OCC Leads in Sending Students to State University System

Orange Coast College sends more students to the California State University system than any other community college, according to state education officials.

The community college in Costa Mesa also showed a 35% year-to-year increase in transfers to the University of California system by the fall of 1987, making it the third largest feeder institution to that system, the California Postsecondary Education Commission announced in a report issued this week.

Seven other community colleges in Orange County had mixed records in transfers, the report said.

While Orange Coast College, with about 25,000 students, is the largest single-campus community college in the state, commission officials noted that a high number of transfers depends on much more than its large enrollment.

“Just size alone does not mandate a large number of transfers,” Kevin Woolfork, the commission’s fiscal policy officer, said in an interview Thursday.

Woolfork said that “the quality of the community college program” and its encouragement of students to pursue four-year degrees are more important than enrollment size in generating high numbers of transfer students.

“Without pointing to any specific college, quite frankly there are many large community colleges in the state with low numbers of transfers,” Woolfork said.

The post-secondary commission noted in its report that the Legislature and various higher education groups have been concerned in recent years about declining transfers of community college students. The commission said that its fall, 1987, analysis shows an improvement statewide in community college transfers, with Orange Coast College dominating the other 106 two-year colleges in the state.

In the 1986-87 school year, Orange Coast College had 267 transfers to the University of California system, 1,263 transfers to the California State University system and 167 transfers to independent colleges, the report showed.

“Orange Coast College has now overtaken the City College of San Francisco as the college with the largest number of State University transfer students,” the report said.

In analyzing community college transfers to the UC system, the report noted: “Orange Coast College (is) now ranked third in the state in university (of California) transfer students.”

The commission said its analysis of community college transfers last fall found that Cypress College and Fullerton College in the North Orange County Community College District jointly “had fewer transfer students to both the University (of California) and the State University” than in previous year.

Golden West College in Huntington Beach also showed a year-to-year decrease in students transferring to the UC and Cal State systems this past fall, the report said. Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana maintained about the same number of transfers to both systems, according to the report.

Irvine Valley College in Irvine and Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, both part of Saddleback Community College District, had 40% increases in the number of transfer students to the UC system this past fall, the report said. But the two colleges essentially stayed the same in numbers of transfers to the Cal State system last fall, the report said.

The report said that Coastline Community College, a so-called “college without a campus,” perennially has had low numbers of student transfers. Coastline, with headquarters in Fountain Valley, has an unusually large number of older students. The college has noted that fewer of its students say they are pursuing four-year degrees.