Transfers Tell Only Part of the Community College Story

I write to differ with The Times’ article, “Some Schools Making Moving Up a Priority,” Feb. 16, which asserts that Ventura College lags behind its sister colleges in making university transfer students a high priority. This conclusion was based on data from a recent report issued by the California Postsecondary Education Commission and visits to transfer centers at each of the three colleges in the Ventura County Community College District.

It is correct that the number of students transferring to universities from Moorpark and Oxnard colleges has increased over the past decade, whereas at Ventura College the number has remained about the same. In fact, we at Ventura College share the pride felt by the staff and students at our sister colleges in achieving those results. But to conclude that transferring students is a lesser priority at Ventura College than at our sister colleges is unwarranted and quite wrong.

Worse, it besmirches the reputation of a superb group of faculty, counselors and service staff that supports the thousands of hard-working students who seek to transfer. It leaves the public with the impression that if students wish to transfer, they ought to go to one of the other colleges instead of to Ventura College.

Let me explain where this article goes wrong. The number of transfer students is tightly correlated with the number of high school graduates entering the colleges, the number of full-time students attending and the number of students 19 and younger because, obviously, all three are connected.

Over the past decade, Moorpark and Oxnard colleges have experienced large increases in all three types of students while the corresponding numbers for Ventura College have remained constant. Consequently, one would expect to see more students transferring from the other two colleges and a stable number transferring from Ventura College. This is exactly what has happened.

To attribute the difference in transfer numbers to differences in transfer centers is also wrong. Transfer centers at all three colleges represent a tiny fraction of the total effort made by all faculty, counselors and support staff to enable students to complete the courses needed to get into universities.

Neither is it correct to say, as your article implies, that transfer numbers measure curriculum quality. Colleges measure this by how well transfer students perform after they enroll in the universities, and Ventura College students have always outperformed native university students. Not only that, Ventura College leads every community college in the state in the number of courses articulated for university transfer credit, another measure of curriculum quality.

Ventura College represents a major public asset to the people of this county, and I am proud of the transfer achievements of its faculty, staff and students. It is wrong for The Times to mislead the public into thinking otherwise, based upon incomplete uses of data and a misunderstanding of how all of a college’s services work together to prepare students to transfer.