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Keeping students informed of the transfer process.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This article resulted from an action research project conducted to explore ways in which California community colleges could increase student awareness of the university admission and major-course requirements, encourage student utilization of community college student transfer services designed to inform, advise, and guide students seamlessly through the transfer process, and increase student transfer success.

Introduction

As a California community college transfer service provider with several years experience, an increase in the number of transfer students who are unaware of changes to the California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) admission process and lower-division, major prerequisite requirements has become evident. If left uninformed the transfer goals of these students could be adversely affected. Spurred by this observation, an action research project was conducted by this researcher at Butte Community College in Northern California to determine how community college transfer service providers could increase student awareness of the changes to the university admission process and lower-division prerequisites to ensure the students experience a seamless transition to the university of their choice. The action research project focused on age and enrollment status of the California community college student population, challenges transfer students lace, and the preconceptions and expectations of services the students bring with them to determine how effectively community college student transfer services meet the needs of today's students. Research also focused on how the environment could affect student usage of transfer services, and how collaboration with university partners could improve student awareness of the transfer process.

The Challenges

Access from a community college to a university used to be easy, but recent changes to the CSU and UC admission process and lower-division, major prerequisite requirements has created challenges that students must conquer to avoid adverse affects to their transfer progress. Livingston and Wirt (2003) describes some of the challenges that today's community college transfer students must conquer, such as enrollment restrictions that are making it harder for transfer students to gain access into the university. Other challenges include class reductions that are generating competition among students to get the classes they need to become transfer-ready. Livingston and Wirt also described how increases in tuition and material costs...

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