Dimensions of the Transfer Choice Gap:

This article draws on the voices of three Latina and two Latino students who navigated transfer pathways from a community college to four-year colleges. Although all but one of these students was eligible for admission to the selective University of California system, none of them exercised that choice. In fact, only one enrolled in a selective university. The transfer outcomes for the group interviewed illustrate the informational and cultural barriers that students must overcome in order to exercise choice in the selection of transfer institutions. The findings indicate that institutional “transfer agents” are needed to help qualified community college students overcome informational and cultural barriers to transfer into selective institutions. The students’ transfer stories reveal the detrimental consequences of lack of access to transfer agents.

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Estela Mara Bensimon is a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, where she studies racial equity in higher education outcomes from the perspective of organizational learning and socio-cultural practice theories. She is particularly interested in place-based, practitioner-driven inquiry as a means of organizational change in higher education. Her work on practitioner knowledge, organizational learning, participatory critical action research, accountability, feminist theories, and leadership has been published in journals such as Review of Higher Education, Journal of Higher Education, Harvard Educational Review, Liberal Education, Metropolitan, and Change. She served as president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education and as vice president of AERA’s Division J. She is the codirector of the Center for Urban Education, which is dedicated to socially conscious research, and pioneered a multidisciplinary inquiry approach to help higher education institutions across the country become more accountable to students from underserved racial and ethnic communities.

Alicia C. Dowd is an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and codirector of the Center for Urban Education. Dowd’s research focuses on the political economy of higher education, including issues of institutional accountability, effectiveness, assessment, and equity. Dr. Dowd has served as the principal investigator of several major national studies focused on racial-ethnic and socioeconomic equity in transfer, developmental education, and STEM fields. Her work has been published in Review of Educational Research, Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, and Teacher’s College Record.