Students face roadblocks to transfer
UC and CSU leaders, faculty groups must join to fix a broken system, advocates say
Many students enroll in community college planning to transfer to the University of California or California State University.
But very few actually make it, data show.
Despite decades of legislation and calls to action to improve the transfer process, the transition from the state's community colleges to its universities continues to be a difficult and complicated task for many students.
Researchers have long identified many of the roadblocks preventing California community college students from completing a bachelor's degree within the UC and CSU systems. Little has changed.
“I've never heard anyone say, `I don't want to improve transfer,'” said Eloy Oritiz Oakley, president of the College Futures Foundation and the former chancellor of the state's 116 community colleges. “But yet, here we are.”
He's not the only one to recognize the continuing challenges.
“I've been working on these issues for more than 15 years,” said Jessie Ryan, executive vice president of the Campaign for College Opportunity. “And it's astonishing to me how challenging the transfer process continues to be for students across the state.”
A research study by Ryan's organization found that among the students who enrolled in the community colleges in 2012, completed at least 12 credits within six years, and attempted transfer-level English or math, only 3% did. Fewer than 25% transfer after four years.
Transfer statistics at Woodland Community College were unavailable this week, even as students prepared for Friday afternoon graduation ceremonies.
About two weeks ago, students who were transferring to Sacramento State or UC Davis were presented with certificates of their achievements. However, several efforts to find out how many students were transferring was unsuccessful.
In 2022, there were 411 graduates at Woodland Community College, receiving a combined 764 awards, 514 degrees and 249 certificates. However, those numbers might be higher than normal since it was the first in person graduation since 2020 when ceremonies were canceled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
So why do so few students complete transfers after years of pledges to improve? Itzel Ramirez, 18, a first year student at Porterville College, who is studying biology, identified one serious obstacle to transferring.
“I have to take summer courses and, unfortunately, my school didn't provide the courses that I needed, so I have to go to another community college that's like 45 minutes away,” Ramirez said, adding that the class is offered Monday through Friday at Bakersfield College, which would mean a 90-minute trip each day, returning to Porterville to take an afternoon class.
“I'm wasting a lot of gas, but I don't mind it because I need to get this done so I can go to UC Santa Barbara and become a (physician's assistant),” she said. Ramirez said she could've waited to take calculus at Porterville in the fall, but that would have caused a domino effect forcing her to take more courses to meet the UC requirement, spend more money, and delay transferring in two years. Ramirez said the advice she got from her Central Valley campus was to “slow down” and use her financial aid to take the class in the fall.
But, she knew her aid was limited, and “when you go to a university, you don't have that financial aid available. Then you have to get student loans, and I don't want to use all of my financial aid here because I would get less when I transfer over there.”
Ramirez is a Cal Grant recipient, which means she has a total of four years of aid. She didn't want to spend it all getting through community college.
The financial aid limit, and the lack of required courses being available when students need them, are just a couple of challenges for transfer students. And other challenges, many of which have been well documented and studied for more than a decade, still remain, Ryan said.
“It's just been a constant struggle to see systems change for the benefit of students,” she said.
More than 80,000 students transfer each year from community colleges to a UC or CSU campus, according to the California Community Colleges.
More than a decade after the Associate Degree for Transfer was signed into law to ease the transition from the community colleges to the Cal State system, Oakley says the full intent of that law hasn't been realized.
“We still have campuses like San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Northridge and other impacted campuses where it is still very difficult to transfer to the CSU,” Oakley said. At UC, it's “sad to see that the UC faculty still haven't embraced the transfer pathways that have been in place.”
Oakley said the No. 1 problem is culture.
“This culture that the academic senates of the CSU and the UC have, that no one should be telling them what they should do, whether it's the Legislature or the public, that they are the most qualified people to determine what is the best course of major preparation for students coming to the CSU and the UC,” Oakley said.
“It's going to take the leadership of the UC Office of the President, the leadership of the CSU Chancellor's Office to really change the culture and to be in a position where there is an actual collaboration with community college faculty and not gatekeepers,” he said.
This is not the first time the state's higher education leaders have been called to take action. The state's higher education leaders, including Oakley during his time as chancellor, pledged two years ago that they would commit to improving the number of students who transfer from the community colleges to the state's public and private universities.
And while there have been some improvements, such as a new Cal State mobile and online transfer planner that will debut this fall to better help community college students understand the courses they need to attend a CSU campus, more could be done.
“The three leaders could create their own commitments to improving transfer,” Oakley said. “There is no need for regulation or legislation if they create a compact to improve transfer between the three segments. They could exercise their leadership by committing to statewide transfer goals, allocating budget resources to reaching transfer students and committing to improving transfer success once they do transfer. This would require nothing more than a willingness to lead together.”
But transfer advocates said that university and community college faculty are also part of the problem.
Oakley said the university faculty senates have dragged on improvements to the transfer process but that they are not solely to blame.
“The community college faculty don't get away with not having any accountability here,” he said, adding that they've been slow to align their general education requirements with university requirements. A long-standing concern from the universities has been the high number of credits students accumulate in community college when many of those credits aren't required by the universities for transfer.