Educational Equity and the Transfer Student

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By JOSHUA WYNER

Leaders in higher education have recently sharpened their focus on a well-established problem: the inaccessibility of our nation's most selective colleges and universities to low-income students. But few of those leaders seem to realize that a good part of the solution lies within community colleges.

In 2003 the labor economists Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose reported that only 3 percent of students at the most selective colleges are from families in the lowest socioeconomic quartile. That finding was echoed in a speech by Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University: "In the most selective colleges and universities ... only 10 percent [of the students] come from the bottom half of the income scale." A recent book by William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (University of Virginia Press, 2005), provides further evidence as well as insightful analysis of the issue.

Some highly selective institutions — Amherst College, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Virginia, among others — have sought to ameliorate the disparity by increasing financial aid to students from low-income and moderate-income families. Yet while those efforts are to be applauded, highly selective institutions have overlooked a large pool of prospective low-income students — those graduating from community colleges. Reaching more deeply into graduating two-year classes will allow selective institutions to meet their stated goals of providing greater opportunity to top-performing needy students. A growing number of community-college students are precisely the sort of exceptional achievers that elite colleges seek.

Community colleges now enroll more than six million students in courses for credit, or almost half of all undergraduate students, and are growing at a rate much faster than that of four-year institutions. At the same time, the community-college student population has changed. Contrary to common perception, three out of every four students are of traditional college age — between 18 and 24 — and the average age has decreased steadily over the past two decades.

That trend has led to more community-college students wanting to transfer to four-year institutions. As Clifford Adelman documents in a recent Department of Education report, "Moving Into Town — and Moving On: The Community College in the Lives of Traditional-Age Students," students of traditional age are far more likely than older students to transfer to four-year colleges and universities.

The number of students interested in transfer will grow as the average age of students in community colleges continues to drop. America's most selective colleges, however, are not even keeping up with the current demand. Research supported by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation shows a striking decline in transfer enrollment at selective institutions. From 1984 to 2002, at the institutions that constitute the two most-selective tiers of private colleges in rankings by Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, the number of transfer students decreased by 53 percent, according to analyses conducted by John Cheslock, an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education of the University of Arizona, and Alicia C. Dowd, an assistant professor in the higher-education-administration doctoral program at the Graduate College of Education of the University of Massachusetts at Boston (in collaboration with researchers at the New England Resource Center for Higher Education, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California).

Today the median size of a junior-year class at the 38 most-selective private colleges is 645 students. Among those institutions, the median enrollment of all transfer students — from both two- and four-year colleges — is only 19 students. More startling, however, is the fact that only one of those 19 students transferred from a community college. That means that on the campuses of America's highly selec-tive private colleges, more often than not, fewer than one of every 1,000 students started their education at a two-year college.

The problem extends to the most selective public colleges and universities as well. While the numbers and percentages are better than at their private counterparts, access for community-college transfers is quite limited. At the few public universities Barron's classifies as "most selective," data suggest a median enrollment rate of community-college transfer students of less than 4 percent. The situation significantly affects low- to moderate-income students, who, when they enter higher education, generally begin at a community college.

One likely reason for such limited opportunity is the assumption that community-college students cannot succeed. Yet more and more students attend two-year colleges not because they cannot do well at selective four-year institutions, but for many other reasons: proximity to home, small class sizes, and, perhaps most important, lower tuition. The average tuition at public two-year colleges is about $2,000, compared with $20,000 at private four-year institutions.

Evidence that community colleges enroll growing numbers of highly able students can be found in the emergence of community-college honors programs, which have now been established at more than one-third of community colleges. Admission to one such program at Miami Dade College requires a minimum of either a 3.7 grade-point average or 1800 on the new SAT. It is safe to assume that most, if not all, of the 400 students in the program would have gone to a four-year institution if academic achievement were the only factor in their decision — many, in fact, could have gotten into top four-year colleges as freshmen.

Proof also comes from California's higher-education system, a leader in providing community-college students with opportunities to transfer to selective public four-year colleges and universities. In 2001 86 percent of all students who transferred to the University of California, for example, began at a California community college. The California system's data also show that transfer students graduate at rates comparable to students who start as freshmen. A system report on community-college transfers concludes that junior transfers from community colleges "are the most academically prepared among all transfers and are ready to begin their upper-division major coursework upon entry to a UC campus."

Community-college students who attend selective private colleges have also demonstrated success. For example, community-college students who entered Smith College through its innovative Ada Comstock Scholars Program — which admits and provides transitional and educational support to nontraditional students — graduate at rates comparable to those of traditional students. The graduation rate of similar students at Mount Holyoke is 94 percent, a rate higher than that of the college's traditional students.

Since 2002 the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has run a generous scholarship program for community-college transfers, accepting students who have both excellent academic records and substantial financial need. In the past two years, 21 students from the Cooke program have transferred to highly selective colleges. They have earned, on average, a 3.5 GPA.

Besides being fair to hard-working students who have proved themselves at the collegiate level, selective colleges have other reasons to increase economic diversity by seeking out community-college students with financial need. It is less costly to provide aid to a student for two years — once a student completes an associate degree — than for four years. Moreover, colleges and universities need not worry that enrolling such students will lower their rankings in U.S. News & World Report or Barron's. Those rankings do not include the SAT or ACT scores of transfer students, including those from community colleges. Finally, the racial diversity in community colleges offers selective four-year institutions a ready source for increasing their own diversity.

But available information about academic success, financial efficiency, and diversity may not be enough to inspire more-selective institutions to identify and assist community-college students who are ready to succeed at top four-year colleges. The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has therefore joined with the Lumina Foundation for Education and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation to commission research to determine what opportunities low-income community-college students have to transfer to selective colleges and universities, to examine how well those students perform at those institutions, and to understand the attitudes and practices that make some institutions more transfer-friendly than others.

Preliminary findings suggest that the four-year graduation rates of community-college transfers and those of students who begin their education at four-year institutions are comparable. By spring 2006, when this research project is complete, we expect to be able to provide information that will further encourage selective institutions who want to expand enrollment of low- to moderate-income students to do so by accepting more community-college transfers. The Cooke Foundation will also make between $5-million and $10-million in grants this year to establish community-college transfer programs on several selective campuses.

Community colleges must also do their part. What does — or does not — happen on their campuses plays a large role in defining the opportunity that students have to transfer to selective institutions.

Over the past two decades, governments, communities, and businesses have increasingly relied on community colleges to perform a variety of roles: to provide the first half of a four-year degree, particularly to low- to moderate-income students; to prepare students for the work force through certificate programs in areas such as information technology, health care, and financial services; and to offer remedial and developmental education in areas as diverse as English as a second language and GED preparation. Unfortunately, increases in the community-college population and related program expectations have been accompanied by well-documented decreases in state-government support.

Not surprisingly, when surveyed about the greatest challenges they face, most community-college presidents cite fragmented programs and constrained budgets resulting in part from those multiple missions. In the current context it seems likely that community-college students are not receiving adequate guidance about transferring to selective institutions.

Particularly in the face of competing demands, community colleges can only serve those students capable of excelling at selective colleges if they make a concerted effort to identify them and encourage them to apply to such institutions. They can begin conversations with selective four-year colleges about partnerships, like those between Miami Dade College and several top-tier senior institutions. They can also obtain assistance in building such partnerships from Phi Theta Kappa, the primary honor society for community-college students, which has worked with Columbia, Cornell, and the Johns Hopkins Universities and the University of Pennsylvania, among others, to establish scholarship programs for community-college students.

Much of the recent analysis of community-college transfer rates centers on articulation agreements between and among state institutions, with relatively little attention focused on transfers to highly competitive public or private institutions. That focal point is understandable, since most community-college transfer students attend public four-year universities other than the most-selective state flagship institutions. Why then should we care about the access low- to moderate-income community-college students have to selective private institutions?

The answer, first and foremost, is fairness. It is antithetical to core notions of equity to allocate education by income level rather than ability. If merit is to be the basis for meting out the finite resource of a selective-college education, such institutions should ensure that their admissions and financial-aid practices reflect the fact that a large number of qualified low-income undergraduate students are at community colleges.

The tangible benefits that a selective-college education provides to low-income students make the equitable distribution of entry into such institutions especially important. Selective colleges graduate greater proportions of their students, particularly low-income students, than do their less-selective counterparts, and greater numbers of the students who receive a bachelor's degree from a selective college or university move on to graduate school. Graduating from a selective institution also increases low-income students' income potential more than for other students.

Finally, we know that holding a degree from a top institution can greatly increase the breadth of opportunity that a graduate enjoys, including access to leadership positions in many professions. What senses of perspective and drive will be lost on selective campuses and in American communities if increasingly fewer low-income students have access to institutions that open the door to leadership roles?

Selective colleges and universities can help reverse the narrowing of higher-education opportunity for low-income students. In the end, however, change can occur only if leaders at selective colleges and universities recognize a new reality: The exceptional students with financial need they are trying to find are no longer only in high school. Economically and racially diverse groups of high achievers are graduating from our community colleges every semester. And they are looking for the next opportunity to succeed.

Joshua Wyner is vice president of programs at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.