50 years ago Monday the California Legislature signed into law the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education. Read a brief history of the Plan and how it intersects with the SAT and affirmative action.

The California Master Plan is best understood through a word that was just becoming popular at the time: meritocracy. The Plan reflected the idea that the best and brightest young adults should have access to the most prestigious public universities in the country, while simultaneously preserving the opportunity for everyone else to better themselves at open-access community colleges. One key element that defines both of these inter-related ideas is that students who perform well in the community colleges should have an opportunity to move up and earn the same bachelor’s degrees from the same prestigious institutions as their peers who started there.

The opportunity to transfer, then, became a key part of realizing the California Dream embodied in the Master Plan. Instead of just defining an individual’s merit at the entry point of their college careers, they must be given the opportunity to demonstrate it along the way as well. Unfortunately, transferring from a California Community College to a University of California or a California State University institution is far less common than it should be, or as the Master Plan designers intended.

The chart below shows the growth in full-time student enrollment compared to the growth in transfer students. The blue line represents growth in enrollment since 1979 at the California Community Colleges (CCC). It experiences the most growth during recessions as would-be workers find it more difficult to find a job. The orange line represents grown in enrollment over the same time period at the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) institutions. They have seen much more steady growth than the CCC have, but overall the two- and four-year institutions ended the 29-year period with nearly identical growth.

The same can not be said of students transferring from a CCC to a UC or CSU. The growth in transfer students, represented by the red line, lagged behind overall enrollment gains in 24 out of 29 years.

This issue does not suffer from lack of attention. The California Postsecondary Education Commission, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, the Public Policy Institute of California, and the Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy have all released high-quality reports documenting the problem. The state itself has launched initiative after initiative to attempt to solve the problem, but there has been little willingness to coordinate across institution types and truly break down barriers.

Consider a student intent on earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology. The table below, from a report by Colleen Moore, Nancy Shulock, and Cristy Jensen, shows the myriad lower-division preparation this student would be required to have depending on which of six UC or CSU schools they chose (if the table is too small to read, click on it to make it larger). San Jose State University require psychology majors to take General Psychology, Introductory Psychology, Elementary Statistics, Human Biology or Anatomy, and 3 units of a transferable psychology elective. Compare that list to the one at Sacramento State, which requires Introductory Psychology: Basic Processes, Introductory Psychology: Individual and Social Processes, and Methods of Psychology.

There may be some overlap between these two lists, but there might not be either. That’s left to the individual schools to figure out and the student to navigate. Not incidentally, transfer students who make it through the process and graduate with a bachelor’s degree do so with a full semester’s worth of credits more than their non-transferring peers. These types of roadblocks present real challenges to students, and they act as a deterrent even to students with the best of intentions.

Perhaps most importantly, the completion rates at the CCC are shockingly low. There’s some disagreement about just how low those rates are. The Legislative Analyst’s Office suggests about 11 percent of first-time CCC students transfer to a four-year institution withing six years of starting. The Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy estimates that, among degree-seeking students at the CCC, 18 percent transfer, 4 percent obtain an associate’s degree, two percent receive a certificate, and 76 percent do not achieve any of these outcomes within six years.

At root the transfer issue is about incentives and coordination. The CCC have as their primary mission to enroll any high school graduate interested in pursuing postsecondary education. They have little incentive to make sure their students graduate or transfer ready to succeed in a four-year school. The four-year institutions face mild pressure to enroll transfer students, but neither sector has funding or any real accountability decisions based on the success or failure of the transfer function. This is a failure of coordination, which will be the next topic in my series of posts on the tripartite system of California higher education.