SAN DIEGO — For many community college students, a new semester means a step closer to transferring to a four-year university.
“Coming to community college allows students to be able to transfer to maybe a more prestigious college that they might want to go to,” San Diego Miramar College Student Taha Baig said.
Taha wants to transfer to the University of California Los Angeles or the University of California Santa Barbara and join their Biosych program.
“It's a little difficult to transfer and know what you need to do in order to get your degree,” Baig said.
“Difficult,” is a word that describes the findings from a state audit. The report states only about 21% of students who started community college from 2017 to 2019 with intentions to transfer did so within four years.
The audit points out transfer rates were even lower for students from certain regions and demographic groups.
“What colleges will try and do just like Miramar is we try and have targeted efforts towards particular groups that might be struggling and so in most cases up and down the state you're going to see Latinx students and African American students on the lower end of that spectrum,” San Diego Miramar College Vice President of Student Services Adrian Gonzales said.
Assemblymember David Alvarez said that he requested the audit to determine if and how colleges are meeting the state’s transfer goals.
“The findings reveal that we are far from achieving these goals, with only 1 in 5 students successfully transferring within four years—an alarming and abysmal statistic for California,” Alvarez said in the statement.
Additionally, the audit mentions the difference in requirements across and within the three systems and the complexity it adds to the transfer process.
“A student can come in thinking that they may want to go to a CSU, start on a particular path and then change their mind and say oh I want to go to the UC’s so the counselors then have to kind of shift them slightly with maybe the course requirements, the re-requisites and that could add time into their time frame,” Gonzales said.
Staff at San Diego Miramar College’s Transfer Center help students through their services with counseling and resources.