I can’t tell which is more skewed: my personal experience or the research study done by Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. The premise for the study is good: which transfer students fare better in their upper division courses, students who transferred from two-year (less selective) institutions or students who transferred from four-year (more selective) institutions? Here’s the article. According to the study, students who transferred from one four-year school into another tended to earn higher grades in their upper division coursework. Higher grades somehow ends up translating to earning more income later on when you’re out in the real world.

Oh, please let’s break this down. First of all, let me be Obvious Girl and point out that your college GPA probably won’t make or break your future earning potential. If you are a slacker when you were a young’un, you probably have time to change your ways and become a productive member of society, bent on making obscene piles of cash and crushing anyone who stands in your way. And if you kick much academic booty in college, then chances are pretty good that you’re just wired to go go go, and you’ll keep on going at full ass-kicking tilt until you burn out and decide to chuck it all and just go be some place quiet where you can chant naked with no interruptions. Or, once a slacker, always a slacker, and once an ass-kicker, always an ass-kicker. I myself was a slacker in high school and for my first semester away at college, and then I did a 180 and transformed into a high-strung over-achiever.

And for the love of all things holy, please let’s not forget that there are many people in the world who had stellar GPAs in college, but chose to go into a field that tends to reward its workers with Karma in lieu of cash. Teachers being the most obvious example.

As for two-year vs. four-year schools being better or worse at preparing their soon-to-transfer students for their ultimate undergraduate destination, my experience was this: the two community colleges I spent time matriculating through were excellent. I don’t know whether I was just lucky, or whether their close proximity to major universities positively affected their curricula. All I know is that every science and math course I took used the same text, covered the same chapters, and was irritatingly half-filled with students from, the nearby university (Univ. of Washington and UC Davis). When the students already matriculating at the four-year schools couldn’t get a particular pre-med course, they’d just take the same exact course at the two-year institution. And, no, not because they thought it would be easier. Because they had a better chance of getting an evening class, and because the class size was less than 500 and the instructors who taught the course were actual instructors (not over-worked and under paid TAs) and had actual office hours where they would actually answer your questions. Crazy, I know.

One last thing to keep in mind regarding the performance of transfer students from two-year schools being somewhat less than their four-year school counterparts. If a student starts out at a community college instead of jumping right into four-year college or university, there’s a good chance that money is a factor. By this I mean that they are probably working while attending school. I was fortunate (spoiled) and was able to skip off to Cal State right out of high school. (Then I changed my mind, wanted to transfer to the UC system, and was forced to spend a year in community college purgatory to prove that I really really wanted to attend UC Davis). I didn’t have to work during most of my college education (because my parents didn’t feed me and they dressed me like a dork so they could scrimp and save for my college fund, and for that I will be eternally grateful—now I have an education and character), so I’m lucky. But the two times I decided to switch schools and ended up using a community college as the proving ground (from Cal State Fresno to UC Davis) or a waiting room (while I waited for my Washington State residency status to kick in) I noted the predominance of out-of-their-damn-minds students who had to work and go to school. Which makes me think lower GPAs overall from the two-year transfer students has more to do with life and less to do with the quality of the education received at a community college.

Feel free to tell me if you’ve attended a two-year institution that was below par. I have nothing but good things to say about the coursework at Sacramento City College and North Seattle Community College. I was not happy with the red tape factor, nor was I pleased with the obvious Catch-22 state of affairs at Sac City (the dead man in Yossarian’s tent lives there, in the registrar’s office).

Posted by Alexa Harrington
College