Expert Commentary

Economics, Education

Community college transfer processes often discourage students from earning bachelor’s degrees, research shows.

Recent research can help journalists investigate barriers many U.S. students face trying to transfer from a community college to a university. Some papers published in 2025 provide solutions.

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community college transfer problems
(Wikimedia Commons) Truckee Meadows Community College in Nevada, 2004.

About 40% of all undergraduate students in the U.S. attend community colleges, which typically offer the courses students need to complete either an associate degree or the first half of a bachelor’s degree program. But it can be so difficult to transfer to a four-year college or university to continue their studies that many people give up or don’t bother trying.

Most community college students plan to transfer to a school where they can take the upper-level classes required to earn a bachelor’s degree, according to the Community College Research Center at Columbia University. In fact, 83% of the almost 9,000 community college students that the University of Texas at Austin surveyed on the topic in 2022 said they intended to transfer.

The reality is that a small fraction of community college students earn bachelor’s degrees. Nationwide, 16% of students who started community college for the first time in fall 2015 had earned a bachelor’s degree six years later, the Community College Research Center estimates.

At the state level, that number ranged from 3% in South Dakota to 12% in Connecticut, Kentucky and Minnesota to 21% in New Jersey.

Although some community colleges in some states are authorized to award bachelor’s degrees, they are limited to specific, high-demand fields such as elementary education and nursing. About 1% of all bachelor’s degrees earned in the U.S. come from community colleges, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics and American Association of Community Colleges.

Adela Soliz, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies community colleges, says the transfer process trips up a lot of students. They must begin planning years in advance to make sure they take the right courses in the right order and correctly navigate a transfer process that differs by state and institution and, sometimes, even by the student’s major.

4 common hurdles

Soliz notes that students struggle most often with these four problems:

  • A lack of information, or difficulty finding up-to-date, detailed information on how to qualify to transfer and strategies for successfully completing each step of the process.

“If you look at the body of evidence, one of the things that stand out is definitely information,” says Soliz, whose experiences teaching at a community college early in her career motivated her to become an education researcher. “There are studies that demonstrate that the online tools students have access to are insufficient or are sometimes difficult to use.”

It can be tough for students to find the specific information they need on community college websites, in part because these schools offer so many different types of certificate and degree programs. Community colleges provide training in a wide variety of vocational fields, including automotive repair, dental hygiene, funeral home management, air traffic control, and nuclear and avionics technology. They also offer classes to help adults learn English as well as personal enrichment courses in subjects such as gardening, organizing and dance.

  • Inadequate academic advising, including not being able to meet with an adviser when or as often as needed.

Although there does not appear to be a recent estimate for adviser-to-student ratios at community colleges, a 2011 survey suggests the median number of students per full-time adviser was 296 across all colleges and universities that year. The survey was conducted by NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising, a nonprofit organization housed at Kansas State University.

Researchers at the Community College Research Center point out that advising centers are commonly understaffed and overburdened. Anecdotally, community college adviser caseloads are high, they write in a 2021 fact sheet on the subject.

“With advising caseloads as high as 1,200 students per adviser, many advisers do not have the capacity to proactively engage students and monitor their progress,” they write. “The average community college student sees an adviser one or two times during the academic year.”

Scheduling advising appointments can be challenging for community college students, a substantial number of whom work and are parents. Nearly half of all full-time students at two-year colleges had jobs in 2020, compared with 38% of full-time students at four-year institutions, data from the National Center for Education Statistics show.

  • Trouble affording the higher tuition and other new costs of attending a four-year college or university.

Community colleges in the U.S. are known for their low tuition rates, convenient locations and open admission policies, which make it easier for people of varying academic backgrounds and abilities to take college courses. Full-time students paid an average of $4,050 in tuition and fees for the 2024-25 academic year, according to the College Board’s “Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2024” report.

Tuition is considerably higher at public universities and private colleges and universities. Full-time students at public universities paid either $11,610 or $30,780 for tuition and fees for the 2024-25 academic year, on average, depending on whether they were charged the in-state or out-of-state tuition rate. At private, nonprofit colleges and universities, full-time tuition and fees averaged $43,350 for the academic year.

For students who live in states where community college tuition is free, the difference in cost can be even more stark, Soliz adds. In addition to higher tuition rates, community college students often need to pay a variety of new expenses after transferring to a four-year institution. If they must relocate, they incur moving costs and, possibly, higher housing costs on or near that campus.

  • Getting into a four-year institution and making sure all their community college course credits are accepted.

U.S. associate degree programs typically require students to complete a minimum of 60 credit hours, achievable by taking 15 credits a semester over four semesters. Most bachelor’s degree programs require a minimum of 120 credit hours.

Even when community college students follow all the rules and fulfill all the requirements for seeking a transfer, they might not be admitted to a four-year institution. If they get in but the institution rejects some of their course credits, students must either retake some classes or take additional ones — and pay the higher tuition rate charged by their four-year school.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated in 2017 that students lost 34% to 40% of their credits, on average, by transferring between public higher education institutions — moving from a community college to a state university, for example, or from one state university to another. They lost a larger percentage of their credits when they transferred from a public institution to a private one.

Former community college counselor John Mullane, who founded the consulting firm College Transfer Solutions, estimates that community college students who transfer to public universities lose more than 20% of their course credits.

“A common trick that colleges use is they claim they will accept up to 60 or 90 credits from transfer students, but then assign many of those credits to ‘elective’ categories instead of the student’s major,” Mullane writes in his 2021 essay offering students advice on maximizing their transfer credits.

Battling stigma

Another barrier students must overcome is the stigma frequently associated with community colleges, notes Tatiana Velasco, an applied microeconomist and senior research associate at the Community College Research Center.

Some educators at four-year institutions question the rigor of community college courses and their students’ ability to do university-level work, Velasco adds.

“A lot of what we see is faculty members who do not want to accept courses taken at the community college or community college courses to count toward a four-year degree,” she says.  

Academic studies demonstrate that community college students can master university studies. When researchers examined student grades in calculus, physics and chemistry at four public universities in Michigan from 2006 to 2017, they learned that transfer students performed at about the same level as students who had entered those universities as freshmen.

The authors of that study, published in 2023, did find some differences at two of the universities. At one, transfer students earned lower grades in Calculus II and Organic Chemistry I but higher grades in Physics II. At the other university, transfer students earned higher grades in Organic Chemistry I and lower grades Physics II.

The researchers note that their findings “contradict the notion that community college coursework offers weak preparation to succeed in university STEM courses.” They also write that negative perceptions of community college courses “can contribute to institutional policies and practices that impose unnecessary barriers for transfer students in STEM fields.”

For a close look at the transfer pipeline, check out a 2023 paper in the Journal of Postsecondary Student Success by researchers at the City University of New York. They followed 17,455 students in New York City over eight years, from the time they started classes at a community college in fall 2013 through spring 2021. While 44% of the cohort transferred to a bachelor’s degree program, 23% finished it and earned a bachelor’s degree.

2025: New insights and recommendations for change

Several academic studies and reports published during the first half of 2025 provide new insights into the causes and consequences of America’s faulty community college transfer processes. Some of those papers focus on solutions — for instance, recommendations for streamlining the transfer process, strengthening collaborations among institutions and improving the quality of information shared with students. 

Farther down in this piece, we have summarized six of these recent papers — four of which investigate certain aspects of the transfer process and two that provide policy recommendations. Together, this research suggests:

  • Most associate degrees that community colleges award are in liberal or general studies. Researchers note that these fields do not align well with some bachelor’s degree programs and may prevent students from entering more lucrative fields such as healthcare, engineering and technology.
  • The longer students take to complete a bachelor’s degree, the less likely they are to go to graduate school. This has important implications for local communities, considering that students with advanced degrees often become physicians, judges, scientists, legislators, school district administrators and other key decision-makers.
  • People who start their higher education careers at a community college and transfer to a four-year institution to complete a bachelor’s degree accumulate less student loan debt than their peers who only attended four-year schools. However, researchers discovered that transfer students also tend to have lower salaries, which could be explained in part by the fact that many community college students are single, are parents or both.

Soliz is one of the researchers who wrote a paper outlining strategies for improvement. She emphasizes the need for better communication about the transfer process — a crucial yet relatively easy change to make.

In that paper, Soliz and her coauthor, Hidahis Mesa, discuss studies published in recent years that demonstrate that the information community colleges provide to students and the public is not always as accurate, complete and current as officials believe it to be. A 2020 book by higher education scholar Xueli Wang follows 1,670 community college students over four years, capturing their frustrations over the lack of guidance they receive from their schools.

“Students by choice or by necessity are often navigating transfer on their own so websites should be clear, up to date and easy to navigate,” Soliz and Mesa write in “Improving Community College to University Transfer,” published in April in the journal Education Finance and Policy.

“Formal and informal advisors need to be provided with clear policy maps explaining the options for transfer students, the tradeoffs associated with each, and these maps should be updated regularly,” they add.

You can learn more about Soliz and Mesa’s recommendations below. Toward the bottom of this piece, we have summarized five additional research papers that Soliz advises that journalists read for a fuller understanding of the issue.

As a reminder, although most academic journals require subscriptions to read articles, many offer journalists free accounts and copies of articles. Our tip sheet provides details. But there are other ways to get free copies of academic papers, including asking authors directly.

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Delayed Bachelor’s Degree Graduates Have Lower Graduate School Enrollment Rates
Michael D. Bloem. Education Finance and Policy, June 2025.

The author analyzed data on nationally representative samples of students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1993, 2000, 2008 and 2016 and discovered that students who took more than four years to finish their degree were less likely to go to graduate school, compared with students who finished faster. “Among graduates taking four years or less, 57 percent enroll in graduate school within 10 years of earning their bachelor’s degree,” the author writes. “Meanwhile, graduates taking 5, 6, and 7 years or more have graduate school enrollment rates of 39, 36, and 37 percent, respectively.”

Which Community College Awards Are Likely to Prepare Students for Post-Completion Success?
Davis Jenkins, John Fink and Tatiana Velasco. Working paper from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University. April 2025.

Researchers analyzed federal data for more than 1.4 million degrees and certificates that community colleges awarded during the 2022-23 academic year. They find that about two-thirds of the associate degree programs are designed to help students transfer to four-year colleges and universities. However, most of these degrees are linked to low earnings and do not align with programs offered at some four-year institutions. “Nearly 60% of the more than 500,000 community college transfer associate of arts degrees are in liberal or general studies, which research suggests are poorly aligned with specific bachelor’s degree majors and thus may lead students who transfer to take more credits than needed or may shut them out of degrees in fields with higher salaries, such as STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], business, and healthcare,” the researchers write.

Financial Considerations of Vertical Transfer Students: Salary and Student Loan Outcomes for Bachelor’s Degree Recipients
Kim E. Bullington, Matthew P. Ison, Estela Lopez and Jing Li. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, February 2025.

People who started their higher education careers at a community college in 2012 and transferred to a four-year institution to complete a bachelor’s degree accumulated, on average, about $4,500 less in student loan debt by 2017 than their peers who only attended four-year schools, the researchers find. However, community college transfer students also earned less money in 2017. Their annual salaries were almost $4,200 lower, on average, than students who started and stayed at four-year schools.

The Community College Transfer and Articulation Network
Manuel S. González Canché and Chelsea Zhang. The Journal of Higher Education, March 2025.

Researchers analyzed 16,452 agreements outlining student transfer processes between community colleges and four-year institutions across the U.S. This paper examines the similarities and differences of these agreements, noting that “a better understanding of the structure of these agreements is necessary for establishing new or fostering effective partnerships that improve students’ chances of a four-year degree attainment.”

The authors find that community colleges and public universities have the strongest transfer relationships — about 70% of these agreements were between these two types of institution. Kentucky, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia had the highest number of student transfer agreements.

Improving Community College to University Transfer
Adela Soliz and Hidahis Mesa. Education Finance and Policy, April 2025.

The authors of this paper review the research and make four recommendations for improving community college transfer processes. They suggest: 1) Public higher education systems should focus on a single strategy for improving transfer rates, not several at once. 2) States should incentivize collaboration among colleges and universities. 3) College officials at all levels, including presidents, deans and faculty, should be included in building a strategy and implementing it. 4) State systems should prioritize clear messaging to students and advisers.

The Transfer Playbook (Second Edition): A Practical Guide for Achieving Excellence in Transfer and Bachelor’s Attainment for Community College Students
Tania LaViolet, Kathryn Masterson, Alex Anacki, Joshua Wyner, John Fink, Aurely Garcia Tulloch, Jessica Steiger and Davis Jenkins. Report from the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program and the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, March 2025.

This 64-page report features case studies of successful interventions at schools such asArizona Western College, Durham Tech Community College, Imperial Valley College, Northern Virginia Community College, Prince George’s Community College and Tallahassee State College. Researchers also discuss three broad strategies that they argue could dramatically increase the number of community college students earning bachelor’s degrees. Those strategies focus on prioritizing partnerships with other institutions, redesigning the student experience and “routinizing” certain systems and processes.

“In our research for this Playbook, we found exceptional institutions by looking at data and interviewing college leaders, administrators, practitioners, and students,” the authors write. “We synthesized our findings into a practical, three-part framework that can be adapted by leaders, practitioners, and faculty members on community college and university campuses.”

5 studies Soliz recommends journalists read

Improving the Community College Transfer Pathway to the Baccalaureate: The Effect of California’s Associate Degree for Transfer
Rachel Baker, Elizabeth Friedmann and Michal Kurlaender. The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, January 2023.

Researchers look at whether more community college students in California transferred to public universities and obtained bachelor’s degrees after the state adopted the Student Transfer Achievement Reform Act. The measure, signed into law in 2010, streamlined the transfer process by creating an associate degree known as the Associate Degree for Transfer, or ADT. Community college students with a grade-point average of 2.0 or higher who earn an ADT are guaranteed admission to at least one California State University campus with junior status.

What researchers found: Students’ probability of transferring rose an estimated 1 percentage point. However, students who obtained an ADT before transferring were about 10 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than students who transferred with no associate degree or a different type of associate degree.

How Community College Students Leverage Resources and Overcome Challenges to Achieve Transfer Goals
Hidahis Mesa and Adela Soliz. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, November 2023.

To better understand how students manage the transfer process, researchers surveyed and held focus groups with students who had transferred from a community college to a four-year institution in Tennessee with the previous two academic years. The data they collected represent the views and experiences of a total of 404 students who, at the time, attended one of three large public universities in Tennessee.

Key takeaways: Community college students used a wide variety of strategies to navigate the transfer process, including finding ways to resolve discrepancies in information. “Students in our sample had to demonstrate significant resilience in overcoming transfer barriers such as inadequate communication between two and four-year institutions and complicated websites,” the researchers write. They found that students who had taken community college classes while still enrolled in high school and students who participated in the Tennessee Transfer Pathways program, which helps community college students complete a specific set of courses and an specific type of associate degree before transferring, had the best outcomes. However, they also learned that participation in the transfer pathways program was low and that many surveyed students had not known about the program.

Students Sensemaking of Higher Education Policies During the Vertical Transfer Process
Lauren Schudde, Huriya Jabbar, Eliza Epstein and Elif Yucel. American Educational Research Journal, October 2021.

In fall 2015, researchers interviewed 104 students at two community colleges in Texas about their knowledge of the transfer process and their intent to transfer. They interviewed most of those students again in both fall 2016 and 2017. They learned that students get information about transfer policies from multiple school sources, some of which are confusing or conflicting. “In Texas, where students face varied policy signals from institutional actors, students choose what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and how to follow or modify existing policies,” they write. “In a state context that emphasizes institutional autonomy and individual responsibility, the burden is on students to make sense of the various policy signals they receive.”

Navigating Vertical Transfer Online: Access to and Usefulness of Transfer Information on Community College Websites
Lauren Schudde, Dwuana Bradley and Caitlin Absher. Community College Review, September 2019.

Researchers interviewed personnel at 18 community colleges in Texas in spring 2016 to better understand the kinds of information students received about the community colleges transfer process. That summer, researchers reviewed those colleges’ websites to see what information students could get there and how easy it was to find. The resulting paper highlights wide variation in the quality of information students receive from school personnel and websites.

Among the main findings: “At most of the colleges in our sample, transfer information was not offered in orientation sessions. In many cases, transfer was also not incorporated as part of a regular advising session. Instead of offering all students information on transfer, colleges required that students explicitly request information on transfer. When asked where most students find out about their transfer options, several advisers acknowledged that the dissemination of information starts only after students bring it up in an advising session.”

Takes Two to Tango: Essential Practices of Highly Effective Transfer Partnerships
John Fink and Davis Jenkins. Community College Review, August 2017.

Researchers sought to identify partnerships between community colleges and four-year institutions that did the best job helping students transfer and obtain bachelor’s degrees. They focused on students who started classes at a community college in fall 2007 and tracked them through fall 2014. The six community colleges they found to have the strongest partnerships at that time were: Front Range Community College in Colorado, Manchester Community College in Connecticut, Broward College in Florida, Louisiana State University-Eunice in Louisiana, Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts and Everett Community College in Washington.

The researchers briefly describe some of the characteristics these institutions have in common. For example, they write that these schools “collected, analyzed, and strategically used data on transfer students, disaggregated by student race, age, income, and sending/receiving institution, to build awareness about the importance of transfer at their institutions.” They write that officials at Western Washington University, which partnered with Everett Community College, “used data to dispel the myth that transfer students could not excel academically, showing the faculty that transfer students’ grade point averages (GPAs) dip immediately after they enroll but then recover over time.”

Additional resources