Fewer
transfer students graduate at
CSULB
By Sharon Christensen
On-line Forty-Niner
The
graduation rate for transfer students, which
is less than 60 percent at Cal State Long
Beach, has largely been ignored by administrators
on both sides of the transfer equation,
as well as by students, with few solutions
proposed.
Though the focus at CSULB lately has surrounded
freshman retention rates, which have been
consistently below 40 percent, transfer
students are still graduating at a rate
below the ideal, said Van Novack, director
of CSULB Institutional Research.
“Ideally, everybody that enters here would
graduate,” Novack said. “The broader picture
[though] is if students meet their individual
goals, even if it’s not here.”
According to the CSULB Institutional Research
Web site, 58.2 percent of students who transferred
to Cal State Long Beach as juniors in 1995
had graduated six years after arriving on
campus. That’s in addition to the two-plus
years of college classes taken before transferring.
In comparison, Cal State Dominguez Hills,
one of the few CSU campuses to list graduation
rate figures for transfer students on its
Web site, showed that 65.3 percent of transfer
students who entered in 1995 graduated within
six years.
“It’s not completely known to us what happens
to them,” said Susan Mulvaney, director
of CSULB’s department of Testing Services,
who has been involved in a partnership with
other campus departments to track student
graduation and retention issues over the
last two years. “We’re learning a great
deal, but we haven’t made any causal relationships.”
That rate surprised at least one local community
college counselor.
“I didn’t know it was that rate,” said Ruben
Page, a transfer services coordinator at
Long Beach City College, which last year
transferred 526 students to CSU campuses.
Page said, though he didn’t know what the
figure was, he doesn’t use a university’s
graduation rate for transfer students as
a factor in making recommendations to students
he counsels.
“We don’t concentrate on the grad rates,”
said Page, who has also counseled students
at Golden West College in Huntington Beach
and East Los Angeles College. “I concentrate
on the student’s goals.”
And, he said, many students he counsels
don’t really consider that statistic as
having any bearing on their future success.
“Not too many students bring that up to
be honest with you,” he said. “They’re under
the assumption that they’re going to graduate.”
Novack said that just because these students
don’t graduate from CSULB doesn’t imply
that they don’t graduate at all.
“When the [California State University]
Chancellor’s Office looks at graduation
rates systemwide, that rate is higher than
the rates at each individual campus,” he
said. “So sometimes they’re graduating from
another CSU.”
The graduation rates for transfer students
systemwide is 61 percent, according to Clara
Potes-Fellow from the Chancellor’s Office.
Within four years of entering a University
of California campus, 78.6 percent of transfer
students have graduated, according to the
University of California Office of Strategic
Communications Web site.
Heidi Lockhart, director of the Cadena Transfer
Center at Fullerton Community College said
that she does not base her recommendations
on graduation rates, and added the statistic
does not account for the bigger picture.
“Those rates aren’t always indicative that
the school is to blame,” she said. “[The
students] change jobs and move, they have
work and family obligations. It might be
something for the students to review, but
it’s part of a bigger picture.”
One transfer student at Cal State Long Beach
had a similar take on the challenges transfer
students face.
“I think people get lazy,” said computer
science major Ryohei Nagatsuka, a senior
who transferred summer 2000 from Oxnard
Community College. “Some students get so
busy, from working, I think that’s why.”
A July 2001 Summer Forty-Niner article pointed
to changing student priorities, such as
work and family, and fewer students relying
on parents to pay tuition as potential reasons
for the low overall graduation rate at CSULB.
But the same may not necessarily hold true
for transfer students.
A study completed in June 2001 at Cal State
Northridge named academic advising, availability
of classes and lack of connection to the
school as factors contributing to a lower
graduation rate among transfer students,
while economic and personal issues were
not major obstacles to graduation.
Page said he wonders if this rate is part
of a larger trend at Southern California
universities.
“If I had all the grad rates for all the
CSUs, I’d definitely mention it to the students,”
he said. “It they’re all hovering at the
same rate, if that’s the norm, then that’s
something else.”
To more closely evaluate the situation and
better determine if and where students might
be completing their education, CSULB is
investigating whether to join several consortia
to share information with other universities
in the area, Novack said. The university
is also considering joining the National
Student Clearinghouse, which tracks student
enrollment in participating schools for
loan purposes.
With students working harder and longer
toward their educational goals, LBCC’s Page
said he is confident that the preparation
a transfer student puts in at the community
college level is not in vain.
“We at the community colleges are always
interested in what happens to our students
after we guide them to the university of
their choice,” he said. “I believe we prepare
our students well. I hope the receiving
institution is able to foster that.”
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