Taking an alternate route: as competition increases to gain admission into the University of California system, more students are going the community-college route - Academic Kickoff Special Report: community colleges - university transfer programs for community college students - Berkeley has Cooperative Admissions Program

Black Issues in Higher Education, August 28, 2003 by Pamela Burdman

By then, Harvey was living in the Bay Area, and began taking comes at Foothill College.

With a GPA over 3.8 and high scores on the SAT and all the encouragement, Harvey sent in applications to UCLA, Columbia and Brown, and got into all four in 1999. That year, he was the graduation speaker at Foothill. He has since finished his Berkeley coursework in sociology, and would have been a graduation speaker at Berkeley this spring, but he won a prestigious research scholarship that allowed him to delay graduation. Now he's applying to graduate sociology programs at Berkeley, Stanford, Princeton and NYU.

The state's master plan for higher education, developed in the 1960s, delineates California's three-tiered educational system: UC, the elite research institution, was mandated to admit the top one-eighth of graduating high-school seniors to its eight (soon to be nine) undergraduate campuses; California State University, a teaching university that now has 23 campuses, is supposed to enroll the top one-third, and the community colleges were envisioned as centers of opportunity that prepare students for a four-year university or a vocational career.

Today, only a handful of community colleges are fulfilling the transfer part of their role. For every Pecot, Lei and Harvey, there are hundreds of other students with potential who never make it to the doors of a four-year institution. UC officials have been looking for ways to increase this access and expand transfer agreements to all community colleges, but budget cuts remain a problem.

A university program that would guarantee all high-school students who graduate in the top 12.5 percent of their high-school class (not just the top 12.5 percent on a statewide basis, the current rule) a spot at a UC campus if they do well at a community college is currently on hold for lack of state funds. And if the university makes good on its plan to freeze enrollment unless the state can come up with more money for next year, transfer slots could be curtailed even further as the demand rises.

"Transfer is the glue that holds the California master plan together, the idea that you can start anywhere in the system and work your way into CSU and UC," says Pat Callan, director of the San Jose-based National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. "But it's simply not happened. Most of the transfers come from a handful of community colleges. Fourteen thousand or 15,000 transfers a year is pathetic in a state the size of California."

Though California's college enrollment rate is very high nationally, partly because of its extensive and inexpensive network of two-year colleges, the state remains in the bottom third when it comes to high-school graduates completing college. Says Callan, "We've always been much better at letting people in than at helping them reach their educational goals."

* Enrollment of Public Two Year Campuses Out
of the Largest 120 Degree-Granting College
and University Campuses: Fall 2000

Miami-Dade Community College                    46,834
Houston Community College System                40,929
City College of San Francisco                   39,386
Northern Virginia Community College             37,073
Community College of Southern Nevada            29,905
College of Du Page (III.)                       28,862
American River College (Calif.)                 28,420
Mount San Antonio College (Calif.)              28,329
Pima Community College (Ariz.)                  28,078
Santa Monica College (Calif.)                   27,868
Santa Ana College (Calif.)                      27,571
Valencia Community College (Fla.)               27,565
Broward Community College (Fla.)                27,389
East Los Angeles College                        27,199
San Diego City College                          27,165
Santa Rosa Junior College (Calif.)              27,020
Tarrant County College (Texas)                  26,868
Austin Community College (Texas)                25,735
North Harris-Montgomery Comm. Coll. (Texas)     24,554
Cerritos College (Calif.)                       24,536
Portland Community College (Ore.)               24,209
El Camino College (Calif.)                      24,067
Orange Coast College (Calif.)                   23,315
Oakland Comm. Coll., Bloomfield Hills (Mich.)   23,188
Pasadena City College (Calif.)                  22,948
Mesa Community College (Ariz.)                  22,821
De Anza College (Calif.)                        22,770
Riverside Community College (Calif.)            22,107
Macomb Community College (Mich.)                22,001
Salt Lake Community College (Utah)              21,596
Diablo Valley College (Calif.)                  21,581
Cypress College (Calif.)                        21,361
San Diego Mesa College                          21,233
Palomar College (Calif.)                        21,062

SOURCE: NCES--DIGEST OF EDUCATION STATISTICS, 2002