A Second Chance

Community Colleges Offer a Backdoor Route to Elite Schools

By Anne Marie Chaker
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

If your grades and scores aren't good enough to get you into the college of your dreams, a year or two at a community college just might be.

As competition to get into top universities intensifies, community colleges are emerging as a surprising backdoor route to admission. Once seen as places for students who can't cut it at a more-rigorous campus, two-year colleges in some states are becoming official feeder schools to competitive public universities. Others are raising their academic standards, making it less of a leap for elite universities to consider their graduates when they apply for transfers.

Miami-Dade College in Florida, for instance, last year started an honors program for high-school seniors with SAT scores of at least 1,200 or a grade-point average of at least 3.7. A couple of graduates have already been accepted to Columbia, and one each to Yale and Georgetown.

A number of community colleges are striking agreements with top universities to make transferring easier. At Blinn College in Brenham, Texas, some students are guaranteed admission to Texas A&M University if they meet certain grades. Some universities promise to give transfer applications extra attention. The University of Virginia says it gives less weight to the high-school transcripts of applicants who complete two years at a community college.

Mutual Benefit

These ties help both schools. For community colleges, getting more students into brand-name universities raises their profile. For universities, transfers help fill enrollment and revenue gaps left by students who drop out or take a year abroad.

In Virginia, Piedmont Virginia Community College is becoming known as a destination for students who didn't get accepted to the University of Virginia the first time around. In the past two academic years, over 60% of Piedmont applicants were accepted-higher than the approximately 50% of applicants who get in as freshmen from in-state.

All of this comes at a time when it is trickier than ever to get into a top university out of high school, mostly because of a huge spike in applications. While the Ivy League schools have always been extremely competitive, flagship state schools such as Ohio State and UCLA are also getting much more selective. At the same time, enrollments at community colleges have bulged in recent years as families have been drawn by the lower tuition.

Some universities explicitly tell students who didn't make the admissions cut to try again after attending a community college. Texas A&M, for instance, has begun offering an alternative to waitlisted students who don't end up getting in: Attend Blinn College, a two-year school, while also taking classes at A&M. Students on the "Blinn Team" are automatically admitted to A&M if they have a B average in their classes at both institutions at the end of two years. This year, 1,200 students asked to be on the team, 71% more than last year.

California has long had such arrangements in place. But to accommodate a growing number of high-school graduates, it is now setting even higher targets. The University of California system is hoping to increase by 50% the number of transfer students from California community colleges by the 2005-06 school year.

In some states, the backdoor route also includes second-tier campuses of flagship universities. Ohio State University, for instance, now asks students what their second-choice campus would be if they didn't get into the main campus in Columbus. Students who finish a full-courseload year on a regional campus with at least a C average are then guaranteed admission to the main campus.

'A Big B on Their Heads'

Still, the perceived stigma of going to a community college can sometimes get in the way. "It's a hard sell at first, to convince parents that their kids won't be walking around with a big B on their heads," Frank Ashley, Texas A&M admissions director, says of the Blinn Team students. Indeed, the student experience is often very different between two- and four-year schools. Virtually all students at community colleges are commuters, leaving campus life short on clubs, sports and other extracurricular activities.

But at the very least, the growing clout of community colleges gives some students a new way to approach application season. Now, instead of settling for a more obscure four-year school or taking a year off to reapply, they may be able to take the community-college detour. Students interested in the community-college option should ask for statistics on how easy it is to transfer, and find out how well transfers do compared with students already enrolled.

"The truth is, there are a lot of people who really want to be Buckeyes," says Martha Garland, vice provost at Ohio State. "If they're doing well, we want them here."