Community college outreach lags

By Michael Falcone

Daily Bruin Contributor

With an enrollment of more than 1.3 million, the California
Community College system represents a significant pool of
prospective transfer students to the University of California. But
some say inadequate outreach efforts may be keeping the numbers of
underrepresented transfers stagnant.

In an attempt to shift the focus of UCLA’s outreach
efforts from high school students toward recruiting more community
college students, Frank Molina and others decided to initiate the
Student Transfer Outreach and Mentoring Program last year.

“Given the new UC admissions guidelines, more and more
students and particularly students of color will end up at
community colleges,” said Molina, a fifth-year international
and development studies student and the co-director of STOMP.

“Unless there is much more coalition-building going on
between the UCs and community colleges, we’re going to end up
with overly saturated community colleges that have students that
are there just there to be there.”

This year STOMP volunteers traveled to more than 20 Los
Angeles-area community colleges telling students what it takes to
transfer to a university like UCLA.

“We try to help students who come from disadvantaged
groups, and that’s the way we’ve practiced our
program,” Molina said.

In order to increase the transfer rate of specific ethnicities,
Molina said he would like to see more student groups at UC campuses
expand their established high school outreach efforts to include a
community college transfer component.

To this end, community college administrators have been working
toward reestablishing their original goal.

“Transfer centers on community college campuses were
actually developed primarily to focus on underrepresented
minorities,” said Gwyneth Tracy, the coordinator of transfer
and articulation at the California Community Colleges
Chancellor’s Office.

“Some of our campuses have lost that focus, and
we’re trying to bring it back in,” she said. “The
UCs are very supportive of this. They see this as a way of
increasing diversity on their campuses without going against
Proposition 209.”

Currently, the CCCCO has an official “Memorandum of
Understanding” between the community college system and UC
Office of the President.

Besides calling for a 36 percent increase in community college
transfers between the two systems by 2005, it also contains
provisions to “intensify” and “expand”
outreach efforts targeting disadvantaged students.

In addition to a nearly 8 percent drop in total transfer
enrollment at UCs over the last five years, members of
underrepresented groups continue to lag behind white students in
the number of transfers that enroll at the UC each year.

In the 1998-1999 school year, 10,161 students transferred from
community colleges to the UC. Of those, 4,000 were white and 2,300
were Asian and Pacific Islanders. Latina/os followed with about
1,300, and African American, Native Americans, and Filipinos made
up the fewest number of students ““ none of those groups
exceeded 300 transfers to the university last year.

While transfer percentages between ethnic groups are similar,
the overall number of student who transfer is small. Of the 1.3
million students are enrolled in California’s 107 community
colleges, fewer than four percent transfer to a UC school.

With such a low transfer, rate some question whether the bridge
community colleges are supposed to be providing to the UC,
especially for underrepresented students, may be unstable

In addition to the low transfer rate statewide, there are
striking differences between the number of students each community
college sends to the UC. Last year Santa Monica College sent 632
students to UC campuses; Compton College sent one.

As a community college transfer and the first member of his
family to go to college, Molina remembers the difficulties of being
a prospective transfer student.

Before transferring to UCLA, Molina spent two years at Rio Hondo
College in Whittier, where he said the help his community college
transfer office provided was inadequate.

“I didn’t even know there was a transfer center at
my junior college until I spoke to a UC rep who instructed me to
make an appointment with him through the transfer center,”
Molina said.

“The counseling department, was constantly referring me to
CSU schools, when in fact I wanted to transfer to a UC.”

The story is different at Diablo Valley College, a Bay Area
community college ranked third statewide in the number of students
who transfer to UC.

Brock Sanders, a second-year political science student at Diablo
Valley who is planning to transfer to UC Davis next year, described
an environment more conducive to transferring than what Molina
experienced.

“People seemed to be well-informed about what
they’re doing at DVC and the direction they want to go
in,” Sanders said. “I try to go to my counselor once a
semester, but you can go anytime you want to ask for help mapping
out your schedule or what classes to take.”

By the time Sanders is ready to transfer he will have completed
more than the 60 units required to transfer to a UC. But Molina
said when he and other STOMP members make visits to community
colleges, they find many students are often unaware of the specific
requirements and sometimes surprised to hear that transferring to a
UC is not as difficult as they think.

Last August, a state legislature joint committee convened to
discuss revising California’s current Master Plan for Higher
Education.

At their opening meeting Clark Kerr, a former UC President and
UC Berkeley Chancellor, was candid in his criticism of the lack of
substantial interchange between community colleges and the
university.

“I think it’s disgraceful that we should have fewer
transfers from community colleges than the national average, and a
disgrace that we have such tremendous discrepancies from one
community college to another,” Kerr said in his
testimony.

“It’s really abhorrent to think that there should be
that much difference between the opportunities provided by some
community colleges as against others,” he added.

Tracy emphasized that cooperation between both the community
college and UC systems is key if significant progress is to be
made.

“For once, we’re all on the same page and
we’re all working together as a team,” she said.
“We all want to make this happen for all students.”