Private universities pledge to honor transfer degree

Mills College, Notre Dame de Namur, other local colleges to guarantee admissions for eligible students

Students at California’s community colleges are about to get more options for earning a bachelor’s degree in four years.

Community college students in the state who complete the requirements for what’s known as an Associate Degree for Transfer will be guaranteed admission as juniors at three dozen private, nonprofit colleges in California as early as next school year, the system’s chancellor’s office announced Wednesday.

Not all of the schools will guarantee admission for all majors, but students will have at least some options at each college. Noticeably absent from the list are elite private schools such as Stanford University and the University of Southern California.

Still, the news marks the continued expansion of access to bachelor’s programs for the state’s more than 2 million community college students, who are disproportionately likely to be young people of color and the first in their families to earn a degree. InApril, theUniversity of California announced it would simplify the transfer process and award admission to eligible community college students beginning next fall, and in 2015 the community college system worked out a transfer program with historically black schools. The California State University systemhas had a similar program for years, and research suggests creating a clear transfer pathway has helped

students finish a bachelor’s degree in just two years.

A number of Bay Area schools will participate, including the University of San Francisco, Mills College in Oakland and Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont. (See a full list of participating schools here.)

“The four-year residential student is less and less common,” said Margaret Hunter, the associate provost for recruitment and student success at Mills, an all-women school.

That’s something Mills knows all too acutely, having struggled with f lagging enrollment in recent years and ultimately reducing tuition in 2018 to try to attract a wider ar- ray of students.

About a third of Mills’ students are already transfers, Hunter said, but the partnership with the community colleges will “make really high- quality liberal arts education accessible to more people.”

By 2030, the state is expected to needmore than a million more workers with bachelor’s degrees than it is currently on track to have, so helping more students transfer successfully to a four-year school makes good fiscal sense, Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley said in a statement.

“The Associate Degree for Transfer program is vital to our economy,” he said, “and we are proud to work with the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities in providing our students additional opportunities to further their education and help guarantee their chances of achieving upward social mobility.”

Partnering with private colleges, some of them religious, also expands options for students at a time when the UC and CSU systems are increasingly crowded. The new agreement also helps private schools meet a 201819 state budget requirement that they admit a growing number of transfer students each year or risk seeing state aid decline.

Hunter, at Mills, dismissed the idea that the agreement might overburden some schools.

“That would be a good problem to have,” she said. “We would be really happy to have a whole lot of people take us up on it.”