With only a few thousand African American and Latino high school
students scoring 1310 and above on SAT tests, selective colleges often
find themselves — scholarship money in hand — colliding into one
another as they attempt to lure these highly-sought-after students to
their campuses.
“It seemed to me that too frequently we were not pausing to see if
we could develop a [different] constituency,” says Dr. Colton Johnson,
dean of the college at Vassar.
In 1985, Vassar began to do exactly that. The Poughkeepsie, New
York-college joined with LaGuardia Community College — and later, nine
other two-year institutions — to encourage community college students
to become scholars of the first rank
The success of the program is explored in a new report just
published by the American Association of Higher Education. Transforming
Students’ Lives: How `Exploring Transfer’ Works, and Why describes
Vassar’s Exploring Transfer (ET) program.
As of September 1996, according to the report, 399 community
college students — including 191 from LaGuardia — have gone through
the program. Of those, 254 — or 64 percent — transferred to four-year
institutions. Of the transfer students, ninety-seven had earned
bachelor’s degrees; seventy-seven had matriculated at Vassar,
fifty-nine of whom had earned degrees there; and thirty-three had gone
to graduate school, of whom twenty-one had earned graduate degrees.
“We think our results are even better than we publish because there
are some people we can’t find,” says Janet Lieberman, co-author of the
report.
“Our program challenges students with high potential, who might be
unaware of their ability to tap that potential and learn how to
achieve,” says the special assistant to LaGuardia Community College’s
president and cofounder of the program. “The success of so many of our
participants shows that we can expect more from students at community
colleges and that society could benefit if other institutions consider
developing similar programs.”
