‘Waste of time’: Community college transfers derail students

[88m3]

heartbreaking




from my experience it seemed like schools were more out to make money than create a trained/skilled workforce and fulfill their students

a lot of young people aren't going to have the knowledge or time to be able to fight for themselves


That said I still think going to college will give people a pathway to a more stable and healthy life

 

[NZA]

this may be one of the few things arizona does better than most

 

[88m3]

this may be one of the few things arizona does better than most

Are those same people about to stage an insurrection because they can't sell food cooked in their homes?

 

[NZA]

Are those same people about to stage an insurrection because they can't sell food cooked in their homes?

i guess so. it's a bipartisan bill and the governor is the only one against it. ironically, the main people selling home food are mexicans who probably cant get a food handler card if they tried.

ive taken my chances with those parking lot tamales my damn self

 

[Regular_P]

Hold up breh address his response.

I was a product of community college, and I dealt with some fukk shyt and misinformation.

However my biggest issue was working while going school. Instead of just going to school.

Most people that I saw mess up in community college was largely because they were working too much, so they couldn’t keep up school.

Ultimately their part time job in retail turned into full time, then they fell behind their studies.

I went to CC before university as well. Granted, it was 20 years ago in Michigan so some things may have changed, but it was pretty clear on how credits transferred. It was also meant as a stepping stone towards a four year school where you mainly focused on general education requirements, with a handful of classes towards your future Bachelor's.

The university rejected most of her science classes, she was told, because they were deemed less rigorous than those at Bakersfield — even though some used the same textbooks. Several other courses were rejected because Korba exceeded a cap on how many credits can be transferred.

This makes me wonder what courses she was taking. Did she take a bunch of classes beyond the two year Associate's Degree window? I think two years was around 62 credit hours when I was in school. If it's still about the same, did she take 90 hours at CC? If so, I could understand why those credits didn't transfer.

 

[3rdLetter]

Even within the same school systems like suny in ny , there are credit losses. It’s pretty fukkin stupid.

It really is. I went from LaGuardia CC to Queens College and they took all my credits. If I lost some credits I would've wild out. The whole point of staying in the CUNY system, or any system for that matter, is to mitigate this.

I went to CC before university as well. Granted, it was 20 years ago in Michigan so some things may have changed, but it was pretty clear on how credits transferred. It was also meant as a stepping stone towards a four year school where you mainly focused on general education requirements, with a handful of classes towards your future Bachelor's.



This makes me wonder what courses she was taking. Did she take a bunch of classes beyond the two year Associate's Degree window? I think two years was around 62 credit hours when I was in school. If it's still about the same, did she take 90 hours at CC? If so, I could understand why those credits didn't transfer.

I think if you're coming from a CC like she is, 4 years schools have a cap of 64 credits. If you have a combo of cc credits and 4 year credits but going to another 4 year school they'll take about 90 credits. If she doubled majored in cc like it says she is now, that's probably the reason for the extra credits.

 

[Serious]

I went to CC before university as well. Granted, it was 20 years ago in Michigan so some things may have changed, but it was pretty clear on how credits transferred. It was also meant as a stepping stone towards a four year school where you mainly focused on general education requirements, with a handful of classes towards your future Bachelor's.

[/QUOTE]
Exactly

This makes me wonder what courses she was taking. Did she take a bunch of classes beyond the two year Associate's Degree window? I think two years was around 62 credit hours when I was in school. If it's still about the same, did she take 90 hours at CC? If so, I could understand why those credits didn't transfer.

Right and this was my assumption as well.

Because I can't see them rejecting standard science classes like

Chem 101 for Science Majors
or
Calculus Based Physics...

However if her transcript has shyt like Business Calculus or Life Science Calculus then

edit:
This is an example of what I mean:

 

[Bleed The Freak]

All done by design.

Take out loans, stay a slave to the system. Wash, rinse repeat.

 

[Anerdyblackguy]

There has to be stronger and more cohesive matriculation agreements within the community college/four year system. Reading shorty story it seems she went to a public community college but not a CSU affiliated one.

 

[ogc163]

Alot of bullshyt red tape in these community colleges, if you don't have the patience or knowledge to get through a lot of counterintuitive systems/platforms it can be very easy to get lost in the system.

Many of these advisors aren't even good at giving you pointers on how to deal with the platforms because after a simple set of questions it can become very clear that they are not required to keep up with new system changes.

 

[Unolove]

I did two semesters at my local college and said fukk that I ain’t paying for prerequisites

Finnah get these IT certs though

 

[Ozymandeas]

Hold up breh address his response.

I was a product of community college, and I dealt with some fukk shyt and misinformation.

However my biggest issue was working while going school. Instead of just going to school.

Most people that I saw mess up in community college was largely because they were working too much, so they couldn’t keep up school.

Ultimately their part time job in retail turned into full time, then they fell behind their studies.

Exactly. @mastermind is so quick to call people stupid then ends up looking like a moron. I can always count on reading his comments and knowing he's gonna attack someone

I did the same as you and the other breh. Went to community college before going to a 4 year. Shyt was a nightmare. Working 6-8 hours a day + going to class for 2 hours + doing assignments afterward on a daily basis is playing the game on hard mode.

 

[Wild self]

@Serious, a story that stuck with me from Gladwell's "Outliers".

Christopher Langan had one of the highest measured IQs in American history. He skipped multiple grades, got a perfect score on the SAT even while taking a nap partway through.. He taught himself advanced math, physics, philosophy, Latin, and Greek while in high school, spent most of his time in independent study cause he already knew everything in his classes. Didn't coast on his ability, literally studied all day every day because of his thirst for knowledge. Got a full ride to college. Got all A's for his first semester, but had trouble adjusting to college socially because he was from a poor rural family and grew up pretty isolated.

While he was going to university, his mother (who was poor as dirt) didn't send in the right financial info for the annual update on his financial aid package. His dad had already abandoned the family years earlier after a long pattern of abusive behavior. So Christopher lost his scholarship, solely due to his mother's paperwork lapse. He tried to go to the school counselor to get help, but they didn't help him. So he had to drop out of school before the year was over. Didn't even get credit for his second semester though he had already done most of the work and definitely would have aced the exams.

So he goes back home, and enrolls at the local state college, which is 13 miles from his house. He's working and going to school simultaneously, trying to make ends meet for his family. Halfway through the year, his car breaks down, and he doesn't have the money to repair it. He finds a neighbor who is willing to take him into town each day, but it's too late for his morning classes. So he asks his advisor if he can switch to the afternoon sections, due to this lack of transportation that makes it impossible to make the morning classes. His advisor denies it. He goes up to the dean. The dean looks at his transcript, sees he dropped out of his previous college, and tells him that he clearly hasn't learned his lesson and doesn't understand the sacrifices it takes if you want a college degree. Denies his appeal to transfer to afternoon classes. He is so upset that he's being forced basically to fail half his classes for the second time, through no fault of his own, and feels like the whole college is against him. Drops out of school and never goes back. Ends up working in manual labor for most of his life.

Literally one of the smartest people in the world, incredibly academically gifted, incredible work ethic, and he never even finished two years of college due to circumstances that don't have jack shyt to do with how good a student he was.



Now here's a second story that's more personal to me. This is about a motherfukker who lived in my dorm when I went to college. He was smart, even for the standards of the school I went to he was above average. But he was a real piece of shyt. Arrogant, lazy, treated other people like dirt, no work ethic, and got drunk all the time. Talked a lot about his parents who were apparently both wealthy lawyers. He ended up being legendary on campus for the stupid-ass injuries he would get while drunk off his ass.

So at some point he tells us his backstory, and it turns out that back in high school he was pulling a lot of the same shyt, doing bad in class even though he was smart as hell. I think he had a 2.6 GPA or something. So his parents decide the problem is that he's "not being challenged enough", and they use their connections to their alma matter to get him enrolled in college early, even though he has bad grades and hasn't even started his senior year yet, solely based off of his test scores. So he goes to college and acts even worse, by his second semester he's failing literally every class and his parents pull him out. They decide to send him abroad to a highly-regarded boarding school instead, and there they stay on his ass and he graduates with good grades. Because it's an international school and uses a different grading system, he's able to manipulate how his grades are reported and ends up submitting a higher GPA to the colleges than what he really got there. Combined with his test scores and his "inspirational story" of having turned his life around, he gets into the school we went to together. There he does okay for his first year, then falls into the same pattern again of just fukking around and getting drunk all the time. Fails out of school AGAIN. This is the third fukking time he's failed at school in four tries. His parents tried to pull strings to get the school's decision overturned, and the school ended up getting so fed up with their shyt that he literally got banned from campus. That was the last I heard of him.

Fast forward 15 years, and a few year ago I get the urge to look up some of my old classmates. I google his name and he has a whole fukking website. This guy who wasn't worth shyt when I knew him now has two degrees, the second one is a graduate degree from one of the better Ivy League schools. He owns his own business where he was a contractor for a major presidential campaign, and he's an instructor at a local college on the side.

I was looking at that shyt and just couldn't believe it. Like this guy wasn't worth shyt as a student, yet he got chance...after chance...after chance. If he was any other kid, he would have graduated high school without grades good enough for a four-year school, gone to community college, failed his classes, and that would be the end of the story. But because of his background, he got to suck at high school, fail at college, fail at college again, and then STILL get more chances to not just get degrees but get one from an institution at the top of the totem pole in America, and then get connected to both political and academic power.



I'm pretty disillusioned with the idea that American education is some sort of meritocracy. Yeah, it works out for a lot of kids. But who it works out for has a lot more to do with the position you're born into than the position you put yourself into. Of course there are exceptions, but those are the outliers, not the norm.

Stories like that legit make me wanna sue the fukk outta the "bootstrap" mentality

 

[ogc163]

This piece concerns the reasons why relatively few Black men become vertical (or upward) transfer students (transferring from associate to bachelor’s programs). Transfer offices act as bridges to access higher education. They exist as portals into and out of material realities. Access to higher education and mobility from poverty is paramount for the individual student, but how the intra- and intergenerational socioeconomic growth higher education affords the children (and grandchildren) of the student is what cements higher education accessibility as a best practice for social mobility (Attewell and Lavin).

Although I have been at the City University of New York as a student, adjunct and/or staff member for 15 years, I have been the director of transfer services at CUNY’s Hostos Community College for less than nine months. One of the first things I learned in this role was that a tremendous amount of work is being done to strengthen the infrastructure of transferring at CUNY (for example, the work of the A2B—associate’s to bachelor’s—group). These brilliant minds are building systems to ease the transfer process for students. Furthermore, there is space for people doing the work at various institutions to enter the conversation with questions and challenges.

As I began to analyze historical data on access to higher education via transfer, a lacuna appeared—relatively few Black men are enrolling in community colleges and therefore they are not transferring to four-year CUNY colleges. According to CUNY’s interactive Student Data Book, in fall 2022, of the 52,374 students enrolled in associate’s degree programs at CUNY’s seven community colleges, only 13.8 percent of them were Black men.

That number is similar at Hostos, where 13 percent of the 4,303 students enrolled are Black men. It is not a big jump to draw a line from the paucity of Black male community college students through to the paucity of Black male transfer students, finishing at the paucity of four-year Black male college students. In fall 2022, of CUNY’s 11,130 transfer students, only 939 (8.3 percent) were Black men; Black men are leaking out of the vertical transfer pipeline more than the average student, a fact that is also true nationally.

One of the challenges in understanding and addressing leaks in the vertical transfer pipeline is that the students involved are sometimes mentioned as faceless, identity-less percentages represented by diminishing line graphs. It is imperative that we name these students. We must ask ourselves, “Who are the students not going to college and vertically transferring?” The answer is: Black men.

Black men are more likely to seek out postsecondary education at two-year colleges, with 81.9 percent attending public community colleges, and 43 percent of those students indicating they are interested in transferring after community college. Luke Wood and Robert Palmer’s findings in their article “The Likelihood of Transfer for Black Males in Community Colleges: Examining the Effects of Engagement Using Multilevel, Multinomial Modeling” is a tremendous asset to help transfer offices be purposeful about improving the transfer process for Black men.

These researchers found a negative correlation between the number of hours that students worked and their likelihood of transfer (the more hours worked, the less likely was transfer). In addition, the researchers found a positive correlation between students being involved in extracurricular activities and their likelihood of transfer (the more involvement, the more likely was transfer). Students with children, or who were taking care of parents/grandparents, had a lower likelihood of transfer. These findings provide support for there being a causal relationship between the number of hours a student works and their likelihood of transferring. These are important findings, but unsurprising.

Wood and Palmer also found that greater use of campus services was associated with fewer Black men transferring. Since research has shown that campus resources are integral to the success of community college and transfer students, this finding demands our attention. Why would this be the case for Black men? Academic advisement is critical at each point of the transfer process. However, this study found that “students who use these services more (particularly academic advising) might become increasingly aware of the expectations around transferring and become less likely to perceive it as [an] attainable goal” (p. 283).

Another factor important in understanding the paucity of vertical-transfer Black males has to do with resources. When you are a poor student, college actually costs more—you also have to pay opportunity costs. Lolita Tabron and Terah Venzant Chambers’s article “What Is Being Black and High Achieving Going to Cost Me in Your School? Students Speak Out About Their Educational Experiences Through a Racial Opportunity Cost Lens” explains that opportunity cost is defined by economists as “the inherent trade-offs or value of missed opportunities involved in everyday decision making” (p. 125).

Dean Audant of Hostos Community College wrote in fall 2022 that the opportunity cost of attending college is higher than ever. Even higher is the racial opportunity cost that poor Black students face. Racial opportunity cost (ROC) is a theoretical framework developed by two Black women interested in a “transformation of the future”: Lolita Tabron and Terah Venzant Chambers (p. 127). ROC is defined as “trade-offs or the value of missed opportunities that students of color forfeit to achieve academic success in white-normed environments” (p. 125).

This framework can be used “to examine policies and practices at the school level and better understand the resultant opportunity costs to individual students of color who are working to navigate that environment to achieve academic success” (p. 125). A central aspect of ROC is that education plays a central role in perpetuating inequality. ROCs are expressed in three ways: psycho-social costs, representation costs and community costs, and all result from pursuing academic success in education environments where success is defined in particular, racially coded ways.”

I want to be clear that I do not have answers for how to address Black male students’ ROCs. I do not even know definitively what causes what. I do have seeds of thought. ROC is a response to white-normed environments and helps define the increased cost of education to Black students. Many CUNY colleges would not describe themselves as white-normed institutions because the majority of their students are not white. However, CUNY colleges are not hidden under a magical cloak where the long tentacles of racist ideology cannot penetrate.

At CUNY’s Queensborough Community College, Amaris Matos, assistant vice president of equity, inclusion and belonging, explained, “What we discovered was that while Queensborough offers multiple, effective small-scale initiatives that serve Black and Latino males, the college lacks a comprehensive infrastructure to maximize the impact of the available resources.” This describes what many of our colleges experience.

Here is a final thought that, while not fully formed, is foundational in my practice as a CUNY staff member: the lacerations of anti-Blackness cut deep. In classrooms and offices full of people of color, such as at CUNY, anti-Black comments and rhetoric are deafeningly loud. The complexity of race in this country is a tangled matrix of domination that cannot be unraveled through “diversity” only.

For those of us in institutions where many members of our recent and generational immigrant population do not claim “Blackness,” how do we name the anti-Black impulse inherent in saying “I am not Black; I am [insert nationality]” without lumping them all under one category and erasing the identities of Black Americans? There needs to be more deliberate work toward understanding the differences in lived experiences of Black, Afro-Latine and Black immigrant students. Working toward answering this challenge, in addition to ensuring that Black men have adequate resources of all sorts, will help us provide an environment in which Black men’s racial opportunity cost in attending college does not crush their higher education motivation.

Why Black men aren't transferring

Why Black men aren’t transferring.

www.insidehighered.com

 

[Ol’Otis]

I’m sticking with Coursera
California Public Library System paying for it anyway