It is tough being a student today with the standard of living in the Bay Area rising astronomically. The one thing that you could count on was having an affordable education at community colleges but even that is changing with rising costs.
A recent audit report revealed that 21% of community college students — about one in five students — who began college from 2017 to 2019 and intended to transfer did so within four years. If you were to equate that percentage to a classroom grading scale, it would amount to the bottom tier of an F grade.
The Campaign for College Opportunity attributes this to the high costs of being a California student and calls it the “Transfer Maze,” which is a bureaucratic maze that few students manage to navigate.
The California State Auditor also found that less than 30% transferred within six years.
There have been transfer reform attempts implemented at the California Community College level to facilitate the process for students with programs like the associate degree for transfer, which allows students to save time and money by obtaining an associate degree while taking courses that are eligible for transfer to a four-year university.
So far, only the California State University system guarantees admission with the ADT program, while the University of California system has not been on board with conforming with the same or similar guaranteed admission standards.
Without a uniform standard transfer pathway to all universities for community college students they will end up wasting more time and money if they would like to keep their options open — in case one school rejects their application — in regards to transferring to a CSU, UC or private university. As a result, this will either slow down their transfer progress, cause them to give up because of financial constraints or deter them from planning to transfer in the first place.
In addition, without a board or a committee to coordinate this platform and oversee its operation, a solution may not be created nor will it be executed effectively even if a plan is on the horizon.
Edsource.org suggests that the state create a transfer oversight body to coordinate between the UC, CSU, community colleges and private institutions to ensure the ADT programs in the community colleges align with university degrees, and develop more aligned pathways for all majors where students regularly transfer.
There have been attempts by our legislators in the past to create a system to regulate and set a standard in place for coordinating higher education in California.
Former California Gov. Edmund G. Brown signed the Donahoe Higher Education Act into law on April 26, 1960 and it set the stage for the Master Plan for Higher Education in California.
The Master Plan’s goal was to expand the role of community colleges and required CSU and UC programs to reserve enough space to receive transfer students from community colleges.
The Master Plan created the California Postsecondary Education Commission committee to plan and manage California’s postsecondary education system. CPEC was given the power to approve new campuses and graduate programs. Unfortunately, former California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the CPEC during the 2011-12 budget, citing the agency’s ineffectiveness in higher education oversight.
The root of the transferring problem has always been the lack of communication, cohesiveness and the willingness to work together between California’s three systems of higher education — CCC, CSU and UC — to set a standard that will reduce the time, cost and complexity of the so-called “Transfer Maze.”
However, there is hope on the horizon as a program called the California General Education Transfer Curriculum was designed in 2021 in response to the governmental bill AB-928, Student Transfer Achievement Reform Act of 2021.
Cal-GETC was the product of negotiations between the California Community Colleges, the CSU and the UC systems, and will take effect in Fall 2025. Cal-GETC’s goal is to create a unified general education preparation that will allow students to prepare themselves for both the UC and CSU systems.
Community colleges are in the infant stage of implementing Cal-GETC. The “Implementation Plan and Timeline” is a multi-stage approach, which began in summer 2024 and will be completed by summer 2025, as described in a webinar session that took place in February.
Cal-GETC is the first of many steps toward a uniform transfer curriculum for the CSU and UC systems but it only applies to lower division general education requirements. The next step will be to create a similar united course list format for all college major programs.
