The Choice: 4 Out of 5 in Community College Want to Transfer, Report Says

As many as four out of five community college students in the United States want to transfer to a four-year institution so they can obtain a bachelor’s degree, according to a report released Thursday by the College Board.

The report, on the challenges facing students who transfer from two-year public colleges to four-year institutions, also found that two of every five undergraduates in the United States is enrolled in a community college.

The report, “Improving Student Transfer From Community Colleges to Four-Year Institutions,” draws on interviews with 21 administrators from 12 universities, including Georgetown and the University of Southern California.

The popularity of community colleges can be attributed to a number of factors, including proximity to home and rising tuition at four-year institutions. The average tuition at a public community college is 36 percent of that at a public four-year university, according to the report.

The main problem colleges face in the process of admitting transfer students, the report says, is advising. While first- and second-year undergraduates have usually completed a general education program and decided on a major, transfer students may have taken completely different classes that make the advising process complicated.

“This is an exaggeration, but you can take care of a first-year student in a minute, and then your next appointment is a community college transfer student and you’re talking about an hour,” Steve Farmer, director of admissions and associate provost at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is quoted as saying in the report. “There are no rules that apply adequately to the personal circumstances of these students.”

Institutions like U.C.L.A. and U.N.C. have been building programs to ease the transition from community college. At U.C.L.A., students between high school and community college spend time on campus to experience what being a student there is like. Such students are also encouraged to plan their community college course schedules with an eye on what they might need should they return to the U.C. system.

Still, the report, and the administrators quoted, repeatedly emphasize the importance of these students to four-year colleges. Transfer students often add to the diversity of the student bodies of four-year colleges, as many community colleges are made up of minority students. Moreover, these students are often academically successful: “Of the 10 outstanding senior awards U.C.F.? awarded last winter, seven were community college transfers,” the report found, referring to the University of Central Florida.

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The Choice: 4 Out of 5 in Community College Want to Transfer, Report Says

As many as four out of five community college students in the United States want to transfer to a four-year institution so they can obtain a bachelor’s degree, according to a report released Thursday by the College Board.

The report, on the challenges facing students who transfer from two-year public colleges to four-year institutions, also found that two of every five undergraduates in the United States is enrolled in a community college.

The report, “Improving Student Transfer From Community Colleges to Four-Year Institutions,” draws on interviews with 21 administrators from 12 universities, including Georgetown and the University of Southern California.

The popularity of community colleges can be attributed to a number of factors, including proximity to home and rising tuition at four-year institutions. The average tuition at a public community college is 36 percent of that at a public four-year university, according to the report.

The main problem colleges face in the process of admitting transfer students, the report says, is advising. While first- and second-year undergraduates have usually completed a general education program and decided on a major, transfer students may have taken completely different classes that make the advising process complicated.

“This is an exaggeration, but you can take care of a first-year student in a minute, and then your next appointment is a community college transfer student and you’re talking about an hour,” Steve Farmer, director of admissions and associate provost at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is quoted as saying in the report. “There are no rules that apply adequately to the personal circumstances of these students.”

Institutions like U.C.L.A. and U.N.C. have been building programs to ease the transition from community college. At U.C.L.A., students between high school and community college spend time on campus to experience what being a student there is like. Such students are also encouraged to plan their community college course schedules with an eye on what they might need should they return to the U.C. system.

Still, the report, and the administrators quoted, repeatedly emphasize the importance of these students to four-year colleges. Transfer students often add to the diversity of the student bodies of four-year colleges, as many community colleges are made up of minority students. Moreover, these students are often academically successful: “Of the 10 outstanding senior awards U.C.F.? awarded last winter, seven were community college transfers,” the report found, referring to the University of Central Florida.

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Strategy | Community Service: Five Do-Gooders

A FEW weeks after he took the SAT, Jason Shah realized something more vexing to him than algebraic formulas or word usage problems: that many students can’t afford or access programs to prepare them for the test, and college.

The epiphany came in a West Philadelphia middle-school classroom that his sister ran as part of her Teach for America commitment. Many students had trouble with reading and spelling, and Mr. Shah, then 16, wondered how they would be able to study for the SAT in a few years.

He returned home to New Smyrna Beach, Fla., raised $10,000 from family and friends, found Web developers and began INeedaPencil.com, a Web site that offers free SAT prep, including lessons that use conversational language and sports analogies and full practice exams.

“Certain students either don’t do well on the SAT because they don’t have the resources or don’t take the SAT because they think only rich kids take the test,” Mr. Shah says. “It just bothers me deeply that it’s such a simple problem that doesn’t have to exist.”

Now a senior at Harvard, Mr. Shah still runs the site. The project led him to major in sociology and minor in computer science, which gave him skills to run and change the site on his own.

About 36,000 students have used it in the last three years, Mr. Shah says, and students report, on average, seeing a 200-point increase in SAT score after using the service — perhaps so high because these students have had no previous help, he says.

Mr. Shah won a $15,000 grant in a campus business competition and participated in a social innovation incubator. “Being in college and being surrounded by people doing really big-picture initiatives,” he says, “I learned from people’s mistakes about where to get funding, how to market the idea, the flow of the Web site. It looks very different than when it was launched.”

Mr. Shah says that the site has taught him more about social entrepreneurship than sitting in a classroom and studying business theory.

“You’re actually doing something,” he says. “I learned a ton in college, but I’m a hyper-practical person in a lot of ways, and you’re dealing with the day-to-day challenges of things like, ‘How do you help a student across the country?’ Or dealing with the pressure of the server going down while you’re in the middle of a sociology lecture.” — KATIE ZEZIMA

‘That New Book Smell’

WHEN Elizabeth Jane Handel was a young girl, her mother would read books to her each night. A middle-school project — sorting old books to donate to other schools — made Ms. Handel realize just how lucky she was. She wanted to share the gift of reading, and a family friend mentioned that women at the prison where she worked had extremely limited resources.

Ms. Handel started A Book From Mom, a program to donate children’s books to the women’s prison in Framingham, Mass. “I thought if I put books in the prison, mothers could select a book when their child came to visit and it would help ease the tension of the visits,” says Ms. Handel, now 21 and a junior at Barnard College.

Ms. Handel requires all books be new, because “every child deserves that new book smell.” Parents choose which book to read with their children, and the child takes the book home as a gift. Ms. Handel, who collects the books at drives and mails them, has since expanded the program to other prisons in her home state of Massachusetts, and dads can now participate.

An English major who wants to be a writer, Ms. Handel didn’t even mention the organization when applying to college. She has benefited, though. Running it has helped her develop public speaking and leadership skills, she says. “It’s given me a lot of courage.”? — KATIE ZEZIMA

Score One for Peace

FOUR years ago, Mitch Arnold was sitting in his church in Fort Atkinson, Wis., listening to a speech by a school principal from Haiti.

“What really got me was when he said that kids play soccer in dirt and rock fields,” says Mr. Arnold, now 18. “They don’t have nice fields. They use cans as goals. Here we have these nice fields with real goals, real nets, real soccer balls, whereas they use whatever they can find because they really want to play.”

Peace Is the Goal was born. The charitable foundation aims to spread peace through “the world’s game.” Using his own money as well as donations, Mr. Arnold bought balls, pumps, goals, shinguards, cleats, uniforms and field cones and sent them to Haiti.

Since then, he has sent more than $27,000 worth of soccer equipment to impoverished regions of 44 countries.

Next up, he hopes to go to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities or the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to study psychology and Spanish. He plans to continue his charity in college. As he noted in his application essays: “My gifts of compassion, peace and action would only be equaled by my intellectual gifts that I would utilize in the classroom and the lab. As a college student, I aim to grow as I help others to grow.” — ABBY ELLIN

Putting Up a Fight

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