Right in Your Backyard: Expanding Local Community College Transfer Pathways to High-Graduation-Rate Institutions. Issue Brief

Each year, the country's most selective four-year institutions invest significant resources to recruit talented high school students from across the country. These students, mostly affluent and white, contemplate admission offers and consider moves to new locales to pursue their postsecondary plans. Yet, many of these selective institutions are overlooking a talented and diverse pool of students in their own backyard: transfer students from local community colleges. In this issue brief, the authors set out to answer the following question: What is the supply of qualified community college students in the local area of our nation's high-graduation-rate colleges and universities? The authors define "high-graduation-rate" as those 334 public and private, not-for-profit colleges and universities with six-year graduation rates consistently above 70 percent. The authors also provide examples of two high-graduation-rate colleges, both privates, that have developed partnerships with their local community colleges to expand transfer enrollment to their campuses. These examples demonstrate the different forms these partnerships can take depending on the needs of both the two- and four-year colleges and their students. They serve as a model for other private institutions that aim to expand transfer pipelines, diversity student enrollment, and improve student outcomes.