Affordability is one of the most significant barriers facing students who wish to earn a bachelor’s degree. While the inflation-adjusted cost of attendance for college has remained relatively flat at public and private institutions for much of the past decade, paying for college remains a daunting prospect for many students. It is no surprise that some self-styled financial gurus and others have recommended starting at community college as an affordable pathway to a bachelor’s degree.
Recently published data from the U.S. Department of Education suggests a measure of caution in taking this advice. For the first time, the Department shared institution- and state-level data on the rates at which students who enrolled in community colleges in 2014 transferred to a four-year college and the rates at which they earned a bachelor’s degree and provided deeper analysis. Their findings should raise serious alarms for state higher education systems and higher education advocates.
1. Even though nearly 80 percent of community college students say they intend to transfer to a four-year college in order to earn a bachelor’s degree, the share who actually do so is much lower than that. The state with the highest rate for transfer and successful completion of a bachelor’s is New Jersey, where just 18 percent of students follow this path. In all but six states the transfer to bachelor’s success rate was under 15 percent. In sixteen states, the success rate is in the single digits.
2. Most four-year private colleges and universities are not enrolling significant numbers of transfer students from community colleges. The Department’s report only included four-year institutions that enrolled at least thirty transfer students from the 2014 cohort, which revealed that the vast majority of community college transfers move to public institutions and that private colleges and universities have, with a few exceptions, contributed little to the social mobility of transfer students. You can see a full list of four-year institutions included in the report here.
3. In order to understand the pathway from community college to a bachelor’s degree, we need to look at both transfer-out access rates at community colleges and transfer success rates in attaining a bachelor’s degree. Figure 3 compares the access and success rates in the states. In every state but New York, not even a third of community college students transfer to a four-year institution. In almost half the states less than a quarter do so. In most states less than half of students who transfer from a community college go on to earn a bachelor’s.
If we are going to make community college a viable pathway to a bachelor’s degree, we need to continue to identify not just the barriers to transfer and completion but also the practices that the most successful and accessible institutions employ to help community college students transfer and graduate.