If your reason for attending De Anza College is to transfer to your dream college once you hit junior year, the Mercury News has some unfortunate statistics for you: only about 40 percent of community college students in California will make it to a four-year university.

De Anza College students can breathe a little easier though; about 68 percent of us manage to transfer and get our degrees.

In a large part, this is a result of our insanely complicated college system. Not only do we have the UCs in California, but we have private universities all over the United States. Each university has its own credit transfer list, which makes junior status upon graduating from De Anza very different from junior status at UC Berkeley, different from San Jose State and different from the University of Southern California.

In part, transferring is difficult because some universities operate on a quarter system, and others on a semester system. The latter schools will divide your quarter units to make them into what they calculate is equivalent to theirs.

That’s after singling out those classes that they feel measure up to their standards. Often this can make your list of hard-earned units much shorter – my year’s worth of accumulated credits at De Anza turned into 16 USC credits.

At San Jose State, I would probably fare slightly better, since (as of April 2004) a quarter unit is worth three-fourths of a semester unit class.

But as long as students are still transferring, and colleges still look at specific classes even after they’ve hit the junior year mark, why do they need to further complicate the process by creating their own unit systems?

There’s no doubt that not all classes are created equally.

Within their own campuses, schools deal with this by assigning different unit values to different classes. But this number is based on the number of hours a student spends in class, not the quality or amount of knowledge students absorb.

There might be no empirical measurement of class quality, but if all universities could agree on the definition of what one unit is, we wouldn’t be in for as many unpleasant surprises when 50 of our units are only worth 25 at our dream transfer university.

Other countries don’t mess around with individual units, after a certain point.

In the German university system (which is centralized and in large part subsidized by the government, so students don’t have to pay through the nose for each one of those credits that wouldn’t transfer anyway), anyone who wants to transfer from one university to another does so after they’ve reached the halfway point in their college education: two years.

Transfer students in other countries simply enroll in the next college of their choice. Enroll, not apply.

A diploma from any university there counts as the same diploma at any other university. Private universities exist, but their reputations aren’t nearly as inflated as our ivy leagues’ are, so people aren’t as crazy about getting there as we might be.

In a journal of the American Association of University Professors, Academe, there’s been a lot of discussion about Xin Ran Duan’s claim that a two-year Associate’s degree might be helpful in China, since those who attend the equivalent of a community college often head into the workforce, where they are valuable workers who go without the internationally recognizable credential we know as a degree.

Similarly, as Richard Heckman, president of Randolph Community College, points out in a letter to the editor, American holders of Associate’s degrees must contend with the hassle of applying to another university rather than seek out a career with the education they already have.

Heckman writes, “The transfer issue between two-year colleges and senior institutions is a contentious, needless, and wasteful impediment to educating the populace and to effective community and economic development.”