2-Year College Transfers Up at UC

The University of California announced Tuesday that it has admitted a record number of community college transfer students for the fall term, and has increased the proportion within that group of underrepresented minority students.

University-wide, the proportion of Latino, African American and American Indian students within the transfer group rose to 18.5%, from 17.8% last year, according to annual figures released Tuesday. That percentage was up for UC Berkeley and for most of the UC’s undergraduate campuses, but slipped slightly at UCLA and UC San Diego, the figures show.

Across the eight undergraduate campuses, the university this year admitted 14,665 transfer students from the California community college system, a 7.6% jump from last year. The growth comes alongside a 4% rise in freshman admissions for the fall and is part of an expected 10-year increase in enrollment as the children of baby boomers reach college age.

UC and community college officials, who have collaborated on efforts to encourage more of the two-year college students to apply to the university, said they were pleased with the gains. They noted that the year’s figures were ahead of a UC goal, set in a so-called partnership agreement with Gov. Gray Davis in 2000, to increase enrollment from the state’s community colleges by 6% annually through 2005.

Thomas J. Nussbaum, chancellor of the California Community Colleges, called the numbers “very encouraging.”

Transfers have long been seen as a way to bring increased ethnic diversity into UC because the state’s community colleges have large numbers of underrepresented minority students.

At UC Berkeley, the proportion of such students admitted in the transfer group was 17.8% this year, up from 16.5% last year, the figures show. At UCLA, the figure was 19.2%, down from 21.2% last year. And at UC San Diego, the percentage decreased to 13.8%, from 14.7% last year.