Minority Transfers to Four-Year Universities
In California today, over 70% of public school students and 50% of those in community colleges are black and Hispanic and the entire education system suffered greatly because of budget shortfalls in the last three years. Community colleges have an open admissions policy, unlike four-year universities, but also have a high drop-out rate for poor and minority students. According to the UCLA Civil Rights Project, in California, over 70% of minority students in community colleges failed to transfer to four-year universities in six years (Tlatenchi 2012). Most of these students are also low income and from schools that perform poorly at preparing students for university level work, and the education cutbacks have affected them the most, limiting their access to higher education even further. Old affirmative action policies always had the reputation of admitted unqualified students to universities, but new federal rules that still permit race to be considered as one factor among many in admissions decisions may provide more minority students with the opportunity to earn four-year degrees. Proposition 209 had banned affirmative action in any case as did the Bush administration in 2001-09, but the new guidelines by the Education and Justice Departments "permit colleges and universities to consider race or ethnicity if race-neutral measures like standardized tests, household income or geography aren't sufficient to achieve their diversity goals" (Wong 2012). Pipeline and partnership programs that partner high schools, community colleges, state universities and...
Indeed, the disparities are so great that they might as well be living in separate countries, with the inner cities being part of some impoverished Third World nation. Only the threat of lawsuits or shutdowns by state and federal officials brings about even slight improvements in schools like these, because there is simply not enough money to go around. If they attend community colleges with open admissions they will generally require intensive remedial work in basic math, reading, writing and science. Community college classes are overcrowded and counseling in minimal due to budget cutbacks, and most of the minority students have full-time jobs, all of which hinders their chances of transferring to four-year universities (Tlatenchi 2012).
Only a small percentage of black and Hispanic students in community colleges will ever transfer to four-year universities, though, which is why the state began to collect information on their progress in community college courses. Wisconsin did such a study in recent years to determine why poor and minority students almost never transferred from two-year colleges to the University of Wisconsin system. Those who had mostly been attending technical colleges were taking classes that…
