The Community College Transfer Problem

Give the New York Times' Sam Freedman credit for a good choice of topic today -- a program that helps community college students transfer to four-year universities. The story of Viviana Alcazar's journey from a local two-year school to a degree from Stanford also underscores the particular importance of community colleges to the nation's rapidly-growing population of Hispanic colleges students, who are more likely than both white and other minority students to attend a two-year school. That's because the states with large Hispanic populations, like California and Florida, also tend to be the states that chose to accomodate the mid-20th century surge in college enrollment by building highly-stratified higher education systems (in part because they didn't have an existing infrastructure of private schools) whereby only a small proportion of students go to presitigious four-year research universities while most go to local two-year schools. California alone has something like 1.4 million community college students, two-thirds of all the undergrads in state, public or private.

But I wish the column wasn't--like so much higher education media coverage--shot through the lens of super-elite institutions like Stanford. Two-year to four-year transfer is a huge problem in this country; while two-year transfer students tend to perform just as well in four-year colleges as students who start in four-year colleges, less than 40 percent ever transfer in the first place. In other words, the important goal isn't so much to get two-year students to transfer to Stanford as it is to get them to transfer somewhere in the four-year system, so they have a decent shot a bachelor's degree, increasing the dividing line of economic attainment in this country.