Minority Transfers to Universities From California Community Colleges

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 UCs are type of program that offers hope for increasing minority enrollment in the UC system.

Students who graduate from low-quality high schools and community colleges will be lucky to read at an elementary school level, and they realize early on that they are being cheated and do not have nearly the same educational opportunities as whites in suburban schools. 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 did not receive transfer credits or fee waivers, which "put them at a decided disadvantage" (Wong 2012). California community colleges have discovered similar institutional barriers to transfers among academically qualified minority students and once these were changed the numbers of transfers to four-year schools increased. In "Unrealized Promises: Unequal Access, Affordability and Excellence at the Community Colleges in Southern California," Mary Martinez-Wenzl and Rigoberto Marquez found that community colleges with the highest transfer rates had Asian or white majorities, while black and Hispanic colleges had the lowest rates, and hey proposed increasing the financial and academic rewards for colleges that increased their transfer rates (Tlatenchi 2012).

Pipeline programs that begin in the public schools are the best method for increasing minority enrollment in the four-year universities in the long run. These partner school districts with community colleges, state universities and UCs with the intention of assisting poor and minority students work their way through the system. In the Santa Ana Partnership, for example, the public school district, the Santa Ana Community College, California State University at Fullerton and UC Irvine combined to assist public schools that were low income and minority in order to increase enrollment at all institutions of higher learning, especially the community college. This program was highly successful and increased the number of students prepared for college-level courses from 5-9% in 2000 to 28-29% by 2010, and more programs like this are being organized for poor and minority school districts in order to reduce the "trend of increased poverty and racial segregation in public schools" (Wong 2012). In their report "Beyond the Master Plan: The Case of Restructuring Baccalaureate Education in California,," Saul Geiser and Richard C. Atkinson also recommended that some community colleges should be turned into branches of four-year universities, with guaranteed transfers for their students after they complete a two-year degree (Tlatenchi 2012).