Anyone who looks at transfer rates from community colleges would be well advised to be prepared for dismal reading.

Dr. Arthur M. Cohen, the head of the ERIC Community College Clearing House, hads kept a careful watch on transfers for several decades. He says the rates hover around 22 or 23 percent, depending on the year.

But first he had to figure out what a transfer was.

"The first thing we did [was] to take a number of credit hours," says Alison Bernstein, vice president of the Ford Foundation, which funded Cohen's transfer study. "Any community college student who finished twelve hours was potentially a transfer student."

Bernstein explains that this step eliminated most students who had taken just a few courses for training, continuing education, or vocational purposes.

"And then we ask the question, what percentage of the students who have done at least twelve credit hours in one year have transferred?" she explains.

That is the criteria Cohen used to come up with percentages. But even given those criteria, transfer rates from community colleges are notoriously difficult to measure, in part because so many community college students do not fit standard college-going patterns.

Although some community college students are recent high school graduates who attend for two consecutive years and then transfer to a four-year institution, they are not the majority. Community college students tend to be older, employed, often with families, and -- even if they aspire to a four-year degree -- may not be able to pursue a degree without interruption.

The Uncounted

Community college students often start and stop their education several times, sometimes moving and changing colleges. So even if they get their degree, they may not show up in the statistics as transfers.

Dr. Robert E. Parilla, president of Montgomery College in suburban Maryland, says that his students are only counted as transfers if they transfer to a Maryland public institution. However, if they transfer to other institutions -- like nearby George Mason University, which is public but in the state of Virginia; or Howard or American Universities, which are private and in the District of Columbia; or even Johns Hopkins, which is in Maryland but private -- they do not count as transfers according to the statistics kept by the state.