to equity moving forward is going to be to ensure that all CSU campuses offer the same type of quality experience for our Black and Latinx students that some leaders on campuses are prioritizing. I think it becomes even more important that we elevate those high-impact practices like cluster hiring and dedicating funding to ensure welcoming campuses right now than ever before, because students and families are questioning the value of college. 

    In response to the Supreme Court ban on race-conscious admissions, California people have said, ‘Well, we’ve had Proposition 209 for quite some time. So does this really affect us?’ But the reality is we have seen that there is a chilling effect often after these types of decisions. Students and families are questioning the value of college. Students and families are wondering whether or not college is affordable, accessible, worth enrolling in at this time. And so I do believe that given the size, the significance of the CSU system, we have a huge opportunity to say we’re going to do more than ever before in the Graduation Initiative, to make sure that those gains are actually resulting in not just real number gains for all student populations and racial and ethnic subgroups, but closing of equity gaps.





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  • Community college students far from a four-year university are less likely to transfer, study says

    Community college students far from a four-year university are less likely to transfer, study says


    Madera Community College is in the rural Central Valley. Fresno State, about 22 miles away, is the closest four-year public university.

    Credit: Ashleigh Panoo / EdSource

    Why is it harder for community college students studying far from four-year universities to transfer? 

    The answer to that question — which is at the heart of a new study previewed at a webinar last week — could influence state higher education officials’ thinking on proposals to expand bachelor’s degree offerings at community colleges.

    Most community colleges in California are within a 25-mile drive of the nearest California State University or University of California campus, according to the study by the RP Group, the independent nonprofit that conducts research for California’s system of 116 community colleges. But among the 29 colleges that are not, a research team led by Darla Cooper and Daisy Segovia found lower rates of transfer from two-year to four-year institutions.

    Gaps were most visible across the seven community colleges located the farthest from public universities. Colleges at least 87 miles from the nearest UC or CSU had a 28% transfer rate, researchers said, lagging colleges within a 25-mile drive by 8 percentage points. 

    The study noted a smaller gap between a middle tier of community colleges located closer to four-year institutions and those within a 25-mile commute. A third of students at community colleges 27 to 78 miles from a California university transferred compared to 36% of those attending a campus where a four-year institution was 25 miles away or less.

    “We need to bring the education to where the students are and not force the students to go to where the education is,” said Cooper, RP Group’s executive director. 

    Proximity to a four-year public university is far from the only factor related to community college transfer rates. RP Group’s own research has identified lots of practices common among students who continue on to four-year institutions, like completing transferable math and English courses in their first year, visiting an academic adviser and getting involved in student programs like Umoja and Puente, said Cooper and Segovia, a senior researcher at RP Group. 

    Money is a consideration, too: California community college students interviewed in 2019 cited the cost of a university education as a top hurdle to continuing their education. 

    The new study examining the role of distance in transfer rates comes at a time when concerns over regional worker shortages in fields like education and nursing have stoked debate about how to make bachelor’s degrees more accessible to students who might fill those labor gaps.  

    California’s overall higher education plan, first released in 1960, left bachelor’s degrees as the purview of four-year universities. But state lawmakers in recent years have relaxed that constraint. In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill allowing community colleges to add up to 30 baccalaureate degree programs annually, leading to dozens of new offerings. The California Community Colleges website now lists 45 approved bachelor’s degree programs.

    Still, state law places significant checks on which baccalaureate degrees community colleges can green-light. Colleges can’t start a four-year degree if CSU or UC already offers it and must consult with university officials before proposed degrees move forward. CSU and UC can object to proposals they believe duplicate existing university degrees — rules that apply even in rural areas not served by a Cal State or UC campus. 

    That framework has at times put the community colleges at odds with colleagues at four-year institutions. The board of governors for the statewide community college system last year approved a program over CSU’s formal objections. 

    A measure that would have further blurred the boundaries between two- and four-year institutions fell short in the 2024 legislative session. Newsom in September vetoed a bill that would have permitted 15 community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees in nursing, opening the door for community colleges to create degree programs already offered at CSU.

    Researchers probe ‘university education deserts’

    The RP Group’s work builds on previous studies exploring what researchers call “education deserts,” places that either had no college or university or that only had a community college. A 2016 research brief for the American Council on Education reported that such communities tended to have lower college attainment compared with the rest of the country. 

    The RP Group study — “Exploring Geographic Isolation as a Barrier to Equitable Transfer Outcomes” — followed first-time college students enrolled at a community college between 2012 and 2017 who intended to transfer to a four-year institution. It used data from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office to measure those students’ outcomes after six years. Driving distances were measured from campus to campus. 

    Researchers excluded Calbright, an online community college, as well as a newer community college and a college focused on students learning technical trades. That left 113 community colleges covering more than a million students in the study sample.

    The analysis defined three categories of community colleges by their proximity to a public university in California. Researchers dubbed the first two groups – Tier 1 schools, which were at least 87 miles away, and Tier 2 schools, which were 27 to 78 miles away – to be colleges located in “university education deserts.” A third group of community colleges within 25 miles of a university were not considered deserts.

    Comparing the three categories revealed demographic trends. Tier 1 and Tier 2 colleges tended to serve a higher percentage of Latino students, first generation students and low income students than colleges not located in university education deserts.   

    Researchers also observed disparities by comparing the transfer rates of students at Tier 1 institutions to students who were not in a university education desert but who shared the same race and ethnicity. For example, 20% of Black students attending a Tier 1 college — those that were the farthest from a public four-year in California– transferred, compared with 33% of those attending a college in the category closest to a university.

    “It’s an equity issue,” Cooper said. “We wanted to see if there were any particular groups that were being disadvantaged by their location in the state.”

    The RP Group’s study also reported that students at Tier 1 colleges who succeeded in transferring more often left California altogether to do so. Across all three proximity-to-university tiers, a plurality of transfer students landed at a Cal State campus. But 38% of Tier 1 college students transferred out of state for a four-year degree compared to only 16% of students not in a university education desert.

    Future research – and possible solutions

    Segovia said future research could take into account not only community colleges’ proximity to public universities in California, but also their distance to nonprofit universities and out-of-state institutions.

    Looking across state lines could explain some of the variation researchers observed in transfer rates among the community colleges that are the farthest from a public university in California. 

    College of the Siskiyous, which is roughly 200 miles from Cal Poly Humboldt but only 70 miles from Southern Oregon University, had a 32% rate of transfer, Segovia said, beating out some community colleges located closer to in-state four-year schools. 

    The researchers also plan to interview students about how proximity to a four-year college has impacted their education. 

    Webinar panelists discussed several barriers preventing community college students who live far from a four-year university from earning bachelor’s degrees — and some strategies that could ease the transition.

    Panelist Joshua Simon, a student at Lemoore College who serves on the board of the West Hills Community College District, said students struggle to finance their bachelor’s degree education, costs exacerbated by a long commute to a four-year university.

    “One of the hardest things is transportation,” he said. “Some students don’t usually drive, or some students don’t have the means of public transportation … so that’s a little bit of a difficulty when it comes to transferring, at least in-state or locally, around that 40-mile range.” 

    Kevin G. Walthers, the president of Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, said students from his college often don’t get admitted to the nearest Cal State campus, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Those that do, he said, may save money by living at home but find their 70- to 80-mile round trip commute costs $30 a day. 

    Cal State admissions data for fall 2023 shows that 63% of Allan Hancock students who applied to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo were accepted. Of those students, 71% enrolled.

    “If the students are going to finish their degree in two years, and then they can’t afford to leave for Fresno or Northridge or Bakersfield, and they can’t get into Cal Poly, they’re just stuck,” he said. “Given the fact that most of our students are Latino, they’re stuck in a way that is systemically racist. There’s no way around that.”

    Walthers said the lack of bachelor’s degree programs has a simple solution: “Either have the CSU offer services here or allow Allan Hancock College to provide those services.”

    Kate Mahar, the associate vice president of innovation and strategic initiatives at Shasta College, said the school operates several programs with Chico State, about 80 miles south. A dual admission program allows students who apply to Chico State the option to attend Shasta College instead; it also guarantees them a seat at Chico when they’re ready to transfer, so long as they meet eligibility requirements. Students can also receive a Chico State business degree at Shasta College.

    Chico State admitted 87% of Shasta College applicants, according to CSU admissions data for fall 2023. Almost 53% of those students enrolled.

    “They really take it to heart that we are in their service area, even though (some students) are about five hours away from Chico,” she said.





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