From freshman year to graduation in 4 years — with a community college in the middle
Nearly half of students who transfer from four-year colleges go to two-year community colleges, not to other four-year schools.
After receiving straight A's her first semester at Rutgers University, Katie E. Keane left for community college.
A month before Keane graduated high school in 2012, her father attempted suicide. Keane thought she could handle starting college on top of the personal stress — and on paper, academically, she had.
But she ended the semester mentally exhausted, physically sick, and emotionally fragmented.
"So when it came to January, when it was time to start again, I just said 'I can't do this right now,' " Keane said. "It was just too much."
Keane transferred to Burlington County's community college, joining a traditionally unseen population of students who have become increasingly visible. Nearly half of students who transfer from four-year colleges go to two-year community colleges, not to other four-year schools, according to National Student Clearinghouse data.
And a new report from the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, finds that those students often end up doing well. Struggling students — those with grade-point averages below 3.0 — who transferred to community college earned bachelor's degrees at the same rates as those who stayed, and early results show they are equally employable, the report found, based on anonymized data from an unidentified state.
"Students that leave the four-year to a two-year have similar rates of getting a bachelor's degree, similar earnings, similar employability as students who didn't transfer," said Vivian Liu, the senior research assistant at the CCRC who conducted the analysis.
That result initially surprised Liu, she said, until she realized that students who are willing to transfer are often very motivated:
"If they do make it into a two-year school, that means they have enough motivation to say, 'I want something. Yes, I failed in my four-year school, but I don't want to have no college degree and just a high school diploma, and for the rest of my life I'm a college dropout.' "
Many students transfer for reasons other than academics, Liu said.
Shortly after Keane left Rutgers, her father killed himself. Keane, living at home in Burlington Township, began taking a few online courses at what is now Rowan College at Burlington County.
"For me, school was everything," she said. "I kind of just held on to that through all this, and it helped get me through."
She eventually decided to transfer to the community college, where she completed two associate's degrees and graduated last year with a 4.0 GPA as valedictorian.
Keane then transferred to Rider University — because she was slightly behind, she took classes last summer and winter — and last month, four years after graduating from Burlington Township High School, received her bachelor's degree in psychology.
A degree with multiple honors, in part recognizing her 4.0 GPA.
"It's been quite a ride," said Keane, now 22.
But Keane's decision to transfer to a community college carried its own set of worries, she said, especially because of stigmas surrounding community college.
"When I was picking out colleges, [community college] was never an option for me. I was, like, 'No, I need to go to a four-year university,' " Keane said.
John Ortiz, the director of the Career and Academic Planning Center at the community college in Gloucester County, said that stigma about community colleges — and the pressures to go to a four-year school — can harm students and lead them to schools where they don't fit.
Sure, Ortiz said, those students are academically capable — they were accepted, after all — but maybe the finances don't work, or the students get homesick. It could be weariness about the commute, social struggles to fit in, or the emergence of mental-health issues.
For one reason or another, Ortiz said, the students might be better served at a community college.
At Rowan College at Gloucester County, Ortiz said, he tells students that "in life, all sorts of things could happen," and they should be flexible as they plan their next steps.
Karen Archambault, the executive director of enrollment management at Rowan College at Burlington County, said she believes students who transfer to community colleges often end up doing well because they were able to identify their trouble areas and are more willing to seek academic support such as tutoring and counseling.
"Our reverse-transfer students are more likely to be more self-reflective about what kinds of support they need," she said.
Liu, the researcher, said four-year schools should exhaust all options for students before transferring.
Jim Newell, the provost of Rowan University, said that's exactly his hope: Help students figure out what's causing them problems, and fix it.
"If you have the intellectual horsepower to succeed, and you're not succeeding, something is going wrong," Newell said.
Students who reverse-transfer may do well, as the report finds, but Newell would like to see four-year colleges providing enough help to keep that pool of students as small as possible.
It's great that reverse transfers are an option, he said, "but we try really hard to stop students from winding up in that position."
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