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.

Ironically, some students are discouraged from transferring to Maryland institutions, Parilla said. For example, the engineering school at the University of Maryland won't offer scholarship to transfer students.

"Rensselaer [Polytechnic Institute] offered two of our students full scholarship -- that's about $20,000 a year," said Parilla.

The University of Maryland offered the students nothing, so they went to Rensselaer, one of the more prestigious universities in the country. As a result, they won't be counted in official statistics as having transferred.

And then there is the issue of the students who interrupt their education for a variety of reasons -- from the illness of a family member, to lack of money, to job pressures.

"Of my 40,000-plus students, most of them are part-time," says Dr. Ronald Williams, vice president for academic affairs at the Community College of Philadelphia. "When someone shows up and takes a course and then doesn't come back until 1999, is that a drop out?"

The answer is -- officially -- yes. In fact, Williams's daughter, who now holds a master's in business administration, shows up in the statistics as a community college dropout because she began at community college and left before completing a degree.

"Stopout" Students

Students who start and stop and later return -- dubbed "stopouts" by the Carnegie Foundation in the 1980s -- constitute a mystery as far as education statistics go.

"That particular group of people require more inquiry," says Dr. Juan Avalos, who wrote his dissertation on the effects of stopping out and transferring on degree attainment. "A dropout is a dropout is a dropout. The literature doesn't differentiate."

Avalos says that when he did his research, which involved studying the responses of a group of students first samples in 1985 and then subsequently sampled later, he always kept in mind members of his family. His brother "has been bouncing around community colleges for years, but he's still out there," he says.

Avalos was one of Dr. Alexander Astin's researchers on Degree Attainment Rates at American Colleges and Universities: Effects of Race, Gender, and Institutional Type, a study published by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute in 1996. It was that study that did the sampling of students that Avalos used for his dissertation.

Astin, who is one of the premier scholars studying this issue, says in the study that his results "reinforce the popular conception that degree completion rates in American higher education have been declining."

The study found that only 39.9 percent of those who had enrolled in any postsecondary institution for the first time in 1985 had graduated four years later, and by nine year later only 45.7 percent had graduated. These are lower degree-attainment rates than were see in previous decades.

But as William Korn, who works with Astin, says, the study was hampered by the fact that it relied on registrars to know where their former students were. If a student "stopped out and returned somewhere else, the registrar wouldn't know."

That, coupled with the fact that "minorities tend not to return our survey," means that there are still some students -- about whom we do not know what happened.

"We were looking where the light was best," Korn says.

Available Research

Another premier researcher in this field, Dr. Michael T. Nettles of The College Fund/UNCF's Frederick D. Patterson Institute, has analyzed the degree attainment and persistence patterns of students who begin their postsecondary education in community colleges. He relies on the most important data base that has been compiled on this topic, the 1989-90 beginning Postsecondary Students: Five Years Later, a report done by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement."

That study, which follows the entire cohort of student who entered postsecondary institutions in 1989-90, found that half the students started at two-year colleges and only 42 percent at four-year colleges, with the rest attending private, for-profit institutions. Of those, only 60 percent of the four-year students had achieved a degree and 38.4 percent of the two-year college students had achieved a degree. (See BI The Numbers on page 28) Those figures differ between Whites and African American and other students of color, notes Nettles.

"Any time you have a difference it points to an inequality," Nettles says, who adds that there is no question that students of color -- other than Asian Americans -- do not graduate at the same rate as Whites.

But the problem is that even that study -- which is the best there is -- only goes five years. Because community college persistence patterns require a longer time frame to see, they are virtually invisible to the researchers.

One piece of evidence that may be true is a study of students admitted to open admissions community colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, Changing the Odds -- Open Admissions and the life Chances of the Disadvantaged. In that study, conducted by David E. Lavin and David Hyllegard, it appears that although students admitted under the open admissions standards typically take longer to graduate -- six to eight years is not uncommon -- 56 percent of them do go on to graduate and about 18 percent go on for post-graduate work.

According to the Ford Foundation's Bernstein, Lavin's study shows hat you can have "gloom and doom" if you look at some statistics, but it is not exactly clear who is doing what in higher education.

"We're taking pictures in a very traditional way. We are taking pictures with a four-by-four camera. You need to have a more panoramic frame."

As Community College of Philadelphia's William says: "We just don't know. The criticism I accept is that we don't know. Should we know more? That's an expensive proposition."