Community college transfer and degree attainment

Supporters of community colleges have argued that these institutions offer upward mobility by opening the door to higher education for disadvantaged students and providing them with additional job training, remedial education, and preparation for transfer to four-year schools. Critics, on the other hand, maintain that rather than democratizing access to higher education, community colleges actually divert disadvantaged students away from four-year colleges and from attaining bachelor's degrees. Given their potential to undermine stratification, understanding whether community colleges have lived up to their democratizing ideal is imperative. In this dissertation I study pathways to and from community colleges both nationally and in California. I find that the community college is an effective route to a baccalaureate degree for students who transfer. Transfer rates remain low, however, and although they vary considerably among different community colleges, it remains unclear which policies or practices distinguish colleges that are relatively more successful in promoting transfer among their students. Disadvantaged students and those with weak academic backgrounds often make their way to community colleges after struggling in four-year institutions. Although these reverse transfers do not fare as well as students with exclusive four-year college enrollment, they do appear to have more favorable outcomes than otherwise similar students who drop out of postsecondary school altogether after initially enrolling in a four-year school.