WA colleges help transfer students chart a path to four-year degrees

The first time Allizon Bigornia applied to the University of Washington, she was a senior at Cleveland High School in South Seattle with a 3.65 GPA. She hoped to become the first in her family to attend college. 

But then came a rejection letter. 

The second-generation Filipina American pivoted to attend one of the city’s community colleges. During her second quarter at Seattle Central College, she learned about Path to UW, a city of Seattle-funded program with the mission of supporting Seattle Colleges’ students in transferring to the UW after completing an associate degree.

“I didn’t know the process — or I didn’t know how to begin,” said Bigornia, now 20. 

The Path to UW program is one of the newest examples of targeted efforts to support community college students who want to transfer to a university and complete a bachelor’s degree. One in seven of the nearly 1 million students nationally who started at a community college in 2016 earned a bachelor’s degree within six years, according to National Student Clearinghouse data.

The Path to UW program is showing good results, and the state’s programs generally get high marks for helping students transfer seamlessly. But national experts on college transfers say Washington could be doing more to smooth the process.

Here’s how the Path to UW helped Bigornia chart a path to the state’s flagship university.

With a goal of entering the School of Social Work, Bigornia and her new adviser plotted out which courses to take so she could feed easily into her junior year upon transferring. She was connected with peers, program advisers and UW professors; she also took seminars at the UW campus and received guidance on how to submit a competitive application.  

“Without the Path to UW, I think I would still be at Seattle Central completing a different bachelor’s program,” such as an applied baccalaureate degree, she said. Instead, she is already taking courses within her major.

The program has seen strong results: 86% of participants secure admission to UW, compared with 66% of general Washington community college transfer applicants. It also has a focus on equity. Of the participants in the program during the 2021-22 academic year, 62% were people of color, 75% were considered low income and 42% were first-generation college students like Bigornia. 

While Washington doesn’t have data prepared on what proportion of students with transfer degrees complete a bachelor’s within six years, the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges says local efforts support students in achieving their goals: 64% of students who earned a two-year transfer degree in 2016 continued toward a university degree within six years. 

Washington’s transfer infrastructure

In many states, when a two-year college student transfers to a four-year program, admissions counselors at the new university choose which credits to accept. Even among those approved credits, many get recategorized as electives — dragging out the time and cost of earning a bachelor’s degree. 

In Washington, a statewide transfer degree system protects students from much of this. Credits earned through the Direct Transfer Agreement and Associate of Science transfer degree at state community colleges are designed to transfer to most Bachelor of Arts degrees at all of the state’s public four-year colleges and universities and all but one private Washington college. The exception is Whitman College in Walla Walla.

A 2023 report by the Washington Student Achievement Council found more than half of students who graduated with a bachelor’s degree from a public institution in 2021 were transfer students, nearly one-third of whom entered with a transfer degree. Those who entered a Washington university with a transfer degree also had a higher median GPA than students who entered without a degree or directly from high school. Most only take about two classes that aren’t required for them to earn their bachelor’s degree. 

That’s a stark difference from the national trend, where nearly half of transfer students lost on average a semester of courses, according to a recent City University of New York study. 

Still, roughly half of community college students drop out nationally, and just 43% of Washington students who, upon entering community colleges, say they want to transfer to a four-year college or university ultimately do so, according to the state board. 

With the present system, gaps in transfer success are inevitable, said John Fink, a senior research associate at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. 

“In so many ways, we’ve set this up not to work for students,” he said, leaving them to navigate multiple complicated institutions’ systems. 

Room for improvement

To make a difference, Fink said more work needs to be done in Washington to center the student experience at the state level and within institution-to-institution programs like Path to UW.

Examples include universities offering transfer advising on community college campuses; hiring more teachers and advisers who are people of color; having university professors speak at or teach at the community college; and conducting surveys of students’ experience of the transfer process along the way, rather than after they have transferred.

Washington data suggests there are lessons to be learned. Outcomes for students of color and low-income students still lag behind their peers. A 2022 report by WSAC showed Asian and white students transfer at a higher rate — 25% and 23%, respectively — than fellow American Indian and Black students, 16% and 18%. Low-income students were found to be 6% less likely to transfer than non-low-income peers.

Washington has among the strongest data reporting on transfer outcomes nationally. A new online dashboard highlighting transfer outcomes by race, ethnicity and income is expected to go live in November — something that could lead to tailored solutions. 

Credit mapping is another powerful tool Washington institutions could better leverage, said Tania LaViolet, the director for the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute who is co-writing, with Fink, a study on transfer success by demographic. While programs like Path to UW rely on a transfer adviser to know each program a student might want to transfer into and help chart a course path, schools like Everett Community College have mapped out course options and requirements, so students can see for themselves what will transfer well. 

LaViolet said some schools have taken this a step further, creating guides that map out course requirements stretching into the four-year degree, rather than up until students transfer. 

“Imagine demystifying the other half of the pathway,” she said, pointing to the benefits for first-generation students like Bigornia and students from historically underserved communities. “It might lower the barrier of entry for those students who are a little hesitant or reticent to make that next step — to make that investment — because they don’t know what the rest of the path looks like.”

“This is doable“

Across the country, Northern Virginia Community College, the second-largest community college in the nation, is widely considered to be a model for transfer success. Roughly seven years ago, the college of 72,000 students began building a partnership with nearby George Mason University to feed students into their final years of a bachelor’s degree at the public university in Fairfax County, Va. 

“With transfer, so often it gets whittled down to ‘OK, what does the student need to do to get admitted to a four-year institution?’ And that’s a very small piece of the overall puzzle,” said Jen Nelson, Northern Virginia Community College’s director of university transfer and initiatives. 

Their students have access to transfer coaches, dedicated scholarships and a streamlined transfer process that requires no application. The college holds regular conferences that unite college and university faculty to iron out course equivalency and transfer kinks.

While the two institutions started with roughly two dozen pathways for students, they now have 87. They boast an 87% retention rate before students transfer and a 96% retention rate for students who move on to George Mason University.

“It’s never too late to change things if you have folks from both the community college and the four-year institutions that are willing to come to the table and have some honest conversations, putting the student at the center,” Nelson said. “This is doable.”