A new study shows few low-income Connecticut students earn bachelor degrees within six years of transferring from a community college.
Columbia University researchers looked at 43 states nationwide, and ranked Connecticut as having the fourth worst graduation rate for low-income transfer students.
A big part of the problem is that students lose about a semester of credits when they transfer from a community college for a four-year school, said John Mullane, a counselor at Gateway Community College in New Haven.
"So if you're a low income student, when they have to retake classes, that can be a barrier that's just too much for a lot of them. They just end up dropping out, because they just don't have the money to continue," Mullane said.
Low-income students have traditionally done a bit worse than their wealthier peers when it comes to transferring from a community college and getting a bachelor's degree. But that's not the case everywhere, the report found. Poor transfer students from New Hampshire, Florida, Iowa, and North Dakota get bachelor's degrees about as often as other students.
Connecticut guarantees spots in four-year schools to community college students who meet certain criteria.
"It's one thing to guarantee that a student has a slot somewhere in the state," said Josh Wyner of the Aspen Institute, which helped with the study. "It's another for institutions to work with one another in local communities to make sure that the two-year curriculum and the four-year curriculum are really aligned."
UConn is the only four-year public college in Connecticut that doesn’t have credit transfer agreements with the community college system. Mullane did a study last year that found UConn professors often reject community college credits, which he says could be costing students about $3 million per year to retake classes.
