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College Letter of Intent: Writing Steps and Samples

Crafting an effective college letter of intent can boost your chances of getting accepted into your desired programs. While not all schools require one, it's crucial to know how to write one if needed. In this article, we discuss the purpose and importance of a college letter of intent and outline the steps to create one. We also provide an example to help you start your college essay in this format!

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Article Contents 7 min read

What is a college letter of intent.

A college letter of intent is a document that states who you are, what your interests are within the context of the program, and how you intend to add value to the school and program. Note that the content can be similar to that of various  college essay topics .

You will need to connect your goals with the school’s values and program outcomes; so it’s important to do some thorough research beforehand. Schools want to know that you’re a student worth investing in; a letter of intent is your chance to convince them that you’re a candidate who will succeed in the program, contribute to the community, and become a leader in your career. Focus on volunteer endeavors with a measurable impact, work related to your career aspirations, your  best extracurriculars for college , internships, and  top summer programs for high school students  you may have attended.

Here are the main steps involved in writing a persuasive college letter of intent:

1. Research the School

Review their strategic plan and mission statement. Understand the school’s values, such as increasing diversity and accessibility, to align your goals with theirs.

Examine the program’s curriculum and unique offerings carefully, and identify what appeals to you, like customizable courses or experiential learning components, and mention specific details in your letter of intent. Avoid vague statements; provide precise reasons why the program supports your professional goals!

2. Outline Your Academic History

Your letter of intent is where you’ll highlight significant experiences and accomplishments from your academic history!

 Mention high school internships, extracurriculars, volunteering, honor roll, and subject awards. Focus on the most relevant details within the 500-800 word limit!

Research experience-based activities like lab experiments, internships, or practicums offered by the school, and relate them to your past experiences, such as study abroad programs.

But…what if you have a low GPA? While this is related to your academic performance, any mention of your low GPA should be in your personal statement, NOT your letter of intent:

“Admissions committees want to know of any factors that may have contributed to the low GPA. Was this a one-off thing? Was there a major life stressor that contributed to it? Were you just not working hard in that course/during that year, and if so, what have you learned from it and how have you demonstrated growth? Providing the story behind your GPA [in your personal statement] will put weight behind your application and may ultimately even increase your chance of getting in.” – Dr. Neel Mistry, BeMo Consultant

  Creating a rough outline for your college letter of intent is key to an efficient writing process, and impactful results! Here’s how to get started:

• Understand Formatting Requirements Check specific formatting guidelines from each school. For example, one may require Times New Roman, 12-point font, single-spaced, 2 cm margins, and a 500-word limit or 2-page maximum, and another may have slightly different preferences .
• Draft an Outline An outline helps structure your first draft, ensuring all necessary elements are included and ideas are organized. Proper formatting and organization are crucial to impress admissions.

Consider this blueprint to help you with this portion of planning the letter:

4. Edit the Letter

Editing is crucial! Carefully proofread for grammatical and syntax errors, and ensure the information is organized and cohesive. Be prepared to remove any tangential or unnecessary information. Reading your letter out loud helps check readability and pacing. Consider having someone experienced review your letter for additional feedback; this is where a college admissions consultant will come in handy:

“I had my letter of intent reviewed by a BeMo expert and it was a great experience. They were super helpful in terms of the formatting and keeping things concise and organized. There was also a lot of constructive feedback and encouragement from them and all the reviews were done in a very timely manner. Overall, fantastic experience.” – Edwyn, Former BeMo Student

College letter of intent samples.

Dear Members of the St. Thomas Selection Committee,

I am writing to express my interest in the Bachelor of Education Program at your institution. I believe that St. Thomas University’s emphasis on a cross-disciplinary approach to teaching and learning is an innovative and important means of ensuring an inclusive educational environment for students of all ages and backgrounds. I also believe that having two field placement programs at different grade levels will allow me to practice core teaching concepts and theories learned in the classroom so I can become a strong teaching professional.

I earned my high school diploma from Westside High School. I was the valedictorian of my graduating class and the winner of the humanities award for demonstrated excellence in family studies, social science, and philosophy. I also graduated with honors. My career goal is to become a middle school educator; as I believe my two strongest subjects are philosophy and English, I think a role in which I specialize in only one of two subjects would suit my interests and strengths the most.

During my senior year of high school, I volunteered as a tutor with a local tutoring service. My primary duty was to grade tests and written compositions for Grade 2 math and English students. I have also tutored students at various levels ranging from Grade 1 to 12; subjects for older students included philosophy, math, science, and English. My supervisor, Jane Hart, was a teacher at a private school; as part of my training, she taught me about some of the teaching principles that I would need to succeed as a tutor and grader. One of these teaching principles was to use dialectic to allow students to figure out the right answers on their own, rather than being told or shown directly. I believe this is such a powerful strategy because it introduces students to a tool they can use to develop and practice their critical thinking skills and improve their answers in the future. This teaching principle, in my estimation, strongly resonates with St. Thomas’s determination to create teachers that challenge and inspire their students.

To fulfill my community service hours, I took charge of a fundraising group, comprised of about twenty students from all grade levels at my high school. I was responsible for organizing events, hosting meetings, and brainstorming fundraising ideas. As one of the leaders of this group, one skill that I developed was public speaking. Not only was I in charge of speaking to the students in the fundraising group, I also occasionally did speeches in front of the school for recruitment and presentations demonstrating our efforts. This experience taught me that it takes more than just confidence to stand up in front of a crowd; you must also captivate them. I learned early on that if I was going to recruit more members, I would have to get better at engaging with the audience. One method I used to get my audience’s attention was to have them participate in a quiz or game that demonstrated the purpose of the presentation. This allowed me to engage with them and hold their attention for longer.

I’ve also learned a lot about what it takes to become a strong educator through my experience as someone who needed extra help in one of my Grade 10 classes. I was having trouble grasping the concept of factoring and graphing the quadratic equation, so I asked my teacher to occasionally spend some time after class to help me practice. After I had attempted a variety of questions and still had trouble understanding what to do, the teacher decided to explain by going back to an earlier concept that we covered at the start of the class. What I discovered was that I needed to refamiliarize myself with an earlier concept to revise my understanding of the concept I was having difficulty grasping. This was an important realization for me as I continued volunteering at my local tutoring facility where I was teaching students with a variety of strengths and weaknesses in different subjects. Oftentimes, going back to more basic concepts was the most effective course of action.

My experience working as a tutor and volunteering with a fundraising group at my high school has taught me a great deal about how to inspire and motivate students. I now understand that teaching and learning is not a linear process; rather, it requires an adaptable and compassionate framework to be effective. I would be honored to join your school and continue to build these skills as I pursue my goal of becoming a middle school teacher.

I am eager and ready to learn. Thank you for your time and consideration, and for giving me the opportunity to become a member of your community.

Jude Gardner

College Letter of Intent Sample: Graduate School

A college letter of intent is part of your application that explains why you're a strong candidate based on your background, research interests, and what the program offers.

Not all programs require a letter of intent; some undergraduate programs do, as do many graduate or post-graduate programs. Check the school's website for specific admissions requirements.

A letter of intent is detailed and focuses on your background and the program, while a personal statement introduces yourself and justifies your interest in the program.

Typically 800 words maximum, using 12-point Times New Roman font. Specific requirements may vary, so check the school's admissions page.

 Include an introduction with your background and purpose, a detailed main body about the program, and a conclusion reinforcing your intent to enroll.

Research the school and program, identify what appeals to you, and connect your background to their offerings.

Check the faculty pages of the relevant department and review their most recent publications in the school's journal if available.

You should create an outline to minimize edits and check for grammar and consistency between your first and second draft. You can also ask a qualified professional from  college essay review services  to revise your letter and provide suggestions.

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How to Write a College Interest Letter

Last Updated: April 10, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Stacy Blackman . Stacy Blackman is an Admissions Consultant and the Founder of Stacy Blackman Consulting (SBC), a company that specializes in consulting individuals who want to earn Master of Business Administration (MBA) degrees. SBC offers a video series, runs live and virtual workshops, and has a publishing arm, with 25+ e-guides covering different aspects of the MBA admissions process. Stacy has professional experience working in private equity at Prudential Capital Group, launching Stryke Club, and evaluating businesses as a Resident Entrepreneur at idealab!. She earned a BS in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. There are 8 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 502,321 times.

A college interest letter, also known as a letter of intent , a statement of interest, a statement of purpose , or a personal statement , is required by many universities and graduate or professional programs as part of the admissions process. Writing an effective letter involves researching information about the program you wish to attend, as well as reflecting on your own background, accomplishments and future goals. Each educational institution has its own format for the interest letter that must be followed closely. However, there are some general guidelines that will help you write an effective interest letter.

Laying the Groundwork

• Review the course catalog. Familiarize yourself with the institution's academic or professional focus. Take note of classes that appeal to you and areas in which you already have a solid foundation. You might want to refer to some of these aspects in your letter.
• Take note of the exact name of the college or program you are applying to. You don’t want to mention “X University Law School” if the name is actually “X University School of Law.”

Stacy Blackman

Our Expert Agrees: As you research, feel free to reach out to current students, alumni, and professors to ask about the general culture of the school, like if the program is competitive or collaborative or if there are certain specializations the school caters to. Then, tailor your application to show how you can succeed in the school's culture.

• For example, some colleges request both a cover letter and a personal essay. Some graduate and professional programs require multiple, separate written statements, including letters of interest, statements of qualifications, diversity statements, etc.

• The terminology used to refer to the interest letter varies widely. However, most colleges and programs will provide specific directions to you about what the document should contain, which you should use as guidelines as you compose your letter.

• Reflect on your achievements. Now that you are familiar with your desired program, consider your past achievements that align well with the program. Academic, employment, volunteer and extracurricular activities may all apply. For example, if you are applying for a graduate program in teaching, you might mention your preschool teaching experiences, childhood education courses completed, and any volunteer teaching you did at your local community center.

• What contribution or impact will studying at this particular college or program have on my academic development?
• What are my career goals?
• What steps and training are necessary to attain these goals?
• How will I use what I learn in this program to achieve my goals?

Making an Outline

• Consider what interests you most about your field. Is there a particular problem or challenge you want to tackle?
• When did you realize that you wanted to pursue this field?
• What challenges have you faced and overcome?

• Draw on the information you gathered in your research. Use the program facts you gathered, as well as your reflections about your accomplishments and goals, to formulate a few clear and concise introductory statements about your interest in the program and its alignment with your goals.
• Avoid lengthy discussions of the program’s qualifications, such as “Z Business School is the nation’s top business school and has stellar resources in such-and-such.” The program is aware of their own qualifications; they want to know about yours.
• Consider developing a “hook” for your introduction. You could begin with a statement that piques the reader’s interest, such as “I haven’t always known I wanted to do X. In fact, I thought for a long time I wanted to do Y.” Remember: personal anecdotes can be great for introducing who you are and what you value, but don’t let your introduction become your life history.

• Describe your qualifications in terms of your academic experiences, your personal traits and skills, and your recent and current activities. Relate any responsibilities or experience to skills that will be useful in your program.
• Discuss your area(s) of interest. While you should not be too broad in this discussion -- don’t say you want to study simple “American history,” for example -- they should also not be overly narrow. Instead, they should show that you are familiar with problems and challenges in your field. Elaborate on what you want to do during your program of study.
• Describe your future goals in concrete detail where possible. Then, demonstrate how the skills you expect to develop in your program will contribute to your achieving these goals.

Developing Your Letter

• Writing confidently doesn’t mean you have to be arrogant. Simply using clear, declarative sentences such as “I plan to study such-and-such in order to pursue my career goals of such-and-such” allows you to project confidence without arrogance or condescension.

• This also applies to ideas. You may wish to become an English professor because you love reading, but many other people also love reading. What distinguishes you?

• If you’re having a hard time transitioning between paragraphs, they may not be in a workable order. Figure out the central idea of each paragraph and switch things around as necessary to achieve a logical progression.

• For example, a goal statement for a medical school application might read like this: “Attending X Medical School will provide me the training in forensic psychiatry that I need to achieve my career goal of working as a psychological profiler for the FBI.”

• For example, if applying to a graduate degree in history, you could mention a professor whose research interests you and with whom you’d like to work.
• For an application to medical school or a graduate program in the sciences, you might mention particular resources or laboratories that will support your research goals.

Formatting Your Letter

• You may be requested to include a header with your name and email address, along with a page number, on each page of the statement.

• Read your letter aloud. This will help you catch awkward phrases and missing or incorrect words.

How Long Should a College Essay Be?

Sample Interest Letter

Community Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.bestcustomwriting.com/blog/how-to-write-a-letter-of-interest-for-grad-school-10-steps
• ↑ https://alis.alberta.ca/look-for-work/how-to-identify-your-accomplishments/
• ↑ https://wts.indiana.edu/writing-guides/how-to-write-a-thesis-statement.html
• ↑ https://rossieronline.usc.edu/blog/10-tips-on-how-to-write-a-statement-of-purpose-for-graduate-school/
• ↑ https://zety.com/blog/letter-of-interest
• ↑ http://grad.berkeley.edu/admissions/apply/statement-purpose/
• ↑ https://penlighten.com/how-to-write-letter-of-intent-for-college
• ↑ https://site.uit.no/english/writing-style/letters/

About This Article

To write a college interest letter, place the date at the top left of the document and include the name and address of the program below the date. Next, open with a salutation like "Dear" followed by the name of the committee or individual who will receive your letter. Then, write clear, concise paragraphs about your personal qualifications, previous experience, future goals, and why their program will help you achieve them. Finally, end the letter with a pleasant closing and proofread it carefully. For tips on writing style and tone, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to write a letter of intent to college.

Letters of intent aren’t required by every college, but can help you get into your first choice school. There are actually three main types of letters of intent, so don’t be confused about what to write. First, there is a letter of intent that is written and sent by athletic students who’ve been offered scholarships at certain schools. This kind of letter of intent is more like a binding contract through the NCAA, which ties the student to his or her school of choice. With this kind of letter of intent, you don’t have to worry about wowing anyone; you’ve already been selected to be a student at the school, as long as you say yes.

Writing one of the other two types of letters can be a bit nerve-wracking, however. With an undergraduate letter of intent, you’re sending a brief message that says you’re interested in the school. It is kind of like an introduction of yourself before you send in your application. Yes, admissions offices do keep these letters on file, so it can make or break you when it comes time for them to make a decision. Grad school letters of intent are more intense, however. Usually sent in with your application, this letter serves as more of an application essay, highlighting why you want to attend their school and what you can bring to the table as a student. Grad schools that are interested in you will ask for an interview in most cases, but your letter of intent helps you get your foot in the door. Your college search and application process will be difficult, so here are some tips for writing the letter of intent:

Emphasize what you can bring to the campus. Don’t boast, but talk about you achievements, your talents, and what you plan to do in your time at the college. You want to let the admissions committee know that you’ll be an asset to their program.

Start with the most important information. If you’ve had major life achievements or received awards that fit into the scope of your future education well, mention those near the beginning of your letter so they don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Address the letter correctly. If it doesn’t get to the right person through the mail, it might never make its way to the hands of the people who could accept you. If you aren’t sure where to send the letter, call the college and ask to speak to the director or dean of admissions.

Stand out from the crowd. You don’t want your letter of intent to be strange or funny, but you do want to have that “something special” that makes you memorable.

Explain why you want to be a part of the program. Why are you applying to this school? Convey your passion for acceptance to this program, but be careful not to sound like you’re sucking up too much!

These tips can be used whether you’re writing a letter for grad school or an undergraduate program. In either case, stick to one page and don’t forget to proofread! You can find more letter of intent tips from the University of New Mexico and Custom Papers.

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College Application Letters: Cover Letters & Letters of Continued Interest

College application letters.

College application cover letters support your college applications, college resume, and college application essay prompts. In combination with the other elements of your college applications, particularly your college entrance essay, college application letters help establish your “why.” In short, a college application letter is a cover letter for your college applications that describes your background, skills, and interest in the school. When looking at college application cover letter examples, pay attention to the values that they express. College application letters and college entrance essays are similar in that they are exercises in personal branding. When reading college application cover letter examples, pay attention to the messages they convey. 

If you’re wondering how to write a college application letter, CollegeAdvisor.com has advisors who can walk you through every part of the process. If your goal is to get into top colleges, CollegeAdvisor.com can help. We’ll analyze examples of college application letters and discuss the letter of continued interest to help you craft successful applications. 

In this guide, we’ll break down the different kinds of college application letters you may encounter when completing your college applications. We’ll discuss the college application letter and the letter of continued interest, as well as teacher recommendation letters.

If you want to read college application cover letter samples, you’ve come to the right place!

What is a college application letter?

To learn how to write a college application letter, you must first understand its purpose. Do this by checking out college application cover letter examples. College application letters and college resumes serve as introductions for your college applications. Unlike college application essay prompts, there are no specific questions to answer in your cover letter. Instead, include the essential elements of university application letters: your background, what makes you unique, and your reasons for wanting to attend that particular college. In short, what makes you, you .

As you’ll see when reading example college application letters, college application cover letters are not all that different from what you would write in a cover letter when applying for a job or graduate school. The purpose of college application cover letters, college entrance essays, and college resumes is to persuade colleges that you are the strongest candidate for admissions. 

College application cover letters are not the time to be shy, but they’re not the time to be pretentious either. When reading college application cover letter examples, you’ll see that there’s a fine line. Your tone matters. In your university application letters, show your experiences and accomplishments while portraying character traits that colleges value. To get into top colleges, find a balance between being proud of your accomplishments and being humble.

College application letters – Who requires them?

Unlike college entrance essays, college application letters are required by very few colleges. However, the skills you’ll develop by writing university application letters will serve you well as you approach your college application essay prompts. When researching college application examples, you’ll notice that there are optional materials to submit. If you’re serious about your college applications, submit university application letters to show your interest. 

College application cover letters are particularly effective if the college does not have college application essay prompts that ask you to explain why you want to attend the school and/or why you want to study your major. They are even more strongly recommended when applying to colleges that don’t have any supplemental essays. You’ll see many college application cover letter examples that focus primarily on academics, but you can include so much more.

Though university application letters are rarely required, they provide an ideal way to introduce yourself. After all, you’ll notice when reading college application cover letter samples that the goal is to help the admissions committee get to know you as a person. You are more than just your grades and scores.

If you want to get into top colleges that don’t allow you to submit a college resume or don’t provide interviews, you need to take extra steps to earn acceptance. Often, you can repurpose content from college application essay prompts that ask why you want to study your major! The college application essay format differs from that of a college application letter, but they serve a very similar purpose.

Test your knowledge about other aspects of the college admissions process in our quiz below!

What is a letter of continued interest?

A letter of continued interest (LOCI) is a letter you send to a college when you are deferred or placed on the waitlist. So, not everyone will need to write a college application letter of continued interest.

Your letter of continued interest has three primary goals: 

• Reaffirm your interest in the school.
• Provide additional context for your application. 
• Discuss accomplishments on your college resume that have occurred since you submitted your application.

In this guide on how to write a college application letter, we discuss all forms of college application letters in detail. We’ll expand on the above goals to explain the strategies for writing effective letters.

Explaining teacher recommendation letters 

In addition to submitting a college application cover letter and, potentially, a letter of continued interest, your application will also include recommendation letters . These letters enhance your college application entrance essay and build on answers to supplemental college application essay prompts. 

Due to the shift away from standardized testing, other parts of your college applications are inevitably getting more attention in the evaluation process. When assessing your college applications, admissions committees will often rely on letters from your teachers and counselor in place of interviews.

When reading sample college application letters of recommendation, you’ll observe that some are better than others. But, it can be a bit harder to find example teacher recommendations than it is to find college application cover letter examples. To ensure high-quality letters, create a plan well in advance of your senior year. You’ll want to ask teachers to write your recommendations who know you best beyond your grades. The strongest sample college application letters of recommendation speak to both your personal and academic strengths. 

College application sample recommendation letters with the biggest impact typically come from teachers from your core junior year courses – math, science, English, and social studies. If there’s a teacher from your junior year who taught you during your sophomore or senior year too, even better! Teachers who know you through multiple environments – clubs, classes, sports, or other areas – can often do the best job speaking to your growth and achievement over time. 

Choose teachers who know you best

Ultimately, the most effective sample college application letters of recommendation are written by the teachers who know you best. Pay attention to the college application requirements for each school on your list. Note when reading example college application letters of recommendation who the intended audience is. Some schools require math or science teachers for STEM and business majors , while others require English or social studies teachers for humanities majors .

For example, when looking at college application sample requirements, MIT writes “One recommendation should be from a math or science teacher, and one should be from a humanities, social science, or language teacher.” Caltech also requires one math or science teacher evaluation and one humanities or social sciences teacher evaluation. 

Some applicants are tempted to send more letters than the college applications require. However, aim for quality over quantity. If you want to ask another teacher to write a recommendation letter for you, ask yourself what perspective they will bring to your college applications that isn’t already covered in your college entrance essay or other recommendation letters. 

Don’t hesitate to provide materials to help your teachers and guidance counselor write their letters of recommendation for you. In fact, you should! When reading college application sample letters of recommendation, you’ll note that they are specific and provide examples where possible. Some teachers will even have you fill out a standard form to gather information from you. So, by having additional information already prepared, you are helping them tremendously. 

Here are some materials you can provide to help your recommendations augment your college applications:

• College entrance essay
• College resume or a list of your extracurricular activities and awards
• Responses to college application essay prompts.
• A sample college application letter that you’re sending to one of your colleges.
• A few paragraphs about why you want to study your major or pursue your intended career. 
• Key elements of the course you took with them, such as a favorite project or unit. 

When preparing materials to give to teachers, read the instructions given to recommenders by MIT. Even if you aren’t applying to MIT, the information can still be helpful to know. By understanding the process of writing recommendation letters on the teacher’s side, you can see what information will help them write a strong letter for you. 

Don’t wait until you’re submitting your college applications to ask your teachers for recommendations. Some teachers limit the number that they will write, and you want them to have plenty of time to write a quality recommendation. To make sure you have the best recommendations , ask teachers late in your junior year or early in your senior year.

The College Application Letter

As we’ve mentioned, a college application letter is a cover letter for your college applications. It describes your background, skills, and interest in the school. It’s different from both the college application essay format and the letter of continued interest. When reviewing college application samples, you’ll see that your cover letter works together with your college resume and college entrance essay to help admissions officers get to know you. 

Below, we’ll discuss how to write a college application letter and walk through a sample college application letter. But remember, you want your letter to be original! Don’t feel limited by what’s in any examples of college application letters.

Do all schools require a college application letter?

No — few schools actually require college application letters. However, learning to write a strong college application letter can help you in other aspects of the college admissions process. Reading college application cover letter examples can also help you learn how to write for the admissions committee audience. 

One of the ways to learn how to write a college application letter is to read sample college application letters. For instance, the same skills that help you write a strong and concise college application letter will help you in the college essay format, too.

The college application letter – What should I include?

So, you know the purpose of college application letters, but what should you include in them? Reading college application cover letter samples can help you determine this. While the college application essay format lends itself to focusing on one topic or story, college application cover letter examples highlight the importance of covering several different topics.

College application letters should contain the following elements: 

1. school name and address.

You college application letter should follow formal letter formatting guidelines, which include writing the full name of the college or university you are applying to in the upper left hand corner of the letter. Try to be as specific as possible with the address you choose to use.

2. Salutation

A standard salutation is suitable for your college application letter. However, it is a great idea to do your research and use the full name of the admissions officer assigned to your region.

3. Introduction

The best examples of college application letters open strong. Thank the admissions committee for reviewing your application, and introduce yourself. Do you have a unique connection to the school? Can you hook the reader in some way to make them want to keep reading?

4. Explanation of academic interests

Your primary purpose in college is to earn a degree, so notice that in example college application letters most of the space is often devoted to discussing academic plans. Include your intended major and career path, as well as interdisciplinary interests.

5. Discussion of extracurricular interests

The college application essay format may be a place for you to discuss extracurricular involvement, so use this space to elaborate or discuss additional interests. These could be connected to your academic plans, but they don’t have to be.

6. Conclusion

Express your interest in the school! Impactful example college application letters have a clear and brief conclusion that reaffirms your desire to attend and enthusiasm for the opportunity to join the next class of undergraduates. Point to specific classes, professors, programs, organizations, and aspects of the college that pique your interest. No one is going to hold you to your plan, but colleges want to see that you have one.

8. Complimentary Close

Lastly, every good college application letter should include an expression of gratitude alongside your close and your signature.

In the example of a college application letter above, there are a few key details to highlight. The letter is essentially a five-paragraph essay, with one paragraph for each of the five elements. This differs significantly from the college application essay format. In this college application example, the college application letter has clear and distinct sections, and this is very common in college application cover letter samples.

Depending on your interests and plans, you could take a more integrated approach. You’ll read some examples of college application letters that center around a theme or broad plan rather than separated into individual paragraphs.

This sample college application letter is a narrative. The applicant’s goal is to tell her story to the admissions committee. The best sample college application letters paint a picture for the reader and draw the reader into the storyline. Though it can feel like being vivid and descriptive is a waste of your space, “showing instead of telling makes for stronger college applications.

How to format your college application letter?

When reading sample college application letters, you’ll observe that they are formatted very similarly to professional cover letters. Your university application letters should be one page single-spaced. The heading should also be consistent across college application letters. 

• Your full address
• The date you will send the letter
• The admission officer’s name
• The college name
• The college address

Then, open your letter with a salutation. Many examples of college application letters open with “Dear” and are addressed to the admission officer. If you cannot find your regional admissions officer, it is fine to address the letter to the admissions office as was done in the sample college application letter above. Once you write the body of your letter, don’t forget your closing salutation – “Sincerely,” and then your name. 

Once you read several sample college application letters, you’ll understand the best practices. After writing a university application letter for one school, you don’t need to start from scratch for additional schools. Adapt what you have to fit the next college’s context and your specific interests on their campus. 

Being concise is key. Your university application letter should not be redundant. If it exceeds one page, see where information you mention is repeated elsewhere in your application. In your cover letter, focus on the content that makes you as original and unique as possible. Most importantly, don’t forget to proofread your university application letters! 

Can a college application letter help me with other parts of my application?

Think of the college application cover letter as the glue that holds your college applications together. When writing it, think about it as your opportunity to show your best self. After brainstorming the content, you’ll be better equipped to craft your candidate profile into a cohesive narrative and articulate why you want to attend the college.

Though many parts of your college applications will be out of your control by the time you reach your senior fall, the college application cover letter is one that you can control. Use it to elevate your college applications, show interest in your top schools , and make yourself stand out among other applicants!

The Letter of Continued Interest

Another form of college application letter is a letter of continued interest . In sample college application letters of continued interest, you’ll see that the primary purpose is to reaffirm your candidacy for a spot in the next incoming class of undergraduates. 

Though it can feel like a waiting game, the waitlist should not be passive. As soon as you are waitlisted or deferred, begin crafting a letter of continued interest. The best college application sample LOCIs are submitted promptly. Put in the effort to show you’re serious about attending. 

College application example LOCIs should focus on recent updates. Likely, a lot has happened since you submitted your application, particularly if you applied by the early deadlines. Strong college application sample LOCIs convey accomplishments and experiences that either add to previously mentioned ones or provide another dimension to your application. 

Letter of continued interest – When and where to submit?

Learn as much as you can by reading college application example LOCIs, but know that each school’s process for when and how to submit them is different. Additionally, the process may vary based on whether you were deferred to the regular decision round of admissions or waitlisted after the regular decision round. It’s important to follow each university’s directions.

Many schools will request that you upload your letter of continued interest to a portal. Some will request that you email it to an address – typically the admissions office. Others won’t allow you to submit any additional materials. If you’re in doubt, call or email the admissions office and ask. 

What to include in your letter of continued interest?

You’ll notice common trends when reading college application sample LOCIs. Effective college application example LOCIs convey a tone of sincerity, gratitude, and enthusiasm for an opportunity to attend. A strong sample college application letter of continued interest includes four elements. 

First, reaffirm your interest in attending the school if offered the chance to matriculate. Then, discuss relevant developments to your application, such as additional extracurricular accolades and continued academic successes. Sometimes, you’ll see a sample college application letter of continued interest that mentions how a student improved a lower mid-year grade or discusses a new leadership role. 

When reading a sample college application letter of continued interest, remember that colleges are looking for reasons to admit you, so don’t be shy! Offer to answer any questions they have and provide additional info in the conclusion of your letter. 

It’s important to back up your claims with supporting evidence. Strong college application sample LOCIs provide examples and specific details, just as you would in a cover letter or essay. Be vivid and descriptive as you share your story!

However, college application example LOCIs that include overly emotional appeals or merely complement the university are unlikely to be effective. Your letter of continued interest should be all about you. Though it can be difficult to realize this when reading college application example LOCIs, recognize that the content of your letter should fit within the context of the rest of your application. 

The many types of college application letters – Final Thoughts

In this guide, we covered several types of letters associated with your college process – college application cover letters, teacher recommendation letters, and letters of continued interest. Reading sample college application letters, whether they are college application cover letter samples or LOCIs, can help you do your best work. But, remember that every applicant’s college application process is unique. 

Our final tips for writing college application letters:

• Proofread. College application letters with typos or grammatical errors reflect poorly on your effort and candidacy. Use a polished and professional tone in everything you write for your college applications.
• Be yourself. Though this goal can get lost in the requirements, scores, and grades, you should focus on helping the colleges on your list get to know who you are . 
• Follow the requirements. Each college has their own requirements for how they want you to submit materials. Pay close attention to the details for each college as you go through the admissions process. 

CollegeAdvisor.com can help guide you through every step of the college application process. Check out our blog , webinars , or register with CollegeAdvisor.com today. Good luck!

This guide to college application letters and letters of continued interest was written by Caroline Marapese, Notre Dame ‘22. At CollegeAdvisor, we have built our  reputation  by providing comprehensive information that offers real assistance to students. If you want to get help with your college applications from CollegeAdvisor.com  Admissions Experts , click here to schedule a free meeting with one of our Admissions Specialists. During your meeting, our team will discuss your profile and help you find targeted ways to increase your admissions odds at top schools. We’ll also answer any questions and discuss how CollegeAdvisor.com can support you in the college application process.

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How to Write a Letter of Intent for an Undergraduate College

Colleges and universities often require students to submit a letter of intent before or during the application process. The letter is addressed to the school and usually no longer than a page in length. The tone, format and content of the letter should convey that you are an excellent candidate for the school to which you are applying.

Before writing the letter, determine where the letter is going. Spend some time researching various colleges to select the ones to which you want to apply. You can include relevant aspects of your research in the letter to show the readers you are familiar with what the school offers. Concordia University suggests researching how long the school's program runs, their graduate rate and whether alumni speak well of the program when deciding which schools to apply to. Other aspects of a college you can research include specific faculty members, majors, clubs and organizations, geographical environment and course titles.

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One of the main functions of a letter of intent is to inform schools about who you are and what will you contribute to the institution. The letter can include relevant aspects of your biography as well as your strengths, skills, interests and hobbies. Be as specific as possible in both the wording and the content of the letter; avoid words that are too subjective or broad such as "successful" and "happy." Instead, describe what those words mean to you and your life experiences.

Purpose and Goals

There are countless schools and disciplines to choose from when applying to college. Therefore, it is important to clearly communicate in your letter why you are interested in studying at that particular department and school. An effective way to explain why you want to study in the program is to tie the explanation of your purpose to your academic and professional goals. State your career goals and show the reader how attending the college will help you reach those goals.

Accomplishments

Although a letter of intent is different from a resume, it should still include your accomplishments, credentials and awards. Eller College advises students to "provide evidence that you surpass the other candidates." By naming relevant accomplishments that relate to the college or specific program to which you are applying, you can set yourself apart among the other applicants. However, be discerning about which accomplishments and awards you name -- they should always directly relate to the field of study or institution or to your long-term goals. Overall, showing a history of success promises the reader more successes in the future.

• Eller College: Letter of Intent and Resume Development
• Concordia University: How to Write a Letter of Intent

Soheila Battaglia is a published and award-winning author and filmmaker. She holds an MA in literary cultures from New York University and a BA in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley. She is a college professor of literature and composition.

How to Write a Letter of Intent for College

What is a letter of intent for college.

A cover letter known as a “letter of intent” for college is used to present a candidate to a panel of admissions officers who are reviewing student applications. A conventional letter is composed of a header, a salutation, a body, and a conclusion.

The applicant’s personal narrative, or their academics, extracurricular activities, and accolades, ought to be discussed in this letter’s body. It needs to be precise, to the point, and personal. This letter is crucial to an application since it sets the tone for the other documents that are submitted as part of the whole application.

What is the significance of a college letter of intent?

Well, this letter gives the admissions officers the details they need to decide whether or not you are qualified to be included in their college program by outlining your academic and professional background.

It is in your best interest to submit a letter of intent for college that conveys and clearly demonstrates your qualifications, both academically and professionally.

Be as specific as you can in your letter about why you want to enrol in this particular program at the college of your choice. Your letter is very crucial. Don’t forget to take into consideration the college’s prompts and submission deadlines.

How do you Write a college letter of intent?

Let’s examine the different strategies you can use when writing a letter of intent for college:

Make sure you carefully read the prerequisites

Every educational institution has a unique set of requirements that must be met as part of the admissions process. Usually, they will anticipate that you will tailor your letter of intent to the specifications they provide.

Be sure to note due dates, a specific format to employ, a list of required documents, and any issues or concerns specific to that institution. Some of these assignments will have word limits, while others will need you to finish an exercise or respond to a simple question. You should be prepared in advance in case you are also asked to provide a letter of recommendation.

Conduct in-depth research

Make an informed decision by learning as much as you can about the college you have chosen. Read as much as you can about the institution, such as its goals and mission, duration of operation, methods of instruction, personnel, extracurricular activities, etc. You can look it up online or browse the college website to find any more information you might require.

For instance, you might find a list of courses for undergraduate degrees that you can enrol in, along with reading materials and the course structure for each topic. You might choose to make some notes about the course’s duration and read some student reviews to gain a greater understanding of the college course you will be taking.

The next thing you should do is think about and write down the qualities you possess in order to take part in this specific college program, as well as how you might contribute anything of value to the institution.

Make sure to address it to the right person

Letters of intent are typically addressed to the institution; however, it is a good idea to find out if there is a specific member of the admissions committee to whom the letter should be addressed personally or by email.

It’s crucial to research the recipient’s name before writing the letter of intent for college so that you may include the appropriate salutation. You should choose an official tone and write professionally, so keep that in mind.

State your objectives

Describe your career goals for after you finish this course and receive your degree. Describe some of your long-term career goals and explain how enrolling in particular classes offered by the college program could help you achieve them.

The admissions committee is always looking for graduates or former students who carry on their legacy. Make sure to highlight your successes and those that would have a positive impact on the school to boost your chances of being admitted into the program.

Provide evidence to back up your arguments.

Instead of merely saying it, back it up with evidence. This is good writing advice that may also be used while drafting a college admissions letter. In this context, “proof” or “evidence” refers to the ways in which you could show the university’s admissions committee that you have met their requirements and are making an effort to get accepted.

If you’re a senior in high school applying to a business program in college, for instance, describe how you’ve used business techniques and strategies in your assignments and other academic settings.

Be as specific as you can

Unless instructed otherwise by the institution, your letter of intent shouldn’t be more than one page long. As a result, be careful to introduce your arguments and ideas at the start of the letter. Include pertinent details and illustrations throughout your article.

List out all the reasons you are passionate about this program, why you decided to pursue this degree, and any obstacles you have faced. Write your responses to these in the context of how they influenced your decision to pursue a career in academia.

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If you don’t feel confident sending your letter of intent, Rostrum is here to help. We are aware of what it takes to produce standout college applications and letters of intent that can potentially advance applicants to the next phase of the selection process. To schedule your first appointment, contact us. To help you get started with your college preparation, turn to Rostrum Education!

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A statement of purpose, also known as a letter of intent, or LOI, is a brief, focused essay submitted as part of your admission package to a school or university. The LOI establishes intent to enroll by informing Admissions of your educational and career background. The admissions department reviews the LOI, along with the other submitted materials, to assess whether a student is a worthy candidate for their school’s graduate program.

It is in your best interest to deliver a high-quality LOI, one that highlights your best qualities, both academic and professional. Think of your LOI as a document that sells your strengths, your background and your drive. Consider the following tips as you begin to structure your letter of intent.

• What value will you gain?
• What are your short- and long-term goals?
• How long does their program run?
• What is their graduate rate?
• Do alumni speak well of the program?
• What makes you a solid candidate?
• What skills and passions do you bring?
• Why are you considering working toward this degree?
• What do you plan to do with your earned degree?
• What can you bring, academically and professionally, to the school’s degree program?
• What makes you stand out from the competition?
• Use that feedback to revise your LOI until you have a solid final draft.
• Have a fresh set of eyes review it for content, clarity and errors.
• Finalize and send: Submit your LOI to the admissions department of the desired program.

A letter of intent is a serious and heavily-weighted piece of your admissions package. Unlike a college application essay, where your goal is to impress the admissions committee with your passion and your enthusiasm, a LOI is a more studied document, a sample of your productive, disciplined process. Be as specific as possible about why this particular program is the right one. Describe how your background led you to school as the next step, and how your background qualifies you for admittance. Pay attention to detail and adhere to the admission deadlines.

With some time and focus, you can make your LOI an effective piece of the package that not only highlights, but also sells, your academic and professional potential.

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Statements of Purpose: Drafting Your Statement

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Write one essay for each program. Although they may sound similar, each program’s statement prompts asks for slightly different pieces of information about who you are. You may be fortunate to have two or three similar prompts for a few programs, but even then, remember that you must meld your own interests with the opportunities available at each particular program--so, no two statements should read exactly alike. In essence, be prepared to draft (and continuously revise) dedicated statements for each program application. Don’t send out a boilerplate essay.

Attempt to create one unifying theme in your narrative. Some applications ask you to include the answers to broad prompts in your statement. For instance, the only instructions you get may be: describe your goals and preparation to pursue graduate study in no more than 1500 words. Conversely, others may ask you to answer a series of very specific questions such as your reasons for applying to their program in particular, how your background fits into your professional goals, how your past achievements would aid you during your time in graduate school, and what you have learned from your prior professional experience. Regardless of the particular kind of writing situation, attempt to fit your narrative into one unifying theme. For example, if your essay focuses on how family has played an important role in your decision to go to graduate school, do not throw in an experience from your trip to a foreign country as another factor in your decision making process unless it is strongly tied with the overall theme of family. Also, be sure to stick to the word limits.

Strong statements of purpose answer four important questions that inform admissions committees of who you are professionally and personally.

Professionally, statements of purpose answer two questions for the committee.

First: what kind of work are you interested in doing in graduate school?

Be specific, don’t make the mistake of thinking that being vague in your focus will reach a wider audience. For instance, if you mainly want to study business ethics with two prominent faculty members who focus on that topic, write that in your statement. Do not worry that you are pigeonholing yourself by being specific and instead list several other areas that you could be interested in. There will not be enough time to go into all of these areas and it will make your statement sound aimless and disconnected.

Second: why is the program you are applying to a good fit for you?

This is where your online research on each program comes into play. Be specific about what makes the program that you are applying to your ideal choice. Avoid general statements such as “your program is one of the best in the country.” Focus more on the specific things that you think make it great—for you and your research in particular. If it has a good instructor to student ratio, how will that benefit you? If what separates the program from the rest is that it provides excellent field training before you graduate, how will you take advantage of this? Be specific. You may also talk about your goals after grad school. Where do you see yourself? Does the program have a good history in helping other students get there? You don’t have to be one hundred percent certain about your future plans; no one will pull your application essay before you graduate and express shock and disappointment if your interests happen to change. But generally, going to graduate school is a huge commitment. Admission committees want to know that you understand this and that you envision some type of gain for your dedication.

A word of caution: Avoid changing your statement just to get into a program if it is a bad fit for you. You’ll save yourself time and money down the line.

Be aware that while it is generally a good idea to be as honest about your intentions as possible, avoid being too candid about your reasons for applying to a certain school if they are less than scholarly. For instance, admission committees do not want to hear that you are applying to their program primarily because of the school’s proximity to significant others, family, friends; because it is located in a place with a great college town feeling; or, because it offers a variety of funding opportunities (however, you could probably mention this last one in passing if their funding is outstanding among other programs, signaling a dedication to its students’ goals).

Personally, statements of purpose also answer two questions for the committee.

First: What matters to you—and why?

The committee will receive a lot of data about you. The statement of purpose allows you to give that data meaning. It is important that you not just rephrase whatever is on your CV or resume because this won’t get at the meaning behind your experiences. A job or a class may have lasted only a few months, but it may have been the impetus for you to go to graduate school because of a unique experience that occurred there. The statement of purpose should give the committee a sense of who you are and how you have personally interpreted events in your life.

Second: How are you unique from the other candidates?

Above all, avoid playing it safe with bland language. It can be tempting to resist making yourself stand out in your statement because you don’t want to ruin your chances by “sounding weird.” Ironically, this type of information may be what makes you the most compelling candidate. Graduate program committees receive dozens—sometimes hundreds—of applications each year. Make your voice stand out among the rest by showing that you are not only professional but that there’s a person behind the important decisions you have made. What was the human element that motivated you to get you to where you are?

Many people wonder whether they should mention their minority status. Generally, you should mention your minority status only if it pertains to your studies. For instance, did working with a minority group (that you belong to) motivate you to go to graduate school? How so? Are you interested in undertaking minority issues once you have earned your degree—and, if so, in what capacity? For example, once you earn your Masters in Social Work, are you hoping to help Hispanic individuals who suffer from serious and persistent mental illness? Tie this with your background to give this goal some context.

Remember to switch over between other graduate application tasks such as asking for letters of recommendation, ordering your transcripts, filling out the questionnaire for each school, and so forth. This will break up the writing task and help to re-energize you.

Works Consulted

Getting In: A Step-By-Step Plan for Gaining Admission to Graduate School in Psychology . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. 1997. Print.

Kaplan, Inc. Get into Graduate School: A Strategic Approach . New York: Simon & Schuster. 2003. Print.

Stelzer, Richard J. How to Write a Winning Personal Statement for Graduate and Professional School . 3rd. ed. Lawrenceville, NJ: Peterson’s Publishing, 2002. Print.

Stewart, Mark Allen. Peterson's How to Write the Perfect Personal Statement . Lawrenceville, NJ: Peterson’s Publishing, 2009. Print.

• Sample Letters

Sample College Letter Of Intent

If you’ve shortlisted your favorite college and looking forward to get the admission, then you need to write college letter of intent . This intent letter describes the reason why you should be given admission and what you like about the college. Sometimes, this letter is also sent by athletic students who have been offered scholarships.

15+ Sample Letter of Intent Template

9+ sample national letter of intent, 7+ letter of intent medical school.

The sample letter should emphasize more on what you can bring to the campus, addressing the letter correctly and make it stand out from other crowd. Check out sample college letter of intent available online to know the format and follow the same to draft one. You may also see letter of intent format .

Download College Letter Of Intent Bundle

College Letter Of Intent For School Teacher

Jessica Miller 123 Education Lane Teachertown, MA, 02120 [email protected] (555) 987-6543 March 11, 2024

Dr. Samuel Harris Pine Grove Elementary School 456 Learning Ave Brighton, MA, 02135

Dear Dr. Harris,

I am writing to express my keen interest in the 5th Grade English teacher position at Pine Grove Elementary School, as advertised on the Massachusetts Department of Education job portal. With a Bachelor’s Degree in English Education from Boston University and a Massachusetts state-certified teaching credential, I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to your school’s tradition of academic excellence and community engagement.

During my student teaching experience at Sunnydale Elementary, I designed and implemented engaging lesson plans that accommodated diverse learning styles and fostered a positive learning environment. My dedication to promoting collaborative classroom activities encouraged students to learn from each other, enhancing their engagement and comprehension of complex literary concepts. Furthermore, my integration of technology and multimedia resources into lesson plans captivated students’ interests and enriched their learning experiences.

I am particularly drawn to Pine Grove Elementary School because of its commitment to fostering a love for reading and critical thinking among students. I admire the school’s innovative literacy programs and its emphasis on creating a supportive community that encourages students’ intellectual and emotional growth. I am eager to contribute my passion for English literature and effective teaching strategies to support Pine Grove’s objectives.

In addition to my academic background, my experience as a volunteer reading tutor for underprivileged children has equipped me with the skills to make a significant impact beyond the traditional classroom setting. I am enthusiastic about the opportunity to contribute to Pine Grove’s after-school reading program, aiming to create an inclusive and dynamic learning environment for all students.

I am confident that my educational background, teaching experience, and dedication to creating a nurturing yet challenging learning environment make me a strong candidate for the 5th Grade English teacher position at Pine Grove Elementary School. I am very excited about the opportunity to meet with you and discuss how I can contribute to your team. Thank you for considering my application. I look forward to the possibility of contributing to the success and vibrancy of Pine Grove Elementary School.

Jessica Miller

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College Letter Of Intent For Scholarship

Alex Johnson 789 Pine Street Anytown, NY, 12345 [email protected] (555) 321-9876 March 11, 2024

Scholarship Selection Committee Dream Big Scholarship Foundation 1234 Education Blvd Scholarstown, NY, 12346

Dear Scholarship Selection Committee,

I am writing to express my earnest intent to apply for the 2024 Dream Big Scholarship offered by the Dream Big Scholarship Foundation. As a prospective freshman at the University of New York, majoring in Environmental Science, I am dedicated to making significant contributions to environmental research and conservation efforts. I believe that through your scholarship, I will have the essential support to pursue my academic and career goals while making a positive impact on our planet.

Throughout my high school career at Greenleaf Academy, I maintained a GPA of 3.9 and actively participated in environmental clubs and community clean-up initiatives, which fostered my passion for environmental science. As the president of the Environmental Club during my senior year, I led a campaign that resulted in the planting of over 500 trees in our community and organized workshops on sustainable living practices for students and residents. These experiences have not only prepared me for the academic challenges that lie ahead but have also deepened my commitment to environmental stewardship.

The Dream Big Scholarship’s mission to support students who are dedicated to making a difference resonates with my personal and academic aspirations. With the financial assistance from your scholarship, I will be able to focus more intently on my studies, engage in research projects, and participate in internships without the overwhelming burden of tuition and expenses. Furthermore, I am eager to contribute to the University of New York’s renowned environmental research community and collaborate with peers and professors on projects that address pressing environmental issues.

In addition to my academic achievements and extracurricular involvement, I have volunteered over 200 hours with local and national environmental organizations, including the Green Earth Initiative and Water Conservation Corps. These experiences have equipped me with practical skills and a broader understanding of environmental challenges, reinforcing my resolve to contribute to environmental solutions through my education and future career.

I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to apply for the Dream Big Scholarship. I am committed to utilizing the resources and knowledge gained through my education to contribute to meaningful environmental conservation efforts. I believe that with your support, I can further my academic achievements and work towards a sustainable future for all.

Thank you for considering my application. I look forward to the opportunity to further discuss my ambitions and how the Dream Big Scholarship can help achieve them. Enclosed, please find my academic transcripts, letters of recommendation, and a detailed account of my extracurricular activities. I am eager for the chance to contribute to our world’s betterment through my passion for environmental science.

Alex Johnson

College Letter Of Intent For Signing Day

Jordan Williams 123 Victory Lane Hometown, GA, 30301 [email protected] (404) 555-1234 March 11, 2024

Coach Michael Thompson Head Football Coach State University 456 College Way University City, GA, 30302

Dear Coach Thompson,

I am writing with great excitement and honor to formally express my commitment to join the State University football team as part of the National Signing Day on April 15, 2024. After thorough consideration of my options and numerous discussions with my family and mentors, I am confident that State University is the best place for me to grow both academically and athletically.

Throughout my high school career at Hometown High School, I have dedicated myself to achieving excellence on the football field and in the classroom. As a starting quarterback for three years, I led our team to two state championships and received All-State honors in my junior and senior years. Academically, I have maintained a GPA of 3.8, demonstrating my commitment to success in all endeavors.

The opportunity to play under your leadership, Coach Thompson, is one I hold in high regard. Your coaching philosophy, the team’s competitive spirit, and the academic support provided at State University align perfectly with my goals. I am eager to contribute to the team’s future successes and to further develop my skills under your guidance and that of your coaching staff.

State University’s reputation for excellence both on the field and in its academic programs has deeply influenced my decision. I am particularly excited about enrolling in the Business Management program, which I believe will provide me with a strong foundation for my future aspirations on and off the field.

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to you, Coach Thompson, for your belief in my abilities and for offering me the opportunity to be a part of the State University family. I also want to thank my high school coaches, teammates, and my family for their unwavering support and guidance throughout my journey.

I am fully committed to upholding the values and standards of State University and the football team, and I look forward to contributing to our collective goals. Please find enclosed my signed National Letter of Intent along with other required documentation to formalize my commitment.

Thank you once again for this incredible opportunity. I am ready to face the challenges ahead and make a significant impact both as a student and as an athlete at State University.

Jordan Williams

College Letter Of Intent For Masters Degree

Elena Rodriguez 254 Maple Street Aspen, CO, 81611 [email protected] (970) 555-0198 March 11, 2024

Graduate Admissions Office University of Advanced Technology 789 Innovation Drive Tech City, CA, 94016

Dear Graduate Admissions Committee,

I am writing to express my enthusiastic application for the Master of Science in Computer Science program at the University of Advanced Technology (UAT) for the Fall 2024 semester. With a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology from Colorado State University and three years of professional experience as a software developer, I am eager to advance my expertise and contribute to the field of computer science through innovative research and technology development.

During my undergraduate studies, I maintained a GPA of 3.7 and actively participated in the Computer Science Club, where I led a team project developing an open-source tool for data visualization that is now used by over 200 students and faculty members. This project not only honed my technical skills but also cultivated my leadership and teamwork abilities.

My professional experience has further solidified my passion for computer science. Working at TechSolutions Inc., I contributed to the development of scalable web applications that improved user experiences for thousands of clients. These experiences exposed me to the challenges of developing user-centric solutions and the importance of continuous learning and innovation in technology.

The Master’s program at UAT stands out to me for its cutting-edge research facilities, distinguished faculty, and a curriculum that emphasizes both theoretical foundations and practical applications of computer science. I am particularly interested in the research being conducted by Professor Jane Smith on artificial intelligence and machine learning. I believe that under her mentorship, I can explore my research interests in developing AI-driven solutions for enhancing cybersecurity.

My goal is to leverage the knowledge and skills gained from the Master’s program at UAT to contribute to the advancement of technology solutions addressing global challenges. I am committed to excellence and innovation, and I am excited about the opportunity to collaborate with like-minded peers and faculty members at UAT.

I have enclosed my resume, transcripts, and recommendation letters for your review. I am looking forward to the opportunity to further discuss how my background, skills, and aspirations align with the goals of the Master of Science in Computer Science program at UAT. Thank you for considering my application. I am eager to contribute to and learn from the esteemed community at the University of Advanced Technology.

Elena Rodriguez

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Letter Of Intent For College

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Letter Of Intent For College Admission

Sample Letter Of Intent For College Admission

Letter of Intent For College Application

How to Write Letter of Intent for College?

Writing a Letter of Intent (LOI) for college involves expressing your interest in a specific academic program or institution. Here’s a guide on how to structure and write an effective Letter of Intent for college:

1 . Salutation:

• Begin with a formal salutation, addressing the recipient (often the admissions committee or department).

2. Introduction:

• Start with a brief introduction stating your name, the program you are applying for, and the purpose of your letter.

3. Personal Information:

• Provide concise personal information, including your academic background, major achievements, and relevant experiences.

4. Express Your Interest:

• Clearly state your interest in the college and the specific program. Explain why you are drawn to this particular institution and how it aligns with your academic and career goals.

5. Academic Background:

• Detail your academic achievements, emphasizing relevant coursework, projects, or research experiences that highlight your preparedness for the chosen program.

6. Extracurricular Activities:

• Discuss any extracurricular activities, leadership roles, or community involvement that showcases your well-rounded personality and commitment to contributing to the college community.

7. Unique Qualities and Skills:

• Highlight unique qualities, skills, or perspectives you bring to the college. Showcase what makes you a valuable and distinctive candidate.

8. Career Goals:

• Clearly outline your short-term and long-term career goals. Explain how the college and the specific program will contribute to your professional development.

9. Fit with the College:

• Demonstrate your understanding of the college’s values, culture, and academic offerings. Explain how you will contribute to and benefit from the college community.

10. Mention Specifics:

• Reference any specific professors, courses, facilities, or opportunities that attracted you to the college. Show that you’ve done your research. Summarize your main points and reiterate your enthusiasm for joining the college. Express gratitude for the opportunity to apply.

11. Formal Closing:

• Close the letter formally with a closing phrase (e.g., “Sincerely” or “Best Regards”) followed by your full name.

Example Of Letter Of Intent For Candidacy

Size: 4.7 KB

College Letter of Intent is a document which is provided by the student to the college. It includes the message that the candidate is the best person. It includes the details of the candidate, and the name of the college with other details. It is available for free and you can download both pdf and word document.You may also see letter of intent graduate school

College Letter Of Intent Format

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Importance of a Letter of Intent

A Letter of Intent (LOI) holds significant importance in various contexts, and its value lies in its ability to convey clear intentions, demonstrate commitment, and establish a positive impression. Here are key aspects highlighting the importance of a Letter of Intent:

• An LOI serves as a formal document expressing a person’s or entity’s serious intention to pursue a specific course of action. Whether in academics, business, or legal matters, it signals a commitment to proceed with further discussions or actions.
• In the context of college admissions, an LOI allows applicants to express their genuine interest in a particular institution and academic program. It provides an opportunity to showcase motivations, career goals, and alignment with the college’s values, contributing to a holistic evaluation of the applicant.
• In business, an LOI is often used in negotiations and transactions. It outlines the preliminary terms, conditions, and expectations of a potential agreement. While not legally binding, it sets the stage for more detailed contracts and helps parties gauge each other’s intentions.
• In real estate, an LOI is commonly used by prospective buyers to signal their interest in purchasing a property. It outlines the proposed terms and conditions, facilitating initial negotiations before formalizing the deal through a purchase agreement.
• In legal contexts, an LOI may be used to express a party’s intent to enter into a sample agreement or contract sample. While not a legally binding document in itself, it can provide a basis for negotiation and clarification of key terms before drafting a comprehensive contract.
• In the business world, LOIs are often utilized in mergers and acquisitions. They outline the broad terms and conditions of a potential deal, allowing parties to assess compatibility before investing time and resources in detailed due diligence.
• For grant applications, an LOI can be a crucial component. It allows applicants to briefly outline their project, its objectives, and its alignment with the grantor’s mission. Successful LOIs often lead to an invitation to submit a full grant proposal.
• In the context of job applications , a letter of intent can be used to express one’s interest in a specific position or company. It provides an opportunity to highlight relevant skills, experiences, and enthusiasm for the role.
• Whether in personal or professional contexts, an LOI helps set expectations. It clarifies intentions, preventing misunderstandings and promoting transparency in relationships and transactions.
• The act of writing an LOI allows individuals or entities to customize and personalize their expressions of intent. It provides a platform for conveying unique motivations, goals, and aspirations, creating a more tailored and impactful communication.

In summary, a Letter of Intent is a versatile and valuable tool that helps establish clear intentions, build understanding between parties, and pave the way for further agreements or actions. Its importance lies in its ability to facilitate communication, express commitment, and streamline processes in various professional and personal spheres.

College Letter Of Intent Template

College Letter of Intent is a document that a candidate has to provide to the college. The letter mentions the qualities of the candidate. The example of the letter is available online. You can download the sample for free and it is available in both word and pdf format. You may also see letters of intent medical school

Letter Of Intent Sample For Student

Size: 4.9 KB

College Letter Of Intent is produced to the college by the candidate and it mention the qualities of the candidate that fits him/her in the college. It is available in numbers for free and you can download and customize as per your choice. It is available in both word and pdf document. You may also see letters of intent to purchase property .

Key Elements to Include in Your Letter of Intent

• Introduction : Start with a clear introduction of yourself or your organization, and state the purpose of the letter. Mention how you became aware of the opportunity, position, or program you’re interested in.
• Statement of Interest : Explicitly express your interest in the position, program, or opportunity, and explain why it appeals to you. Highlight what draws you to it and how it aligns with your goals or values.
• Background and Qualifications : Outline your relevant background, including education, work experience, skills, and achievements that make you a suitable candidate. Be specific about how your experiences prepare you for this opportunity.
• Specific Examples and Achievements : Include specific examples of your work or achievements that demonstrate your skills and qualifications. Use concrete evidence to illustrate your capabilities and how they relate to what you’re applying for.
• Your Goals and How They Align with the Opportunity : Discuss your short-term and long-term goals, and explicitly connect them to the opportunity. Explain how the position, program, or project will help you achieve these goals.
• Knowledge of the Organization or Program : Show that you have researched the organization, institution, or program you are applying to. Mention specific aspects that interest you and how you see yourself contributing.
• Call to Action : Include a polite call to action, such as expressing your desire for a meeting, interview, or further discussion. Make it clear that you’re eager to take the next steps and are available for further engagement.
• Closing and Contact Information : Conclude your sample letter  by thanking the reader for considering your application. Include a professional closing, followed by your full name and contact information, ensuring they can easily reach you for follow-up.

Remember, your letter of intent should be personalized, concise, and clearly structured to effectively communicate your interest and qualifications.

College Letter Of Intent in PDF

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College Letter Of Intent Outline

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What is the LOI of college?

The Letter of Intent (LOI) for college, also known as a College Letter of Intent or College Admission Letter of Intent, is a formal document submitted by a prospective student to express their genuine interest in attending a specific college or university. This simple letter is typically submitted as part of the college application process and is intended to convey the applicant’s enthusiasm, qualifications, and reasons for choosing that particular institution. Here are key elements typically included in a College Letter of Intent:

• Begin with a formal salutation and a brief introduction stating the purpose of the letter.
• Clearly express your interest in attending the college or university. Mention the specific program or major you are interested in.
• Provide a concise overview of your academic background, including your current or most recent educational institution, major, and any notable achievements.
• Articulate why you are drawn to this particular college. Highlight specific features, such as academic programs, faculty, resources, campus culture, or extracurricular opportunities, that align with your educational and personal goals.
• Share any relevant experiences, such as internships, research projects report , or extracurricular activities, that have influenced your decision to pursue education program proposal at this institution.
• Discuss your short-term and long-term career goals and explain how the college’s offerings will contribute to your professional development.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the college’s values and mission. Explain how your values align with those of the institution.
• Express your eagerness to contribute to the college community. Discuss how your unique qualities, experiences, or perspectives will enrich the campus environment.
• Include any additional information that strengthens your application and showcases your qualifications. This could include relevant skills, achievements, or personal qualities.
• Close the letter formally, expressing gratitude for the opportunity to apply. Reiterate your enthusiasm for joining the college.
• Sign off the letter formally with a closing phrase such as “Sincerely” or “Best Regards,” followed by your full name.

What are the 3 purposes of writing a letter of intent?

• Expressing Interest: A letter of intent is written to express genuine interest in a program, job, or opportunity.
• Outlining Qualifications: It outlines the writer’s qualifications, showcasing skills and experiences.
• Requesting Consideration: It formally requests consideration for admission, employment, or participation in a specific venture or program.

1. What is a student letter of intent?

A student letter of intent is a brief, formal document expressing a student’s genuine interest in a specific academic program proposal or institution, outlining academic goals, and showcasing qualifications for admission.

2. What do you write in an intent letter?

In an intent letter, express genuine interest in a program or opportunity, outline relevant qualifications, convey enthusiasm, and articulate specific reasons for choosing or applying to a particular institution or role.

3. How long is a letter of intent?

The length of a letter of intent varies, but it is generally concise, typically ranging from 300 to 600 words. It should be long enough to convey essential information and intentions clearly.

4. Is letter of intent handwritten?

A letter of intent is typically typed and printed for a professional appearance. Handwritten letters may be acceptable in specific situations, but clarity and professionalism are crucial.

5. Who prepares a letter of intent?

A letter of intent is prepared by an individual who wishes to express their genuine interest in a program, job, or opportunity. It is written by the applicant or party involved.

6. Who benefits from a letter of intent?

Both the writer and the recipient benefit from a letter of intent. The writer expresses their interest and qualifications, while the recipient gains insights into the writer’s intentions and suitability.

In conclusion, this College Letter of Intent in pdf reflects my sincere commitment to contributing to and thriving in the academic community at [College/University Name]. I am excited about the prospect of further discussions and am grateful for the opportunity to be considered for admission to [specific program].

If you have any DMCA issues on this post, please contact us!

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How to Write a Letter of Interest for College Admission

By Eric Eng

Writing a letter of interest for college admission can be crucial in boosting your chances of getting accepted into your dream college or program. In this article, we will guide you through crafting a compelling letter showcasing your strengths, accomplishments, and genuine interest in the institution.

Understanding the Purpose of a Letter of Interest

A letter of interest, or a letter of intent or statement of purpose, is a formal document that allows you to express your enthusiasm for a particular college or program. It serves as an opportunity to introduce yourself, provide additional information not found in your application, and articulate why you believe you would be a valuable addition to the institution.

When writing a letter of interest, it is essential to understand its role in the college admission process. Admissions officers receive numerous applications from highly qualified candidates, and a letter of interest can help you stand out from the crowd. It allows you to highlight your unique qualities, experiences, and motivations that may not be evident in other parts of your application, such as your academic achievements and extracurricular activities.

Now, let’s delve deeper into the key elements you should include in your letter to make it impactful and memorable.

The Role of a Letter of Interest in College Admission

As mentioned earlier, a letter of interest plays a crucial role in the college admission process . It allows you to go beyond the facts and figures presented in your application and showcase your personality , passions, and aspirations. Admissions officers are looking for students with impressive academic records and individuals who will contribute to the campus community and make a positive impact.

By writing a well-crafted letter of interest, you can demonstrate your genuine interest in the college or program and show that you have taken the time to research and understand what makes it unique. This can help you stand out from other applicants with similar qualifications but lack the personal touch that a letter of interest provides.

Furthermore, a letter of interest allows you to address any potential weaknesses or gaps in your application. If certain aspects you feel need further explanation or clarification, this is your chance to provide that information. It shows your commitment to transparency and willingness to take responsibility for your academic journey.

Key Elements to Include in Your Letter

Now that you understand the importance of a letter of interest let’s explore the key elements that you should include to make your letter impactful and memorable:

• Introduction: Start your letter by addressing the appropriate person or committee, such as the admissions director. State your intention clearly and express your excitement about the opportunity to apply to their institution or program. This sets the tone for the rest of the letter and captures the reader’s attention.
• Personal Background: Provide a brief overview of your educational background, highlighting any relevant coursework, research projects, or honors you have received. Discuss why you are interested in pursuing this particular field of study or program. Share personal anecdotes or experiences that have shaped your passion and commitment to the subject.
• Academic and Career Goals: Outline your long-term educational and career goals and demonstrate how the college or program aligns with those objectives. Emphasize the unique resources, faculty, or opportunities the institution provides that will help you achieve your goals. Discuss any specific research or internship opportunities you are excited about and how they will contribute to your growth and development.
• Extracurricular Involvement: Discuss your involvement in extracurricular activities, clubs, or community service that demonstrate your leadership skills, passion for learning, and commitment to making a positive impact. Highlight any initiatives or projects you have undertaken and how they have shaped your character and values. Show how these experiences have prepared you for the challenges and opportunities in college.
• Why You Are a Good Fit: Show that you have researched the college or program thoroughly. Identify specific aspects that attract you to the institution, such as courses, faculty, research opportunities, or campus culture. Explain how these align with your interests and aspirations. Discuss any connections or conversations with current students, alumni, or faculty members that have solidified your decision to apply.
• Conclusion: Summarize your key points and reiterate your enthusiasm for being considered for admission. Express your gratitude for the opportunity to submit the letter and invite further communication or an interview. Leave a lasting impression by sending your letter positively and confidently, showcasing your eagerness to contribute to the college or program.

Remember, a letter of interest is your chance to showcase your personality, passions, and aspirations. Use it as a platform to tell your unique story and convince the admissions officers why you would be a valuable addition to their institution. Good luck!

Preparing to Write Your Letter of Interest

Before writing your letter of interest, it’s essential to thoroughly research the college or program. Consider the following steps:

Researching the College and Program

When choosing the right college or program, gathering as much information as possible is crucial. Start by visiting the college’s official website and explore the different departments, majors, and resources available. Take note of professors, courses, and programs that align with your interests and career goals. Dive deep into the website, clicking through various pages to uncover hidden gems of information.

While at it, don’t forget to familiarize yourself with the institution’s mission, values, and any notable achievements or initiatives. This will help you understand the college’s overall vision and give you valuable insights to include in your letter of interest. Your knowledge of the college’s accomplishments will demonstrate your genuine interest and dedication.

Identifying Your Strengths and Achievements

Reflecting on your academic and extracurricular experiences is essential in crafting an impactful letter of interest. Take the time to identify your strengths and achievements relevant to the college or program you are applying to. Consider your academic performance, research projects, internships, leadership roles, community service, and other accomplishments showcasing your skills and passion.

Think about the challenges you have overcome and the lessons you have learned. Highlighting these experiences will demonstrate your resilience and show the admissions committee how you can contribute to the college or program. Remember, it’s not just about listing your achievements but also explaining how they have shaped you as an individual.

Moreover, don’t shy away from discussing your personal growth and development. Colleges and programs are interested in what you have achieved and how you have grown as a person. Share unique challenges that have pushed you to become a better version of yourself. Doing so will provide a glimpse into your character and demonstrate your ability to overcome obstacles.

Lastly, connect your strengths and achievements with the college or program you are applying to. Please explain how your experiences align with their values and mission. This will show the admissions committee that you have done your homework and are genuinely interested in joining their community.

Structuring Your Letter of Interest

The structure of your letter of interest should be clear, concise, and well-organized. Follow these guidelines to ensure your letter is engaging and easy to read:

Starting with a Strong Introduction

Begin your letter with a captivating introduction immediately grabs the reader’s attention. Demonstrate your enthusiasm for the college or program and briefly overview what makes you a compelling candidate.

For example, you can mention how you have always been passionate about pursuing a career in computer science and how the college’s renowned computer science program aligns perfectly with your goals. You can also highlight any relevant experiences or achievements showcasing your field dedication and skills.

Crafting the Body of Your Letter

The body of your letter should elaborate on the critical elements mentioned earlier. Use paragraphs to address each piece individually, providing specific examples and personal anecdotes that support your claims. It’s essential to balance presenting your qualifications and expressing your genuine interest.

One way to achieve this is by discussing any relevant coursework or projects you have completed that demonstrate your knowledge and proficiency in the subject area. You can also discuss any extracurricular activities or internships that have allowed you to apply your skills in real-world scenarios.

Additionally, you can mention any research or publications you have been involved in, showcasing your ability to contribute to the academic community. By providing concrete examples, you will demonstrate your qualifications and make your letter more engaging and memorable.

Concluding Your Letter Effectively

End your letter on a solid note by summarizing your main points and reiterating your enthusiasm for the college or program. Invite the reader to contact you for further discussion or an interview and express gratitude for their time and consideration.

Furthermore, you can mention any aspects of the college or program that excite you and align with your interests and goals. This will show that you have researched and are genuinely interested in joining their community.

Finally, you can mention any additional skills or qualities you possess, such as leadership abilities or a strong work ethic, that would make you a valuable addition to the college or program. By ending your letter with a solid and positive impression, you increase your chances of standing out among other applicants.

Writing Tips for a Successful Letter of Interest

When writing your letter of interest, keep the following tips in mind to ensure its success:

Writing a letter of interest can be crucial in achieving your goals. A well-crafted letter can make a lasting impression, whether you are applying for a job, seeking admission to a college or program, or expressing interest in a particular opportunity. To help you create a compelling letter, here are some valuable tips:

Maintaining a Professional Tone

Maintaining a professional tone is one of the most important aspects of a letter of interest. While showcasing your personality and passion is essential, it is equally important to strike the right balance and present yourself as a competent and well-qualified candidate. Avoid using slang, colloquial language, or overly casual expressions that may undermine your professionalism. Instead, use proper grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary to convey your thoughts effectively.

Remember, the purpose of your letter is to impress the recipient with your skills, qualifications, and dedication. Maintaining a professional tone demonstrates your ability to communicate effectively and your commitment to the opportunity at hand.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

When crafting your letter of interest, paying attention to detail and avoiding common mistakes that may diminish its impact is crucial. Proofread your letter thoroughly to eliminate grammatical or spelling errors that could undermine your credibility. A well-polished letter not only reflects your attention to detail but also shows your commitment to excellence.

Furthermore, avoiding exaggerating your accomplishments or making unsubstantiated claims is essential. While it is natural to highlight your strengths and achievements, providing evidence and examples to support your claims is equally crucial. By doing so, you establish credibility and build trust with the reader.

Additionally, address the letter to the correct person or committee. Research the recipient’s name and title to ensure your letter reaches the right hands. Furthermore, follow any specific guidelines the college or program provides, such as word count limits or formatting requirements. Adhering to these guidelines demonstrates your ability to follow instructions and attention to detail.

Writing a letter of interest can be daunting, but by following these tips, you can create a compelling and successful letter that captures the reader’s attention. Remember to showcase your unique qualities, highlight relevant experiences, and express genuine interest in the opportunity. Good luck!

Polishing and Proofreading Your Letter of Interest

Before submitting your letter, take the time to polish and proofread it to ensure clarity and coherence:

Reviewing Your Letter for Clarity and Coherence

Read your letter aloud or ask someone else to review it to ensure your ideas flow smoothly and coherently. Check if your points are logically connected and if the overall structure of the letter is clear and easy to follow.

Ensuring Correct Grammar and Spelling

Use grammar and spell-check tools to catch any mistakes, but be cautious as they may not detect all errors. Double-check proper names, dates, and other factual information to ensure accuracy. Reading your letter backward can help you spot spelling errors you may have missed.

By following these steps and guidelines, you can effectively write a letter of interest for college admission that showcases your unique qualities, aspirations, and genuine interest in the institution. Remember, your letter of interest is an opportunity to make a lasting impression on the admissions committee, so invest the time and effort needed to craft a compelling and well-written letter.

If you want to discuss the matter to a greater extent or inquire about college admissions, look no further! Our experts here at AdmissionSight can help you! Here at AdmissionSight, we have over a decade’s worth of experience guiding students through the competitive admissions process to get accepted to the top universities in the world. Feel free to set up an appointment today to book your initial consultation .

Want to assess your chances of admission? Take our FREE chances calculator today!

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What Is a Letter of Intent for College?

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• Download PDF Download PDF

How to Write a Letter of Intent for College?

Letter of intent for college template.

• Letter of Intent Template

A Letter of Intent for College is a typed or handwritten statement that describes the individual's qualifications, skills, accomplishments, and aspirations within a specific area of study and adds more weight to their application to the educational institution of their choice.

You can download a Letter of Intent for College template through the link below .

Being one of the main documents that determine the future of the applicant, a proper College Letter of Intent must point out the reasons why the person must be chosen as a prospective student and describe in detail what they have managed to achieve already. If the applicant can accurately explain why they chose this college and not their competitors and record their skills and qualifications that make them stand out from other candidates with similar stories and goals, it will not only strengthen their application but will also be a crucial factor when deciding their future academic and professional fate.

Follow these steps to compose a Letter of Intent for college admission:

• Learn more about the college or a particular program you are applying for. Once you are sure this educational course is the right fit for your expertise and objectives, you can draft a Letter of Intent .
• Find out the type and title of the document you need to prepare. Although a Letter of Intent is an umbrella term that covers both personal essays and statements of qualifications, you might be asked to name your document differently.
• Write the introduction. A sample Letter of Intent for college admission should always include the salutation, name, and title of the recipient of the letter (the college, the department, or a certain individual that handles the admission procedures), and the name of the applicant.
• Start the main part of the document by indicating your desire to enroll in college.
• Describe your qualifications and academic achievements so far - list schools and other institutions you have attended, mention your good grades, and enter the names of certificates that confirm your knowledge of certain disciplines if you plan to attach them to your application.
• Outline the skills and qualifications you possess and tell the recipient of the letter how do you want to apply them during your studies. Remain genuine and do not undersell yourself - you need to be sure of your knowledge and experience.
• Add a personal touch to the letter - you can share a personal story that motivated you to choose a particular profession or sparked your interest in the field of knowledge you are currently devoted to.
• Include a paragraph to share your future goals in the chosen field of study. Highlight your dedication to the college you want to attend and focus on your academic and professional commitments.
• Thank the addressee for their attention and sign the letter. You should add your contact details to stay in touch with the college and its representatives.

Check out these related letter templates:

• College Acceptance Letter ;
• College Appeal Letter ;
• College Rejection Letter .

Download Letter of Intent for College Template

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How to Write a Letter of Intent for College

How to write a letter of intent: definition.

A letter of intent (also known as a cover letter or letter of interest) is a letter written to show your strength and qualifications for a certain position. A letter of intent is simply a letter that expresses your intention to do an activity, whether it is taking out a business loan, applying for a scholarship, or a job purpose. The reader of the letter will make an opinion based on your use of vocabulary to make your point and sell yourself. In some colleges and universities, a letter of intent is an important part of the admission process and may be the first thing the committee members read.

How to Make a Letter of Intent: What’s So Special

Picking a desirable program and university is a hard task. Many students attentively learn the program, talk with students, visit university open day and walk through the campus. If you are a person who needs to be entirely confident in taking a decision, such actions are very important. You need to be sure that the university will be worth the money and time. When you eventually find the best one, writing a letter of intent will be the right decision. Such letters are an additional point for getting you on the course. A letter of interest gives you a possibility to demonstrate that you have already prepared for college life and that the program ideally fits your future goals.

Why is writing a letter of intent a good idea? A resume reports your academic experience and professional skills. It tells the reader what, when, and where. The letter of intent gives the answer to why you think that your experience and skills are relevant to the chosen college program. It spreads the light on your dedication to the chosen specialization, what motives you have to join the rows of students, and how the program meets your future life perspective.

In this guide we will tell you how to write a letter of intent for university. If you need to know how to write a letter of interest for a job, we recommend you to read another guide on our website. Entrust your future to us as we offer a stellar service to ‘ write my admission essay ,’ helping you secure a spot in your dream college.

How to Start a Letter of Intent

If you want to write a good letter of intent, you will need to prepare for writing it. This will give you enough background for creating the first draft.

1. Read the requirements attentively.

Each academic institution has requirements for the admission process. Define the deadline, the list of required documents, and questions that should be addressed in the letter. If you can’t find details about the letter of intent, you may find information that may be helpful. It is important to note that some colleges don’t recommend to send letters that are not in the list of required documents.

2. Analyze the college program.

Collect as much information about the college as you can. Find out the mission and goals of the college. Look through the college website and browse the internet for additional information. For example, you may find a list of interesting subjects that will be in the desired undergraduate program. Think about what qualities a student should possess to deserve a place in this particular college.

3. Compose a list of qualities and skills you have obtained to date.

Think what experience will be helpful during your college life. The admission committee is searching for motivated and realistic students who will easily fit the college community. Think what arguments will convince the reader to get you into the program. Why do you wish to enroll in this particular program? What research have you already done? Why do you think that the program is the best match for you? How does the program relate to your career goals?

4. Look through available examples of the letters of intent.

To inspire yourself for writing, review sample letters of intent available on the internet. Think about how you can incorporate powerful phrases in your own letter. Make a list of words and phrases that you can use while writing.

How to Format a Letter of Intent: Writing the First Draft

The letter of intent has a typical structure: salutation, introduction, main body, closing, and signature. Currently, most colleges require electronic format for documents. So, there is no need to write a header as it was required in mail letters.

1. Write the salutation.

The best way to establish the first contact is addressing the letter personally. You can contact the admission office if you wish to know to whom you need to address the letter. It will look like this: “Dear Ms. White”. If for some reason you are unable to find out the person’s name, you can write “Dear Admission Committee Member” in the salutation.

2. Start the letter by introducing yourself.

Briefly tell why you are writing this letter and tell what kind of academic activity you do now. Indicate what program/internship/grant program/etc. you wish to join. Grab the reader’s attention with interesting details, as the admission committee will look through hundreds of similar letters and admission forms. Be specific and get to the essence of the letter at the very beginning. Use the following phrases:

• I am excited to submit this letter of intent for the [program] …
• Please find enclosed my academic resume …
• I am a current student in …
• I would like to bring to your kind attention …

3. Write the body paragraph(s).

Depending on the purpose of your letter of intent, you need to choose the right points to describe in your letter. In this section you need to persuade the committee member that you have the right skills and knowledge for the desired program. Typically, there are from two to four body paragraphs.

You may be successful in certain subjects, participate in school programs, attend extracurricular activities, etc. What have you learned? Mention only the experience and skills relevant to the program. Your basketball successes will help you get an athletic scholarship, but it won’t help if you are applying for a genetics major.

Mention how you work in a group of students and whether you have work experience. Also, it is worth mentioning why the program is worth your attention. Why do you love this particular program? Do you like their structured program or future opportunities? For example, if you are writing a letter of intent for internship, you will need to focus on your experience connected with the company’s activities and list related research you have already conducted in this sphere.

Useful phrases for this paragraph:

• I hope someday my enthusiasm and knowledge can contribute to …
• I cannot think a better way of gaining knowledge …
• While I believe that my experience I have obtained during …

4. Write the closing.

Write kind words thanking the reader for their time and attention to your letter. You can ask the reader for a specific action: request an interview or to contact you for more information. For example: “I would appreciate if you would contact me for additional details at 123-456-456 or via email at [email protected].” Also, you may need to mention the list of the documents attached.

After the last sentence, write the closing:

– Regards, – Thomas Red – Sincerely, – Virginia Blue

Write contact details in your signature if you haven’t mentioned it above.

How to End a Letter of Intent: Finalizing the Letter of Intent

Proofread the letter.

Print the first draft of the letter and make sure that it corresponds with all the requirements. The letter should have a strong introduction, clear structure, and polite closing. Be sure that your letter of intent reads easily, clearly, and every sentence makes sense. Find out whether you have applied the right format and the text is mistake free. Keep in mind that even one spelling mistake may ruin even the most powerful letter of intent for scholarship.

Send the letter.

Make sure that you have chosen the right format of the document. Some letters should be saved in the .pdf or .doc formats and attached to the list of documents, while others should be sent via email.

Letter of Intent Sample

In the following sample you can see how a finished letter should look. Look how the author has organized the paragraphs and presented key information. Pay attention to the tips highlighted in the picture. Our author has commented on the letter and pointed out necessary information that you should pay attention to. This sample should give you a few ideas for a good start.

Click on the picture to view it in the full size.

Tips How to Write a Letter of Intent for College

• The letter should be brief and highly concentrated with information. You need to put all necessary points about yourself within one page.
• Show enthusiasm. The aim of this letter is to persuade the reader that you are the ideal candidate for the college program. Use powerful words: thrilled, excited, proud, looking forward, etc.
• The letter of intent should be written using a formal tone. Make sure that the letter looks professional: clear structure, signature, and an absence of mistakes.
• Add any information about your professional skills that you have obtained from extracurricular activities, volunteering, part-time jobs, courses, etc.
• If you are writing a letter of intent for a grant, make sure that you have spelled the name of the organization correctly.
• Don’t repeat the information from your CV. A letter of intent is a great way to clarify information about your candidacy and explain some gaps or weaknesses.
• Point out that the program is challenging, and provide an example of how you can successfully overcome challenges in real life.
• Leave enough time for writing. It may happen that you won’t be able to create a good letter of intent on the first try.
• Don’t neglect the requirements. Sometimes, a letter of intent may work against you. Always make sure that your letter corresponds to the college’s requirements before sending.
• Don’t use any specific words or jargon just to show your knowledge. Try to do a letter that is easy to read and understand.
• Make the letter personal. This means that you need to consider the peculiarities of the chosen program. Avoid generalizations. If you are writing a letter of intent for a position, you need to show how your skills will help the company.

How to Write a Letter of Intent for a Grant

Students who have no money to pay for the program or need extra funds for conducting a particular research can apply to corporations and organizations that provide grants. The structure and principles that we have disclosed earlier can be easily applied for the letter of intent for funding. However, keep in mind the following:

• Follow the requirements and attach all required documents to the letter.
• The letter should be written with utmost sincerity.
• Describe the situation you have faced and briefly state what you need to do (e.g. you want to enroll certain program, but your family has no money). Tell a personal story.
• Tell what objectives you want to meet. If your future career or activity will be connected with human lives or with the company’s activity, don’t forget to mention it.
• Explain how you will report the outcome (this is especially needed for certain researches and projects).
• Point out the deadline (e.g. you need to pay for a paper college program by a certain date).
• Mention the exact number of costs you need and provide supporting evidence. If you are asking for funding for your project, you may need to provide a realistic and relevant budget.
• If the grant doesn’t cover the full sum of money, you need to explain other financial sources that you are going to use. Usually, companies can fund only a part of the needed money.
• Be brief and get to the point quickly. People that give money usually have no time for reading long stories.

Remember, a successful letter of intent may become the key to the desired program, internship, or position. If you will write the letter keeping all of our steps and tips in mind, we believe that you will easily write a letter of intent for school, scholarship, business, and more. Good luck!

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WTO / Applications / Free College Admission Application Letter Templates

Free College Admission Application Letter Templates

A college admissions application letter is a formal letter that an aspiring student submits to a college along with other pertinent documents to get admission into that college.

Given that the college receives numerous applications, your letter is the perfect opportunity to explain what makes you stand out from other applicants. The application letter works as a tool to enhance your admissions process and speed up your chances of joining your dream institution. Your letter should capture important and specific details about why you are a perfect fit for the particular school.

It should outline the strengths you possess both as a young person and as a student. This means highlighting notable accomplishments, including achievements in a co-curricular activity, if you think you could benefit the school from that perspective. Practically, some schools can pick you because they believe you can earn them immense recognition due to your athletic prowess.

Your letter is significant as it solidifies your entire admissions application. It can boost your chance of securing a place at your dream college. This is because the personal information you provide, such as former leadership positions and exceptional academic excellence, can potentially portray you as a stronger applicant as compared to other applicants.

Free Templates

Writing a College Admission Application Letter

With the huge number of admissions applications your dream college receives, your letter should be well-written and capture the most unique qualities that could give you an edge over other applicants.

The following is the ultimate guide for writing a professional letter, assuming you have already taken your time to conduct enough research:

Write down your personal information

Identify yourself at the beginning of your admissions letter. This means writing down your full name and address. Use the conventionally accepted address format, whereby you indicate the street address, state, city, and zip code. This way, the admissions officers reading your letter will have an idea of who you are as they proceed to read your letter.

Include the date

After writing your name and address, indicate the date of sending the letter. Use a professional format, such as “November 15, 20xx.” Keep in mind that using a casual format could compromise the professionalism of your letter.

Write details of the college

Address the letter by using the standard, formal format as shown below. Remember to address the admission officer as discovered earlier during your research.

Name of admission officer, Name of college Street address City, state, zip code

Include a salutation

The admissions application letter is a formal correspondence, which means you must address the reader formally and try to avoid adding some sort of language such as To whom it may concern , Hi, Hello, or Good Morning. The best approach is to use the full name of the admission officer. If you do not know the name of the officer assigned to your region, conduct some research.

Dear Mr. White,

State your intent for applying to the school

State the reason for writing the letter and express your genuine interest in the program you are applying for. Indicate the program you would like to pursue and explain why you want to study at that institution. Think about the school’s unique qualities that set it apart from other colleges.

Give reasons why you are applying to their college

Now this is the opportunity to offer a personalised explanation about why you want to join their college. In one or two paragraphs, explain how this institution can contribute to driving your career goals and dreams forward. Be sure to relate how the distinctive strengths of the college could help shape your future. For instance, if you are a football player and the institution runs a nationally strong football team, let this be one of your major points.

Write a conclusion

When it comes to finalizing the letter, express your interest without getting too demanding or needy and conclude it with a positive tone. Inform the administration that you have submitted all required documents and that you are available to provide any other additional information or clarifications. Conclude by thanking the admission officers for sparing time to review your application and expressing your keenness to receive a positive response.

Include a sign-off

Sign your letter with a formal sign-off and add your full name.

College Admission Application Letter Template

[Your Name]

[Your Address]

[City, State, Zip Code]

[Your Email Address]

[Your Phone Number]

[Admissions Office]

[College or University Name]

[College or University Address]

Dear Admissions Committee,

I am honored to submit my application for the [specific program or degree] at [College or University Name] for the upcoming [semester or year]. My high school journey has been characterized by a commitment to academic excellence, a passion for [relevant academic field or extracurricular activity], and a dedication to personal growth and development. It is with great anticipation that I seek to bring my enthusiasm and dedication to an institution that champions [broad values or principles, such as academic integrity, innovation, or community].

During my time at [Your High School Name], I have engaged deeply with [specific subjects or activities], which has not only enriched my understanding but also sharpened my desire to explore these areas further in a collegiate setting. My academic achievements include maintaining a GPA of [Your GPA] while actively participating in [extracurricular activities or clubs], highlighting my ability to balance rigorous coursework with extracurricular commitments.

My involvement in [specific projects or community service] has taught me [key lessons or skills], reinforcing my belief in the importance of [value or principle relevant to the college’s ethos]. These experiences have shaped my worldview and fueled my ambition to contribute to a vibrant academic community.

Enclosed with this letter, you will find my application form , high school transcripts, [any other required documents], and letters of recommendation. I am prepared to provide any further information needed to support my application.

As I envision my future at [College or University Name], I am excited about the prospect of joining a community that embraces [aspect of the college’s mission or values]. I am eager to engage with the diverse and dynamic student body, participate in [specific programs or activities offered by the college], and contribute to the campus community through my passion for [your field of interest or a particular activity].

Thank you for considering my application. I am enthusiastic about the opportunity to learn, grow, and contribute to the esteemed community at [College or University Name]. I look forward to the possibility of discussing my application with you further.

Sample College Application Letter

I am writing to express my enthusiastic application for admission to the Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science program at Dream University for the Fall semester of 20XX. My passion for environmental stewardship, combined with my academic achievements and community involvement, has prepared me for the rigorous and rewarding path that Dream University offers.

Throughout my high school career at Green Valley High, I have maintained a cumulative GPA of 3.8, demonstrating my commitment to academic excellence. My coursework in biology, chemistry, and environmental studies has not only strengthened my scientific foundation but has also ignited my interest in sustainable environmental solutions. I was honored to receive the Green Innovator Award in my junior year for leading a community project that successfully implemented a local recycling program, reducing waste by 30% in its first year.

In addition to my academic pursuits, I have actively participated in the Environmental Club, serving as its president in my senior year. Under my leadership, we launched a school-wide initiative to reduce energy consumption, which included installing energy-efficient lighting and promoting a carpooling system among students and faculty. These experiences have taught me the importance of leadership, teamwork, and community engagement in addressing environmental challenges.

Dream University’s reputation for excellence in environmental science, coupled with its commitment to sustainability, aligns perfectly with my academic interests and career aspirations. The opportunity to work with faculty members who are at the forefront of environmental research and to have access to state-of-the-art facilities is incredibly exciting to me. I am particularly drawn to the hands-on research opportunities and internships that Dream University offers, which I believe are essential for applying theoretical knowledge to real-world environmental issues.

Enclosed with this letter, you will find my application form, high school transcripts, SAT scores, letters of recommendation, and a personal essay that further details my passion for environmental science. I am confident that my background and aspirations make me a well-suited candidate for the Environmental Science program at Dream University.

Thank you for considering my application. I am eager to contribute to and learn from the vibrant academic community at Dream University. I look forward to the opportunity to further discuss my application and how I can contribute to the university’s mission of fostering environmental innovation and sustainability.

Elena Rodriguez

Key Takeaways

The application letter for admission to the Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science program effectively presents the candidate’s qualifications and enthusiasm for the university. Here’s why it’s an effective sample:

Personalized Introduction: The applicant addresses the admissions committee directly, establishing a personal connection and demonstrating genuine interest in the program.

Academic and Extracurricular Achievements: The letter highlights the candidate’s strong academic record and relevant coursework, showcasing their preparedness for the program. Their leadership roles and community involvement in environmental initiatives demonstrate a well-rounded skill set beyond academics.

Alignment with University Values: The applicant thoroughly researched the university’s program and emphasizes how its reputation and values resonate with their academic interests and career goals. This alignment with the university’s mission enhances the candidate’s suitability for admission.

Supporting Documentation: Mentioning the inclusion of required documents with the letter shows the candidate’s organization and attention to detail, providing a complete application package.

Enthusiastic Conclusion: The letter closes with a strong expression of gratitude and eagerness to contribute to the university’s academic community, leaving a positive impression on the admissions committee.

Overall, this application letter effectively communicates the candidate’s qualifications, passion for environmental science, and suitability for the program, making it a strong sample for aspiring applicants.

Admission Application Letter Writing Tips

Given the high level of competition for limited slots, you can increase your chances of joining the college by writing an outstanding letter. From conducting research to ensuring timely submission of the letter, here are key tips to help write an excellent letter:

Research and self-reflect

Visit the college’s website and try to find some of the qualities they prefer in students. Also, you can talk to someone who has attended the school before you. Using the information you gain from your research, tailor your letter in a way that shows that the school’s mission and vision statement correlate with you as a character and as a future professional.  

Emphasize your uniqueness

The uniqueness of students is a key factor, so you should try to mention your abilities and skills that make you the most suitable applicant for the college. For instance, you may want to explain how you are an exceptional player if that means something to the particular college you are writing to.

Be concise and to the point

Colleges receive numerous applications and spend a lot of time going through them. In this context, avoid writing an unnecessarily long letter. Instead, make it brief and to the point. One way to maintain the acceptable and recommended length is to only write the information you think is essential. Also, avoid repeating details that are already covered in your documents.

Be specific

Colleges love to pick students who write to them with genuine intentions. For this reason, let the administration know that you believe it is only their college that can offer the best quality education and college life that you want to explore. Think about the specific reason that built your interest in the college and capitalize on it. This could be anything, from nationwide recognition in a game that you play to an excellent ranking for your program of interest.

Make sure to go through your admissions application letter several times to correct any grammatical and spelling mistakes. Ensure that your letter has good readability so that the reader can see your professionalism and attention to detail. If it helps, have a friend go through your letter to see what they feel about it. While polishing your letter, keep in mind that submitting a letter containing careless mistakes could ruin your chance of securing a life-changing opportunity.

Submit the letter before the deadline

Colleges tend to be strict on timeliness to ensure the smooth flow of their selection procedures. Many colleges do not even consider going through admissions applications sent in late. In this context, be sure to follow up on the dates announced by your preferred institution to ensure that your letter reaches them before time runs out.

Final Words

A well-written admissions application letter can increase your chances of joining the institution of your dreams. Remember that a good writing process starts with adequate research. When writing the letter, be keen to capture how the school’s culture, mission, vision, and strengths relate well with your qualities and strengths as a student. Write about your achievements in the community and your former schools. Always remember to keep it professional, concise, and one page long. Consider using a customizable template to make sure you have included all the essential information in your application letter. 

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Letter of Intent for College Application

Download this Letter of Intent for College Application Design in Word, Google Docs, PDF, Apple Pages, Outlook Format. Easily Editable, Printable, Downloadable.

Get to draft a formal and effective letter to help you convey your intent to apply for a degree or program at a college or university. Download this ready-made letter of intent template for free to help you with that. The file is easy to use, just add the necessary details.

LETTER OF INTENT FOR COLLEGE APPLICATION

Dear [RECIPIENT NAME]

First of all, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to you for giving me the opportunity to apply to [INSTITUTION NAME]. I am truly honored and, at the same time, very excited because being a student of your university has always been my dream. I would like to express my intention of applying for [DEGREE/DIPLOMA] program. I am truly passionate about the mentioned field of study and I believe that the teachers at [INSTITUTION NAME] can provide me with the quality of education that I aspire for. 

The principal reason why I want to enroll in your university is [REASON]. Furthermore, I have received various recognition and achievements which makes me a suitable candidate for [INSTITUTION NAME].

I truly hope that you would consider my application and if you have any questions about me and my credentials, you can reach me through this number [CONTACT NUMBER]. 

[YOUR SIGNATURE]

[YOUR NAME]

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Deferred or Waitlisted? How to Write a Letter of Continued Interest

What’s covered:, what is a letter of continued interest, what do colleges want to know about students who have been waitlisted or deferred.

• A General Outline For a Letter of Continued Interest

Example of a Strong Letter of Continued Interest

• What Are Your Chances of Acceptance If You’re Deferred or Waitlisted?

For students who are waitlisted or deferred from a top-choice college, the application process can seem frustrating or even discouraging. If you’ve received a letter placing you on the waitlist or deferring your early admissions application, you are probably feeling some combination of disappointment and impatience.

You now have to wait even longer to find out if you’ve gotten into the school of your dreams. And worse still, the odds of being accepted off the waitlist are even slimmer than the regular acceptance rate. While you may be feeling powerless, rest assured that there is something you can do during the interim to improve your chances of being accepted.

Writing a letter of continued interest is a smart thing to do if you’ve been waitlisted or deferred. In this post, we’ll explain what one of these letters entails, how you should go about writing one, and even include an example to inspire your writing. 

If you’ve been waitlisted or deferred, this generally indicates a few things about you as an applicant. First, the good news—the college thinks you’re worth a shot. They believe that you might be a strong candidate. Of course, this doesn’t come without a caveat. Generally, if you’re on the waitlist, the admissions committee is not entirely convinced that you’re going to be a positive contribution to the incoming class. While they recognize your potential, they have more qualified or compelling candidates, and until they hear back from them, they cannot guarantee that they have a place for you.

A letter of continued interest is exactly what it sounds like. It lets the college know that you are still interested in attending, even if you have to wait longer to find out. It also updates the college of any achievements you’ve accomplished since your original application and hopefully convinces them that you will indeed be a positive contributor to the freshman class.

In general, there are two pieces of information that can help to tip the scale in your favor. Think of it this way: colleges want to fill their freshman class with highly qualified, successful students. To do this, they need to cast a net that’s both wide enough to fill the class, yet fine enough to select only the students who will be truly successful. It’s a careful balance.

So, these colleges generally want to know two things about you. First, are you capable of succeeding at the school in question, and second, will you attend if you are offered a spot?

What To Include In a Letter of Continued Interest

Your letter of continued interest should answer these two questions in a way that is affable and genuine. It should also express gratitude for being offered a place on the waitlist or a deferred decision, because this serves as evidence of positive personality traits, like perseverance and the ability to rise above adversity.

You want to convey to the college that you haven’t been sitting around moping over the fact that you weren’t immediately accepted; if anything, you are even more motivated. Tell the school about recent accomplishments like how you worked your AP Physics grade up to an A+ in the third quarter or how you placed first at the state DECA competition in February.

Another good thing to include is a reiteration of why you are still interested in the school. Maybe you visited the campus over winter break and fell in love with the humanities library with original manuscripts from acclaimed writers. If the school has been in the news recently for a scientific breakthrough that excites you, tell them about how eager you are to work with the faculty to further that research.

What NOT To Include In a Letter of Continued Interest

We get it; you’re probably feeling frustrated and disappointed. Maybe you feel inadequate or powerless. Talking to friends and family, venting to your peers, or taking it out on the athletic field are all great ways to express these totally valid emotions.

The letter of continued interest is not the place for these feelings, though. Keep your focus on the positives and don’t let any of those negative feelings show through in your letter.

Also avoid talking about other schools you have been accepted to. Harvard won’t think any better of you if you tout over them you earned a spot at Yale. The focus for this letter should be on the school you are addressing, that’s it. Yes you might have other options at your disposal, but you need to convince the college of your undying interest, so don’t mention any other colleges.

A General Outline For a Letter of Continued Interest 

Introduction.

In your introduction you should thank the admissions committee for reviewing your application and let them know that you are still interested in attending. Remember to formally address the letter to the admissions committee, or even better, if you know the recruiter for your school or region address your letter to them. 

Be warm, cordial, and respectful in your introduction—don’t start by berating the admissions committee for rejecting you. While you can mention your disappointment, make sure you counter that with more positive emotions to keep the letter forward-thinking and hopeful.

Updates on Accomplishments

Here, you’ll provide information about your accomplishments since you submitted your original application. Do not repeat accomplishments or any information already on your application—the admissions committee already has this information and if you submit it again, it will look like you haven’t achieved anything since. Limit your updates to 2-3 topics and be sure to explain briefly what the update is, what level of accomplishment it illustrates, and how it has contributed to your overall character/development.

When considering what you want to update the admissions committee on, try and pick things that relate to your overall application theme. If you wrote about your interest in politics in your essays, tell the school how you recently won a Model UN competition and, as a result, got to visit the UN Headquarters in New York where you got to envision yourself as a diplomat, negotiating treaties on that floor.

Your accomplishments don’t have to be purely academic or extracurricular either. Maybe you lost a family member to cancer and since then you have clarity in pursuing oncology. You could also share an independent project you’ve taken up or a new skill you’ve taught yourself in the past few months.

Personal Element

Just as your college essay needs to be personal, so does your letter of continued interest. After you’ve demonstrated your recent accomplishments, make sure to include some details that humanize you and set you apart from the rest of the waitlist pool. Think about it this way: colleges receive hundreds of these letters, how can you make yours memorable?

Infuse your personality into the letter, whether that be through humor or a personal story that shows qualities like perseverance or curiosity. 

Humble Closing

At the end of your letter, you want to reiterate your desire to attend the school and your gratitude to the admissions committee for their time and for taking a chance on you. Just as with the opening, you want to end respectfully and positively. 

Dear College of My Dreams, (obviously you would put the actual college name here)

I would like to sincerely thank the College of My Dreams Admissions Committee for taking the time to look through my application amongst the thousands of applicants and offering me an opportunity to be on the waitlist. College of My Dreams is still my dream school, and if accepted off the waitlist, I would happily attend. I would like to take this opportunity to display my continued interest in CMD and update the Admissions Committee on some of my accomplishments since applying.

Since applying in January, I have been making substantial progress on my research project for Intel ISEF. My project seeks to test whether statistical regression and neural networking can predict geo-political conflicts in developing nations. I have been developing an algorithm to analyze such patterns using a framework of a naïve Bayes classifier under the guidance of Mr. CollegeVine, the Technology General Manager at CollegeVine Tech LLC.

This project has completely changed my perceptions of the unique dynamics implicit in a complex geo-political struggle. Additionally, I have gained an even greater appreciation for computer science’s broad applicability to solve qualitative challenges, while feeding my lifelong curiosity about international relations. It would be nice if I could eventually achieve my goal of making basic predictions about such conflicts… I wouldn’t complain either if my program found itself in the CIA’s computer system one day!

I also continued my role as a leader on the varsity basketball team this winter. Recently I was named the Northeast Elite Team MVP and was named to the All-East All Star Team. In February, I scored 34 points in our league playoff game and was recognized as the national player of the week by Basketball Weekly. We are currently gearing up for the league championship game, so lately I’ve been spending a lot of time in the gym, getting in peak shape and practicing my free throws. (That one I missed against our cross town rivals earlier this year continues to haunt me!)

Finally, I have stopped trying to beat my nine-year-old sister on the Wii. Even as the captain of my school’s basketball team, I still lose miserably whenever she chooses to play me in the digital version. I’ve now realized my best efforts are futile and I’m focusing on time and efforts on more fruitful pursuits.

CMD has distinguished itself as a top institution for me, and I am continuously in awe as I read about its amazing work in helping students achieve their dreams. I would like to thank the Office of Undergraduate Admissions once again for reviewing my application, and I would eagerly matriculate if offered a position in the Class of 2027.

Sincerely, 

(Physically Sign Your Name Here) 

What Are Your Chances of Admission If You’re Deferred or Waitlisted?

Usually, the likelihood of deferred applicants getting accepted is akin to those applying through the regular decision process. The pool of applicants for early action or early decision typically comprises the most competitive contenders of the admission season, thus making a compelling application more noticeable during the regular decision phase.

The probability of acceptance from the waitlist fluctuates based on the specific school and the admissions cycle. Broadly speaking, securing a place from the waitlist at an elite institution like Stanford is quite slim, but these odds improve significantly at schools that are less competitive. Regardless of being deferred or having been accepted, a letter of continued interest can boost your chances. College admissions can be challenging given the multitude of factors involved, especially when trying to seek an estimate of your chances of admission. However, CollegeVine’s innovative chancing engine simplifies this process. By incorporating a wide array of variables, including standardized test scores, GPA, and even extracurricular activities, this tool calculates your personalized probability of admission to your chosen school.

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

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Official website of the   State of California

2023-123 California’s Systems of Public Higher Education

Streamlining the Community College Transfer Process Could Increase Access to Bachelor’s Degrees

Published: September 24, 2024 | Report Number: 2023-123

September 24, 2024 2023‑123

The Governor of California President pro Tempore of the Senate Speaker of the Assembly State Capitol Sacramento, California 95814

Dear Governor and Legislative Leaders:

As directed by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, my office conducted an audit of the State’s three systems of public higher education: the California Community Colleges (CCC), the California State University (CSU), and University of California (UC). Our assessment focused on these systems’ efforts to improve the rate of community college transfers to CSU and UC. In general, we determined that streamlining the community college transfer process could increase students’ opportunities to earn bachelor’s degrees.

Although most transfer students who applied to CSU and UC gained admission to at least one campus in those systems, CCC students still struggle to transfer. Only about 1 in 5 students who began community college from 2017 to 2019 and intended to transfer did so within four years, and transfer rates were even lower for students from certain regions and demographic groups. The vast majority of students who did not transfer never reached the point of applying to CSU or UC, mainly because they had not earned enough units. The three systems could help increase transfer rates by improving the outreach and support they provide to transfer-intending students. For example, CCC could ensure that students receive counseling and develop education plans so that they have a clear roadmap for transferring. The three systems could also share data about transfer students to help campuses make more targeted outreach efforts. Additionally, for students who earn enough units to transfer, CSU and UC could facilitate access to their preferred degree programs by ensuring that competitive campuses and majors adequately prioritize transfer applicants for admission.

Another barrier to transfer is the variation in transfer requirements across and within the three systems, which makes the process difficult for students to navigate. The Associate Degree for Transfer (ADT) offers a streamlined transfer pathway to CSU. However, community colleges may not offer every ADT, CSU campuses may not accept every ADT, and UC has established its own transfer options that lack some of the ADT’s key benefits. Expanding the use of the ADT—or the use of a UC option that emulates its benefits—would further streamline the transfer process.

Respectfully submitted,

GRANT PARKS California State Auditor

Selected Abbreviations Used in This Report

Results in Brief

Each of the State’s three systems of public higher education—the California Community Colleges (CCC), the California State University (CSU), and the University of California (UC)—plays a critical role in helping Californians attain bachelor’s degrees. Since the publication of the Master Plan for Higher Education in California in 1960, the State has sought to develop and strengthen pathways for students to transfer from community colleges to CSU and UC campuses. Nevertheless, the transfer process remains difficult for students to navigate for a variety of reasons, including differences among the State’s three higher education systems.

The State’s Three Higher Education Systems Have Struggled to Meet Some Key Goals Related to Student Transfers

Only about 21 percent of community college students who began college from 2017 to 2019 and intended to transfer did so within four years, and transfer rates were even lower for students from certain demographic groups and regions of the State. Of the students who reached the point of applying to CSU or UC, more than 90 percent of CSU transfer applicants and more than 75 percent of UC transfer applicants gained admission to at least one campus in those respective systems, demonstrating relatively broad access for transfer students. However, transfer applicants’ access to competitive campuses and majors was more limited, which CSU and UC could address through additional monitoring to ensure that these campuses and majors are adequately prioritizing transfer students for admission.

Variations in Requirements Across and Within the Three Systems Add Significant Complexity to the Transfer Process

Students who intend to transfer from California’s community colleges must navigate a complex series of decisions related to varied CSU and UC requirements, especially if those students are considering multiple campuses or majors. To try to minimize this complexity, the Legislature and the three higher education systems have designed specific transfer options. For example, the Associate Degree for Transfer (ADT) offers a streamlined transfer pathway to CSU campuses, as well as other benefits. However, this option’s impact is lessened because each community college may not offer every ADT, and each CSU campus may not accept every ADT. Further, UC has not yet widely adopted the ADT model. Instead, it has established its own transfer options that do not provide the same level of benefits as the ADT does.

The Three Systems Could Better Facilitate the Transfer Process by Increasing Outreach and Support

Outreach and support from all three systems are key to ensuring that community college students can successfully transfer. Nonetheless, the five community colleges we reviewed had some weaknesses in their processes for supporting students to help them transfer. Further, although CSU and UC have existing programs and methods for advising community college students about the transfer process, these efforts do not reach all transfer‑intending students. Expanding data sharing among the three systems would help improve their outreach efforts.

Agency Comments

The CCC Chancellor’s Office, the CSU Office of the Chancellor, and the UC Office of the President indicated they would take action to implement our recommendations. Because we did not make recommendations to the specific campuses we reviewed, we did not request them to respond.

Introduction

During the past several decades, the attainment of a bachelor’s degree has become increasingly associated with positive outcomes, such as higher income and lower unemployment rates. According to a March 2023 report from the Public Policy Institute of California, a worker with a bachelor’s degree in California in 1990 earned an average of 39 percent more than one with only a high school diploma. In 2021, this difference had grown to 62 percent. Moreover, research suggests that California will face a significant lack of college‑educated workers within the next decade. To address such concerns, the Governor set a goal in 2022 to increase the percentage of working‑age Californians who have a postsecondary degree or certificate from 55 percent to 70 percent by 2030.

Although some students attend private universities, eight out of every 10 college students in California attend a public institution in one of the State’s three systems of higher education: the California Community Colleges (CCC), the California State University (CSU), and the University of California (UC). Figure 1 shows these systems’ sizes, roles, and degree types. As we discuss in the sections that follow, all three systems are critical to creating paths for Californians to attain college degrees.

Figure 1 California’s Three Systems of Higher Education Are Intended to Serve Different Purposes

Source: State law, the Master Plan, and reports and data from the systems about their campuses and undergraduate populations.

*   We have not included Calbright College, a fully online public community college, because it does not offer courses that transfer to other colleges, nor does it confer associate degrees.

†   We have not included the University of California, San Francisco, because it does not provide undergraduate instruction.

‡   The 1960 Master Plan envisioned these roles, including that UC would accept community college transfer students with at least a 2.4 GPA and that CSU would accept transfer students with at least a 2.0 GPA. In practice, transfer admissions requirements can be complex, as we discuss in Chapter 2 .

Figure 1 is a vertical chart that describes basic details about and explains the key roles of each of California’s three systems of public higher education: the California Community Colleges, the California State University, and the University of California. The California Community Colleges is the largest system, consisting of 115 colleges and serving 1.9 million students in academic year 2022-23, whereas the California State University has 23 campuses and served 405,000 undergraduate students, and the University of California has nine campuses and served 230,000 undergraduates. The figure also shows that community colleges offer academic and vocational instruction to all students eligible for public higher education and generally award associate degrees and certificates. The California State University and University of California offer undergraduate and graduate instruction and generally award bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and doctoral degrees.

The Master Plan for Higher Education in California

Published in 1960, the Master Plan for Higher Education in California (Master Plan) is essentially an agreement between the State and the three public systems of higher education. The Master Plan serves as a framework to differentiate the mission of each system and to provide all Californians with the opportunity to access higher education. The Master Plan states that UC should draw from the top one‑eighth of the high school graduating class and CSU from the top one‑third. Community colleges must admit any high school graduate. Because of this policy—along with affordable tuition, a broad array of educational and workforce training options, and 115 colleges across the State—community colleges currently serve more students than do CSU and UC combined.

Although the Master Plan and state law require CCC, CSU, and UC to collaborate, significant separation and autonomy exists both across and within the three systems. The Master Plan recommended that one council oversee and coordinate higher education efforts, but no permanent body has served this purpose since 2011. At that time, then‑Governor Brown vetoed funding for the California Postsecondary Education Commission—essentially disbanding it—because he believed it had been ineffective. Further, the three systems are not responsible to the same authority. Unlike CCC and CSU, UC’s independence is enshrined in the State’s Constitution, and it is therefore not subject to the same level of legislative control.

Within each system, statewide governance is the product of at least three bodies: a governing board, a faculty senate, and a central administrative office. The text box describes the responsibilities of these bodies. CCC is especially decentralized because 72 local community college districts, each containing from one to nine colleges, are governed by locally elected boards that have significant authority to set policy within their own districts.

The Higher Education Systems’ Statewide Governance Consists of Three Bodies

CCC, CSU, and UC each have the following:

• A governing board that sets policy, establishes requirements, and provides guidance for the system.
• A faculty senate that has certain authority over curriculum and other issues of educational policy.
• A central administrative office that manages and oversees the system.

Source: Analysis of state law and system policies and websites.

 The Role of Transfer

The Master Plan emphasized transfer from community colleges, which primarily provide lower‑division education, to CSU and UC, which provide both lower‑ and upper‑division education. 1  In fact, to ensure adequate capacity and lower the costs to educate each student, the Master Plan envisioned increasingly shifting students away from CSU and UC and into community colleges for their lower‑division education. When the Master Plan was published in 1960, about 55 percent of the State’s undergraduate students within the three systems of public higher education were enrolled in community colleges, 26 percent in CSU, and 19 percent in UC. By 2023 the proportion of undergraduate students enrolled in community colleges had risen to about 75 percent, with the remaining 16 percent attending CSU and 9 percent attending UC.

The Master Plan’s vision for expanding the role of community colleges requires that CSU and UC reserve enough space to receive transfer students from community colleges. When the Master Plan was published, the ratio of CSU’s and UC’s lower‑division students to upper‑division students was about even. The Master Plan recommended that this ratio shift so that 40 percent of CSU’s and UC’s undergraduate populations were lower‑division students and 60 percent were upper‑division students—essentially reserving additional upper‑division space for incoming transfer students. In 1991 the Legislature established this same ratio in state law, as the text box  shows. That legislation contained several other key statements of intent to guide the implementation of the transfer system. For example, the legislation states that the transfer system should ensure the successful transfer of students to CSU or UC, including to the campus and major of their choice, if the students’ academic performance is satisfactory. It also states that CSU and UC should prioritize the admission and enrollment of CCC students who have met transfer requirements above those students entering at the freshman or sophomore levels.

State Law Requires CSU and UC to Reserve Space for Transfer Students

“Both UC and CSU shall have as a basic enrollment policy the maintenance of upper division enrollment, which are students who have attained upper division status, at 60 percent of total undergraduate enrollment . This goal shall be met through programs aimed at increasing the numbers of qualified transfer students from the community colleges without denying eligible freshmen applicants.” [Emphasis added]

“The governing board of each segment shall ensure that individual university and college campus enrollment plans include adequate upper division places for community college transfer students in all undergraduate colleges or schools , and that each undergraduate college or school on each campus participates in developing articulation and transfer agreement programs with community colleges. The governing boards shall meet this goal within their respective general statewide planning framework used to attain and maintain the state’s goal of a 60/40 ratio of upper to lower division students, their segmental enrollment planning processes, and campus planning regarding program balance, educational quality, and other relevant goals.” [Emphasis added]

Source: Education Code section 66730.

Both the statute we quote in the text box and the related Master Plan recommendation envision the 60 percent upper‑division metric as a goal for ensuring that adequate numbers of community college transfer students can enroll at CSU and UC. However, the goal relates more directly to students’ upper‑division status than it does to their transfer status. For that reason, UC has adopted a related goal that is more specific to transfer student enrollment: its goal is to enroll two incoming resident freshmen students for every one incoming resident transfer student, which it refers to as the two‑to‑one ratio . In other words, if one assumes that it takes four years to earn a bachelor’s degree, the 60 percent upper‑division metric in state law generally equates to the enrollment of two freshmen for every one transfer student—or roughly one‑third of new students would enter as transfers. We refer to this one‑third ratio throughout our report as the transfer representation goal . 2  

The community college transfer process can create educational opportunities for a more diverse array of California’s students. Many sources show that students of certain racial groups and socioeconomic backgrounds are underrepresented among California’s college graduates. For instance, although the percentage of Californians with bachelor’s degrees has increased for all racial groups since 2010, disparities persist for Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino students. The transfer process can play a crucial role in addressing such disparities because students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups have historically been more likely to start their higher education journey at a community college than at CSU or UC.

Community colleges may offer increased access to higher education for first‑generation college students and college students from low‑income households. In addition to having lower tuition costs than CSU or UC, community colleges have significantly more campuses statewide. Thus, students may not need to relocate to enroll in community college, reducing their housing and relocation costs. Community colleges may also allow students to have a more flexible class schedule if they need to work or care for family members.

Efforts to Improve the Transfer Process

The Legislature and the three public higher education systems have undertaken efforts in recent years to improve the community college transfer process, including by setting key goals for improvement. Figure 2 depicts five overarching goals that we analyze in Chapter 1 . State law and the three systems have also established many other requirements and goals, some of which we discuss in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 .

Figure 2 We Evaluated Key Goals Related to Transfer

Source: Analysis of state law, the Master Plan, key documents from the three systems, and related criteria.

*   We selected these five goals so we could assess the transfer system as a whole during our audit period, even though the systems have each established additional relevant goals. Further, each system did not adopt each of these goals. For example, CCC set a goal to increase the number of transfers by 35 percent, but CSU and UC did not formally agree to this goal.

†   Although CCC had not established a specific goal during our audit period related to students’ rate of successful transfer, we also evaluated transfer rates, as we explain in Chapter 1 .

Figure 2 is table that lists the five overarching goals related to transfer that we evaluated. The table has two columns: the first lists the goals we evaluated, and the second provides the sources we used to identify those goals. The first three goals relate to California Community Colleges and originate from the system’s 2017 Vision for Success strategic plan. The first goal is to increase the number of students transferring to the CSU and UC systems by 35 percent over five years, and the second and third goals are to reduce and ultimately eliminate demographic disparities and regional disparities in transfer outcomes. The fourth and fifth goals, which relate to the CSU and UC systems, are to reserve space at these systems for transfer students in proportion to other students, and to guarantee admission at CSU and UC for all eligible transfer students. The main sources we used to identify these CSU and UC goals include the Master Plan, state law, and UC documents.

One of the most significant changes to the transfer process in the last two decades was the introduction of the Associate Degree for Transfer (ADT), which Senate Bill 1440 (Chapter 428, Statutes of 2010) established in 2010 and Senate Bill 440 (Chapter 720, Statutes of 2013) bolstered in 2013. Figure 3 describes the ADT, which consists of a maximum of 60 semester units of general education and major preparation requirements that prepare students to enter CSU at the upper‑division level. In addition, Assembly Bill 928 (Chapter 566, Statutes of 2021) established an intersegmental committee whose responsibilities include ensuring that the ADT becomes the primary transfer pathway between the CCC system and campuses in the CSU and UC systems. Assembly Bill 1291 (Chapter 683, Statutes of 2023), signed into law in 2023, establishes a pilot program that will expand the ADT to campuses and majors within the UC system, beginning in academic year 2026–27 with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UC has also introduced other options to attempt to streamline the transfer process, such as the Transfer Admission Guarantee (TAG) and UC Transfer Pathways. We discuss these two options and the ADT in more detail in Chapter 2 .

Figure 3 Community College Students Have Multiple Options to Meet CSU and UC Transfer Requirements

Source: Analysis of state law, CSU and UC systemwide requirements and transfer programs, and public reports.

Note: We do not include in this graphic the CSU or UC dual admission programs that we discuss in Chapter 3 , because those programs are still relatively new.

*   State law establishes a pilot program to expand the ADT to some campuses and majors within the UC system, beginning with at least eight majors at UCLA in the 2026–27 academic year.

Figure 3 provides an overview of transfer requirements and transfer options for the CSU and UC systems. Both systems generally require that a transfer applicant obtain 60 transferable semester units, including certain general education courses, and CSU requires a 2.0 GPA or higher for transfer whereas UC requires a 2.4 GPA or higher. In terms of specific transfer programs or options, the primary transfer program for the CSU system is the Associate Degree for Transfer, or ADT. For the UC system, there are two main transfer options: the Transfer Admission Guarantee, known as TAG, and the UC Transfer Pathways. UC considers a program called “Pathways-plus” to be a third option, and it is a combination of TAG and UC Transfer Pathways. The figure provides additional details for each of these specific programs or options, such as that the ADT is a two-year degree that can reduce transfer students’ time to earn a bachelor’s degree and guarantee course transferability.

Several other recent laws have also affected the transfer process. For example, legislation enacted in 2017 and 2022 established a framework to increase the probability that community college students will enter and complete transfer‑level coursework in English and mathematics during their first year. Legislation enacted in 2021 required CCC to adopt a common course‑numbering system across all of its colleges and, in February 2024, a task force issued its final report about the design and implementation of this effort. Another 2021 state law assigned a committee to establish a singular lower‑division general education pathway known as the California General Education Transfer Curriculum (Cal‑GETC) and separately mandated that transfer‑intending students be placed onto an ADT pathway if such a pathway exists for their intended major. Because this law is recent, its impact has not yet been fully realized. For example, Cal‑GETC will not take effect until the 2025–26 academic year.

In June 2023, the Joint Legislative Audit Committee directed our office to review the higher education systems’ efforts to improve the percentage of community college students who transfer to CSU and UC. To conduct our review, we judgmentally selected campuses to represent all three higher education systems and the State’s diverse geography and student demographics. Those campuses were the following: Clovis Community College (Clovis); Diablo Valley College (Diablo Valley); Lassen Community College (Lassen); Santa Ana College (Santa Ana); Victor Valley College (Victor Valley); San Diego State University (San Diego State); California State University, Stanislaus (Stanislaus State); University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley); and University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara).

Chapter Summary

• Only about 21 percent of community college students who began college from 2017 to 2019 and intended to transfer did so within four years, and transfer rates were even lower for students from certain demographic groups and regions of the State. Of the 745,000 transfer‑intending students who did not transfer within four years, about 96 percent did not apply to CSU or UC. Further, most of those students who did not apply—61 percent—had earned 30 or fewer units.
• More than 90 percent of CSU transfer applicants and more than 75 percent of UC transfer applicants gained admission to at least one campus in those systems. However, transfer applicants’ access to competitive campuses and majors—such as California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo); UC Berkeley; and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors across several campuses—was more limited than their access to other campuses and majors.
• Systemwide, both CSU and UC met the key transfer representation goal of enrolling at least one‑third of their new students through transfer. However, certain campuses and majors within each of the systems did not meet this goal. CSU and UC could help ensure that transfer students have adequate access to their preferred campuses and majors by monitoring campuses’ and majors’ efforts to enroll transfer students and following up with those campuses that have low transfer representation and may be denying qualified transfer applicants.

CCC Has Taken Steps to Facilitate Student Transfers to CSU and UC, but the System Is Not Yet Meeting Certain Critical Goals

Many students enroll in community college intending to transfer, yet the percentage who successfully do so has remained low—our analysis shows that about 21 percent of transfer‑intending students transferred within four years of enrolling in a community college, and less than 30 percent transferred within six years. The possible causes for low transfer rates include underlying barriers such as financial insecurity, family responsibilities, and an inability to relocate. However, students may also face educational barriers related to accessing community college courses they need to transfer or understanding complex transfer requirements. Although CCC has taken steps to facilitate transfer and address some of these barriers, opportunities still exist for CCC to monitor and increase transfer rates.

The Number of Students Transferring to CSU and UC Has Increased but Still Falls Short of CCC’s Goal 

In its 2017 Vision for Success strategic plan, CCC adopted a goal to increase the number of its students who transfer each year to CSU or UC by 35 percent over five years—from about 80,000 students to about 108,000 students. Figure 4 shows that CCC was making progress toward that goal before the effects of the COVID‑19 pandemic (pandemic) began in 2020. At that time, the number of CCC students who transferred to CSU or UC started to decline.

Figure 4 CCC Was Making Progress Toward Its Transfer Goal, but the Number of Transfers Sharply Declined After the Pandemic

Source: CSU and UC internal application and enrollment data from 2018 through 2023, CSU and UC publicly reported enrollment data from 2014 through 2018, and CCC’s 2017 Vision for Success .

*   Although CCC’s Vision for Success does not clearly articulate a baseline for this goal, we display the initial baseline for CCC’s goal to increase transfers by 35 percent as 80,000 transfers based on publicly reported CSU and UC data for academic year 2017–18.

Figure 4 is a vertical stacked bar chart showing that CCC was making progress toward its goal to increase the number of transfers to CSU and UC by 35 percent over five years—or from about 80,000 transfers to about 108,000 transfers by the 2022-23 academic year. However, the number of students transferring to CSU or UC declined after the effects of the pandemic began in early 2020. Each vertical bar represents the combined number of enrolled CCC students at CSU or UC, with different colors for transfers to CSU and transfers to UC. The horizontal axis represents academic years, starting with 2014-15 and ending with 2022-23. Academic year 2017-18 includes the baseline figure of 80,000 transfer students. That number steadily increased through the 2020-21 academic year, but declined after that, resulting in a 28,000-student shortfall from CCC’s goal of 108,000 transfers by academic year 2022-23.

Beyond the overall number of students who transfer to CSU and UC, another measure of the effectiveness of the community college transfer process is the rate of successful transfer among all CCC students who express a goal of transferring or who exhibit course‑taking behavior consistent with the intent to transfer (transfer‑intending students). When transfer rates are low, it means that fewer CCC students successfully obtain bachelor’s degrees and benefit from the associated opportunities, such as increased earnings. Despite the importance of measuring transfer rates, the CCC system had not established a formal goal for this metric at the time of our audit. However, the CCC Chancellor’s Office has published on its website these types of transfer rates statewide and for individual community colleges. It and other research entities have found that only a fraction of community college students who intend to transfer are able to do so successfully.

When we analyzed data from the State’s three higher education systems, we found that less than 30 percent of the 325,000 transfer‑intending students who enrolled in community college in 2017 transferred within six years, as Figure 5 shows. To calculate this transfer rate, we identified the cohort of students who entered community college in 2017. We then limited this cohort to transfer‑intending students and measured how many transferred within the six years. In addition to the six‑year cohort transfer rate for students who entered community college in 2017, we also calculated transfer rates for four‑year cohorts—displayed in Table A.1 of Appendix A—to provide comparisons across time and to include students who entered college more recently.

Figure 5 Most Transfer‑Intending Students Did Not Transfer Within Six Years

Source: CCC student and course data and CSU and UC admissions data.

Note: The transfer rates above are based on our matches of CCC students to CSU and UC admissions data and National Student Clearinghouse data provided by the CCC Chancellor’s Office. A small number of CCC students may have transferred to CSU, UC, or other universities whom we were unable to identify because of limitations in the data. For more information, refer to the Scope and Methodology section in Appendix D .

Figure 5 is a graphic showing transfer rates by year for the 2017 cohort of transfer-intending community college students. The graphic includes a single vertical bar in which transfer rates are stacked by year for each of the six years beginning with 2017. For example, 8.8 percent of cohort students transferred in Year 4, which was 2020—the most common of the six years for students to have transferred. The figure explains that of the 325,000 transfer-intending students who entered community college in 2017, less than 30 percent, or about 89,000 of the students in the cohort, transferred within six years to CSU, UC, or another university.

The four‑year transfer rates we calculated remained relatively consistent—about 20 percent across several different student cohorts, as Table A.1 in Appendix A shows. For example, the transfer rate increased by less than 1 percent from the 2017 cohort to the 2019 cohort, although the total number of transfer‑intending students in the cohorts declined by about 6 percent during the same period. The transfer rates we calculated also generally align with other entities’ findings, even though their methodologies may have differed. For instance, the Public Policy Institute of California published a report in August 2023 that stated that about 19 percent of transfer‑intending students transfer within four years of their initial community college enrollment.

Most transfer‑intending students who did not successfully transfer within four years never applied to CSU or UC, likely in large part because they had not earned enough units of credit. Figure 6 depicts the transfer outcomes for students in all three of the four‑year cohorts that we analyzed, and it illustrates that most transfer‑intending students who did not apply to CSU or UC earned fewer than 60 units of community college credit. In fact, slightly more than half of those students earned 15 units or fewer. Many causes could explain this trend, including students not completing courses or not returning after the first term. 3

Figure 6 Most Students Who Did Not Transfer Within Four Years of Enrollment Had Not Applied to CSU or UC, and Many Had Earned Few Units

Source: Analysis of CCC, CSU, and UC data, including National Student Clearinghouse information for students who transferred to universities other than CSU and UC.

Notes: Individual numbers are rounded and may not align precisely with the totals presented.

The transfer rates above are based on our matches of CCC students to CSU and UC admissions data and National Student Clearinghouse data provided by the CCC Chancellor’s Office. A small number of CCC students may have transferred to CSU, UC, or other universities whom we were unable to identify because of limitations in the data. For more information, refer to the Scope and Methodology section in Appendix D .

The National Student Clearinghouse data we analyzed, which we relied upon for information about students who transferred to universities other than CSU and UC, did not include information about students’ applications for transfer. Therefore, the portion of this graphic related to applications and admissions includes information only for CSU and UC.

Figure 6 is a Sankey diagram that moves from left to right to show that most students who did not transfer within four years of enrollment had not applied to CSU or UC and had earned few units of credit. On the left, the chart begins with 940,000 transfer-intending community college students among the 2017, 2018, and 2019 cohorts combined. The diagram then shows that about 21 percent of this combined cohort transferred successfully within four years to CSU, UC, or another university, meaning that 79 percent did not transfer within four years. Of the 79 percent or 745,000 students who did not transfer, only about 4 percent had applied to CSU or UC. The final stage of the diagram depicts that of those students who did not apply to CSU or UC, the vast majority—about 82 percent or 584,000 students—had fewer than 60 units, which implies that they did not have enough units to transfer. In fact, most of these students with fewer than 60 units had 30 units or fewer.

Other students in the cohorts we analyzed did not apply to CSU or UC even though they may have been transfer‑ready. For instance, about 14 percent of transfer‑intending students—131,000 students—did not apply for transfer within four years despite earning 60 units or more of community college credit, as Figure 6 shows. 4 The text box includes some of the possible reasons that these students did not apply to CSU or UC. Similarly, the Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges (RP Group) reported in May 2020 that thousands of students had made significant progress toward transfer but found themselves stuck in the system or abandoned their goals. In addition to identifying other areas of opportunity, the RP Group recommended that community colleges begin by quantifying the transfer‑intending populations on their campuses and proactively reaching out to help students who have made considerable progress toward transfer.

Possible Reasons That Students With 60 or More Units Did Not Apply to CSU or UC

• They delayed transferring until a later time, perhaps because of the effects of the pandemic.
• Even though they had enough overall units, they had not met the course or GPA requirements for a particular CSU or UC campus or major.
• They faced other barriers, such as financial constraints, family responsibilities, or difficulty navigating the application process.
• They entered the work force having decided that they did not want to transfer.

Source: Interviews with CCC Chancellor’s Office and community college officials corroborated by public reports and research.

Other sources and best practices also identify ways in which colleges could monitor students’ progress toward transfer and provide targeted interventions, some of which we discuss in Chapter 3 , to help them reach the point of applying and transferring. For example, Diablo Valley’s 2021 program review of its transfer services included a strategy to increase outreach to students enrolled in transfer‑level English and math support courses—such as through class visits to the transfer center—to reach and assist the students most at risk of not transferring. In addition, an intersegmental committee report from December 2023 recommended reengaging students who have already earned an ADT but did not apply to transfer. Nearly 16,000 students statewide across the three cohorts we measured had obtained an ADT within four years of enrollment but did not apply to CSU or UC, as we show in Table A.8 in Appendix A. A 2021 update to CCC’s Vision for Success highlighted additional examples of promising practices at specific community colleges. CCC’s assistant vice chancellor for data, visualization, and research acknowledged that some community colleges have already developed practices for increasing transfer rates and told us that determining the success of these practices would be a helpful first step that could then allow the Chancellor’s Office to provide useful guidance to all colleges.

As the text box shows, underlying low transfer rates are several fundamental barriers that transfer‑intending students face. Although some barriers we detail in the text box involve factors largely outside of the higher education systems’ control, the systems can still take important steps to facilitate and simplify the transfer process, as we discuss throughout this report.

Students May Face Several Barriers to Successfully Transferring

Key institutional barriers that are primarily a CCC responsibility:

• Lack of timely and accurate information about the transfer process.
• Difficulty for students to access and successfully complete courses needed for transfer.

Key institutional barriers that are primarily a CSU and UC responsibility:

• Complex transfer requirements that are difficult for students to understand and fulfill.
• Limited capacity to accommodate students at some campuses and majors.

Key personal barriers that require support from the three systems:

• Inability to address basic needs, such as financial security or family responsibilities, making it difficult to prioritize the effort to transfer.
• Inability to relocate or access universities outside of the local community.

Source: Analysis of public research and reports, and interviews with CCC Chancellor’s Office and community college officials.

Students in Some Demographic Groups Are Significantly More Likely to Transfer Than Students in Others

State law and CCC have established that the system should make efforts to help students from historically underrepresented groups transfer. For example, state law includes requirements for CCC to work toward the goal of eliminating disparities in outcomes between certain demographic groups (achievement gaps), including those related to transfer, as a condition of receipt of certain state funds. Similarly, CCC established a 10‑year goal in its 2017 Vision for Success to reduce and ultimately close achievement gaps across a range of outcomes, such as transferring successfully.

Although some transfer‑related achievement gaps have narrowed in recent years, significant disparities still exist. For example, the four‑year transfer rate for Hispanic or Latino students in the 2019 cohort was about 15 percent, compared to the rate of nearly 21 percent for all students. Table A.5 in Appendix A provides additional details on transfer outcomes by demographic group for the student cohorts we analyzed. In general, the disparities between the overall makeup of our cohorts and the students who ultimately transferred are wider at UC than at CSU, especially for Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino students. Public data and research show that in recent years, both systems have increased their shares of community college transfer enrollees who are from certain underrepresented groups, particularly Hispanic or Latino students. Nevertheless, the remaining gaps mean that transfer‑intending students from some demographic groups are less likely to achieve their transfer goals.

Understanding the stages of the transfer process that contribute to demographic disparities can reveal their possible causes and inform more targeted interventions. We found that racial or ethnic groups’ representation changed at several stages in the transfer process for the 2017 through 2019 cohorts, including at or before the transfer application stage, as Figure 7 shows. For example, Hispanic or Latino students comprise less of the population who applied to UC, which is a large part of why they also make up less of the population who were admitted to UC. Similarly, Black or African American students comprise about 6 percent of transfer‑intending students in the cohorts but only about 3 percent of cohort applicants to CSU and UC. In Chapter 3, we discuss approaches each system could take to better identify and support transfer‑intending community college students, including students from underrepresented groups.

Figure 7 Not All Student Groups Are Represented Equally in Transfer Preparedness and Admissions

Source: Analysis of a combination of the 2017, 2018, and 2019 student cohorts we created based on CCC, CSU, and UC data.

Notes: The outcomes above—such as whether students obtained 60 or more units, applied to transfer, and were admitted—are based on four years of data beginning with the year a student entered into the community college system. We depict only the four largest racial or ethnic groups in the cohorts.

The application and admission rates above are based on our matches of CCC students to CSU and UC admissions data. A small number of CCC students may have applied or been admitted to CSU or UC whom we were unable to identify because of limitations in the data. For more information, refer to the Scope and Methodology section in Appendix D .

Figure 7 is a clustered horizontal bar chart depicting the four largest racial or ethnic student groups’ representation at different stages of the transfer process for the combined 2017, 2018, and 2019 transfer-intending cohorts. For each group—Asian students, Black or African American students, Hispanic or Latino students, and white students—five bars signify the group’s representation among students at different stages of the transfer process. These stages consist of students with 60 or more units, students who applied to CSU, students who were admitted by CSU, students who applied to UC, and students who were admitted by UC. For each group, bars to the left of the central axis represent an underrepresentation compared to the cohort of transfer-intending students, and bars to the right represent an overrepresentation of the group. In general, the chart shows that Asian and white students were overrepresented in these five transfer stages compared to their share of the initial cohort, whereas Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino students were underrepresented. The chart also reveals that racial or ethnic groups’ representation changed at different stages, including at or before the transfer application stage.

Some Community Colleges and Regions Have Significantly Lower Transfer Rates Than Others

As an example of how transfer rates vary among community colleges, for the 2017 through 2019 cohorts we reviewed, the 10 colleges with the highest four‑year transfer rates averaged rates of about 33 percent, whereas the 10 colleges with the lowest rates averaged about 10 percent. Table A.2 in Appendix A shows transfer rates for those colleges with the highest and lowest rates and for the five colleges we selected for this audit. Transfer rates also varied by community college district, many of which contain only one college. The differences in transfer rates mean that transfer‑intending students at certain community colleges are significantly more likely to transfer than those at other colleges.

Location is one cause of college‑level differences in transfer rates. As Table A.6 in Appendix A shows, our review found that community colleges in the Bay Area, San Diego, and South Central regions had higher transfer rates than colleges located in the Central Valley, Inland Empire, and Northern regions of the State. One factor contributing to this difference may be the distances between community colleges and CSU and UC campuses in those regions. Students are more likely to transfer to a nearby university for a variety of reasons, including challenges associated with relocating.

The executive vice president of student and administrative services at Lassen—a college in rural Northern California—stated that proximity is a major barrier for its students who want to transfer to CSU or UC. The nearest CSU or UC campus to Lassen is Chico State University, which is more than a two‑hour drive. In fact, in the cohorts we analyzed, nearly 76 percent of the Lassen students who successfully transferred did so to an out‑of‑state institution. A number of these students may have transferred to the University of Nevada, Reno, because it is closer to Lassen than any CSU or UC campus.

Similarly, Victor Valley’s dean of student services stated that location is a significant barrier to transfer for the college’s students. For example, its transfer‑intending students face a difficult commute through a mountain pass to reach the nearest CSU and UC campuses in San Bernardino and Riverside, and the public transportation options are limited. The dean added that the cost of living in those areas is much higher than in Victor Valley’s service area, which is a burden for most students.

Research has proposed solutions for geographic barriers to transfer. For example, the Public Policy Institute of California suggested in its August 2023 report that community colleges located far from universities should work to establish partnerships that allow students to obtain a bachelor’s degree by taking university courses at the community college. Lassen’s executive vice president of student and administrative services stated that the college has been working to develop such partnerships with CSU campuses and that the partnerships are helpful for students. However, she stated that challenges persist, such as persuading CSU faculty to relocate to establish programs at Lassen or convincing CSU campuses of the viability of alternative options that incorporate hybrid learning models. Similarly, San Diego State has an Imperial Valley branch that serves students in southeastern California who may not be able to relocate to San Diego, which is more than 100 miles away from the branch.

State law allows community college districts to establish bachelor’s degree programs as long as certain conditions are met, including that the bachelor’s degrees do not duplicate degrees that CSU and UC already offer. Expanding the ability of geographically isolated community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees could help those colleges’ students meet their educational goals. The Public Policy Institute of California has also found that uneven outreach from four‑year institutions, especially in regions with fewer campuses, may constrain students’ awareness of potential transfer destinations, making them less likely to apply. It stated that four‑year institutions must do more to reach out to students, an approach we discuss more fully in Chapter 3 .

In addition to location, other factors may contribute to differences in community colleges’ transfer rates. As we show in Figure 7 , student groups are not all represented equally in terms of transfer preparedness and admissions—and community colleges serve different proportions of these student groups. Similarly, some colleges—such as Diablo Valley or Irvine Valley College—may attract students who have demonstrated strong academic performance and who wish to transfer to a nearby campus, such as UC Berkeley or the University of California, Irvine. Finally, as we discuss in Chapter 3 , we identified weaknesses in some colleges’ processes for helping students transfer.

CSU Admits Nearly All Transfer Applicants but Not Always to Their Preferred Campuses and Majors

As Figure 8 demonstrates, most community college transfer students who apply to CSU gain admission to at least one campus. However, they do not necessarily gain admission to their preferred campus or major. Students may prefer a particular campus or major for a variety of reasons, including the potential future employment opportunities associated with earning a degree. They must also meet requirements specific to those campuses or majors, as we discuss in Chapter 2 . By prioritizing the admission of transfer students to certain competitive campuses and majors, CSU could better ensure that these students ultimately enroll and earn degrees in their desired fields of study.

Figure 8 CSU Accommodates Many Transfer Students but Can Improve Access to Certain Campuses and Majors

Source: Analysis of state law, the Master Plan, CSU application and enrollment data, and other system documents.

*   As we explain in the Introduction , we derived this goal—to enroll one‑third of new resident undergraduates through transfer—from a UC goal that is related to an upper‑division enrollment requirement for CSU and UC in state law.

Figure 8 includes analysis of four transfer metrics that we discuss in our report as they relate to CSU—systemwide admission, systemwide transfer representation, admission to specific campuses and majors, and transfer representation at specific campuses and majors. For example, with regard to systemwide admission, we found that more than 90 percent of all community college transfer applicants gained admission to at least one CSU campus during our audit period. In terms of transfer representation, the system enrolled more than 50 percent of its new resident undergraduates through transfer. However, we found that some individual campuses and majors have low admission and transfer representation rates, with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo falling far below the transfer representation goal while having the highest denial rate for transfer applicants in the system. A key at the bottom of the graphic indicates that we make recommendations related to these findings about CSU campuses and majors.

CSU Admits More Than 90 Percent of All Community College Transfer Applicants

As we note in the Introduction, one key expectation in law is that CSU is to offer admission to all eligible transfer applicants. In alignment with this goal, CSU’s overall admission rate is high: it admitted to at least one campus more than 90 percent of the nearly 500,000 CCC students who applied to transfer from academic years 2018–19 through 2022–23. Table B.1 in Appendix B shows that this systemwide admission rate remained relatively constant during our audit period. Further, as we discuss in the next section , CSU has established a process for determining applicants’ eligibility and ensuring that all eligible students have an opportunity to enroll at one of its campuses.

CSU also largely met another key goal to enroll a sufficient number of transfer students compared to the number of freshmen students it enrolls. Although CSU has not explicitly framed that goal in terms of enrolling at least one‑third of its students through transfer, this specific ratio aligns with the intent of both the Master Plan and state law, as we discuss in the Introduction . As Figure 9 shows, CSU enrolled far more than one‑third of its incoming students through transfer. In fact, many CSU campuses enrolled transfer students at a rate greater than one‑half of all incoming students.

Figure 9 A Large Proportion of CSU’s New Enrollees are Transfer Students, but Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Has Low Transfer Representation

Source: Analysis of CSU enrollment data from academic years 2018–19 through 2022–23.

Note: We included in these ratios all transfer students, not just those from community colleges, and we limited the ratios to California resident students because UC has used this methodology and we wanted to provide consistency between CSU and UC ratios. However, according to CSU’s public dashboards, more than 96 percent of students who transfer to CSU are California residents, and more than 93 percent of resident students who transfer to CSU originate from California community colleges.

*   Cal Maritime has limited and specialized programs compared to other CSU campuses, which may affect its level of transfer representation.

Figure 9 is a bar chart consisting of 23 bars that show each CSU campus’s percentage of transfer students among its new resident enrollees, with the campuses presented from left to right in decreasing order of transfer representation. One horizontal line shows that, systemwide, CSU’s transfer representation is about 53 percent, and another shows the transfer representation goal of about 33 percent. Cal State East Bay is the CSU campus with the largest share of transfer students among incoming resident undergraduates, at 70 percent. Thirteen other campuses have transfer representation percentages above 50 percent. Two campuses fall under the 33 percent goal: Cal Maritime is at 29 percent and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is at 18 percent. A box below the bar chart explains that for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to have met the 33 percent transfer representation goal, it would have needed to enroll about 700 to 1100 additional transfer students annually, depending on whether it admitted equivalently fewer freshmen or simply increased its enrollment capacity while admitting the same number of freshmen.

Although the CSU system as a whole easily met the one‑third benchmark, the campuses’ individual success in meeting this goal varied. As Figure 9 shows, all but two CSU campuses enrolled more than 45 percent of their incoming student body as transfer students. However, California State University Maritime Academy (Cal Maritime) and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo enrolled just 29 percent and 18 percent, respectively. The percentage Cal Maritime enrolled was just below the one‑third mark, which is likely because the campus offers limited and specialized courses of study and enrolls few students. In contrast, low transfer representation paired with high denial rates for transfer applicants may be a cause for concern at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the most competitive campus for transfer applicants of any campus in the CSU or UC systems. Certain majors at other CSU campuses present a similar concern. We discuss both of these issues in the next section.

CSU fairly consistently admits transfer applicants from each major demographic group, although its admission rate is lower for Black or African American students than for students in general. Table B.3 in Appendix B shows CSU’s admission rates by demographic group for community college transfer applicants during our audit period. Of note, CSU admitted 66 percent of Black or African American transfer applicants, which is about 4 percentage points lower than the percentage of all transfer applications it admitted. This gap generally aligns with CSU’s public dashboard, which displays unduplicated totals and shows that, on average, about 84 percent of Black or African American transfer applicants gained admission systemwide compared to 88 percent of all applicants. 5  The assistant vice chancellor of institutional research and analysis at the CSU Chancellor’s Office stated that data showed Black or African American applicants were slightly more likely, relative to other groups, not to meet minimum CSU eligibility or to have incomplete or withdrawn applications. System officials are aware of this gap and stated that they have recently instituted programs to address it by easing the transfer application process, including its Black Student Success initiative, Transfer Success Pathway, and CSU Transfer Planner.

Transfer Students May Struggle to Gain Admission to Their Preferred CSU Campuses and Majors

Transfer students are more likely to enroll at CSU if they are admitted to their preferred campus and major. 6  However, certain CSU campuses and certain majors at some CSU campuses do not have the capacity to accommodate all of the eligible students who apply to them. CSU generally refers to this situation as impaction and has adopted a redirection policy to avoid denying those students admission to programs at other campuses that are not impacted. The text box shows the seven impacted CSU campuses and key impacted majors at other campuses for undergraduate students in academic year 2023–24.

CSU’s Impacted Campuses and Key Impacted Majors in Academic Year 2023–24

Impacted campuses:

• Fresno State*
• Cal State Fullerton
• Cal State Long Beach
• Cal State LA
• San Diego State
• San José State
• Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

Key majors that are impacted at some non-impacted campuses:

• Biological Sciences
• Criminology/Criminal Justice
• Engineering

Source: CSU website.

* Fresno State was no longer impacted as of Fall 2024.

Impacted CSU campuses and majors generally have lower admissions rates. For example, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and San Diego State had the lowest campus transfer admission rates—19 percent and 30 percent, respectively—from academic years 2018–19 through 2022–23, as Table B.2 in Appendix B shows. Moreover, these two campuses admitted transfer applications to their computer science majors at rates of just 8 percent and 13 percent, respectively.

When CSU does not admit eligible students to the campuses and majors to which they have applied, it instead uses a process outlined in its redirection policy to offer those students the opportunity for admission to campuses that can accommodate them in the same or similar majors. 7  The text box shows the minimum eligibility requirements for upper‑division transfer students. To carry out the redirection process, CSU identifies all eligible resident applicants who did not gain admission to the CSU campuses to which they applied and allows them the opportunity to select a first‑ and second‑choice campus that is not impacted. CSU then routes these applicants to either their selected campuses, if they have enrollment capacity, or to campuses that have enrollment capacity.

CSU’s Minimum Eligibility Requirements for Upper-Division Transfer Students

Applicants must complete at least 60 semester (90 quarter) units of CSU-transferable credit and earn a 2.0 GPA in all transferable units attempted. The units must including the following:

• At least 30 semester (45 quarter) units of CSU‑transferable general education credit.
• One transferable course in written communication, oral communication, and critical thinking with a grade of C- or better.
• One transferable course in mathematics or quantitative reasoning with a grade of C- or better.

Impacted CSU campuses and majors are authorized to use supplemental admission criteria to screen applicants. For example, San Diego State generally requires applicants to complete all preparation for major courses listed in the campus’s catalog.

Source: State law, CSU 2023–24 Admission Handbook, and San Diego State’s website.

CSU redirects most transfer students from three of its most competitive campuses: Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, San Diego State, and Cal State Long Beach. According to data that CSU provided, it redirected more than 25,000 community college transfer applicants during academic years 2019–20 through 2022–23. However, during the same period, only a very small number of these transfer students actually enrolled through CSU’s redirection process—about 1,700 students, or 7 percent.

Since the Fall 2019 term, CSU has used between seven and 10 campuses for redirection because these campuses have the necessary capacity. However, during academic year 2023–24, five of the seven redirection campuses were located in Northern California, while the majority of the impacted campuses were located in Southern California. According to the results of a CSU survey of the students it redirected, the two most common reasons among respondents for not enrolling were an inability to relocate and not wanting to attend any of the available campuses. These reasons signal that transfer students are less likely to enroll at a redirection campus.

Transfer students may lack access to their preferred campuses and majors in part because Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and certain competitive majors at other campuses disproportionately consist of freshmen instead of transfers. As we describe previously, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has the lowest transfer representation in the CSU system and enrolls significantly less than one‑third of its incoming students through transfer. Moreover, the campus enrolls less than one‑third in 17 of its 19 academic disciplines, and for the remaining two disciplines, the transfer representation among students who graduate—a metric we discuss in more detail in the next paragraph—was also less than one‑third. Other campuses similarly enroll low proportions of transfer students in some disciplines or majors, but not to the extent of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. For example, from 2018 through 2023, transfer students represented just 21 percent and 27 percent of new resident enrollees in San Diego State’s biological science major and computer science major, respectively. However, transfer students comprised 48 percent of new resident students for the campus as a whole during that same period. In general, transfer students are less represented in STEM majors and disciplines than they are in other majors and disciplines. Figure 10 highlights some of our concerns in this area.

Figure 10 Transfer Representation Varied Significantly Among Specific Majors at CSU Campuses

Source: Analysis of CSU application, enrollment, and degree data.

Note: For the purpose of this graphic, we calculated levels of transfer representation and admission rates using data from 2018 through 2023, meaning that the totals and percentages cover five academic years. Further, we calculated transfer representation among only students with California residency.

Figure 10 is a diagram that shows that transfer representation varied significantly among specific majors at CSU campuses and that some majors with low transfer representation may be denying qualified transfer applicants. The top of the graphic shows that systemwide, CSU majors such as biological science and mechanical engineering had lower transfer representation than other majors did, such as psychology and sociology. Below those examples, the graphic explains that when examining majors that had low transfer representation, we identified some that exhibited indications that they may be denying qualified transfer applicants—such as the majors being impacted and having a low transfer admission rate. A table provides specific examples of impacted biological science and mechanical engineering majors at certain CSU campuses and shows their transfer representation percentages, their impaction status, and their transfer admission rates.

In response to our questions about lower transfer representation in certain campuses and majors, CSU officials explained that using new student enrollment data to measure transfer representation is problematic because many freshmen change majors after they initially enroll. For example, the associate vice president for enrollment management at San Diego State provided us with a student migration dashboard for the campus that showed that freshmen migrate out of STEM majors at higher rates than they do for other majors. Even so, when we analyzed graduation data—which considers only those students who ultimately earned a degree—we still found that certain CSU majors, such as biological sciences at San Diego State, awarded fewer than one‑third of their degrees to transfer students. In other words, transfer representation remained low for many majors even when we adjusted for freshmen changing their majors.

One more factor that could affect a campus’s or major’s level of transfer representation is the number of qualified transfer applicants. If a campus or major with low transfer representation also denies qualified transfer applicants, it may indicate that the campus or major is not adequately prioritizing transfer applicants compared to freshmen applicants. Determining whether transfer applicants are qualified for admission is complicated because campuses and majors use different approaches to assessing qualifications. Although transfer applicants to CSU are generally qualified if they meet the minimum eligibility requirements that the text box shows, impacted campuses and majors may impose supplemental admission criteria to further screen applicants. The very fact that a campus or major is impacted suggests that it is competitive and more likely to deny even applicants who exceed CSU’s minimum eligibility requirements. In addition, when a campus or major has a low admission rate—meaning it denies most transfer applicants—it is another indication that the campus or major may be denying applicants who meet its supplementary criteria.

We assessed whether certain impacted campuses and majors were denying qualified applicants. Figure 10 includes some examples of majors that are impacted and that had low transfer representation—among both new enrollees and degrees awarded—and low transfer admission rates. Based on these indicators and other factors, including conversations with campus officials and our analysis of other available data, we believe that Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and certain impacted majors within other campuses may have denied transfer applicants that met their supplementary admissions criteria. For example, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo denied 81 percent of transfer applications during our audit period, with about 9,400 of those denied applications reporting grade point averages (GPAs) of 3.6 or higher. Although we did not formally audit Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, when we followed up with the campus about some of our findings, its vice president of strategic enrollment management confirmed that the campus has not offered admission to all qualified transfer applicants—meaning applicants who were minimally eligible and also met its campus‑ and major‑specific admissions requirements. The vice president attributed this outcome to high application demand and limited capacity in certain majors, such as business and computer science, and added that the campus has offered admission to all qualified applicants in many other majors and to the vast majority of qualified applicants who are considered local to the campus. Similarly, San Diego State’s associate vice president for enrollment management acknowledged that some impacted majors, such as biological sciences, have denied transfer applicants who meet the major’s admissions requirements, although campus officials identified that recent trends show higher transfer admission rates in Fall 2023 and 2024, including in high‑demand majors.

Ultimately, it is incumbent on the CSU Chancellor’s Office to identify whether a particular campus or major has low transfer representation and, if so, to ensure that the campus or major is offering admission to as many qualified transfer applicants as possible. In the next section, we discuss ways in which the CSU Chancellor’s Office could explore increasing transfer representation in certain campuses and majors, even when limited capacity exists. Doing so would be consistent with the Legislature’s intent that the transfer system be implemented in such a way as to ensure the successful transfer of students to CSU and UC, including the campus and major of their choice, if academic performance is satisfactory.

When Limited Capacity Exists, CSU Can Better Prioritize the Admission of Transfer Students

As the text box describes, three main factors affect enrollment capacity. Taking all three factors into account, CSU has capacity for enrollment growth, although not evenly distributed across all its campuses. For example, CSU projected in January 2023 that it would have budget capacity to enroll at least 25,000 additional California resident students by the end of academic year 2022–23. However, most of that additional budgeted capacity is at seven non‑impacted CSU campuses, primarily located in Northern California, including Chico State University (Chico State); California State University, East Bay (Cal State East Bay); California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt (Cal Poly Humboldt); Cal Maritime; San Francisco State University (San Francisco State); Sonoma State University (Sonoma State); and California State University Channel Islands (CSU Channel Islands).

Three Main Factors Affect Enrollment Capacity

The physical capacity of a campus is determined by the number of people a campus is able to accommodate spatially.

The operational capacity of a campus is determined by the number of faculty and staff.

The budgeted capacity of a campus is determined by the number of full-time students whom the campus can serve with the amount of state funding it receives.

Source: CSU capacity study and public reports.

Shifting funding from campuses with budgetary capacity to impacted campuses could increase the number of transfer students that CSU enrolls. CSU has developed a plan to accommodate enrollment growth at its impacted campuses: in January 2023, it published the Enrollment Target and Budget Reallocation Plan with an explicit goal to reallocate funding from campuses not meeting funded enrollment targets to those that have been meeting them. If CSU achieves this goal, impacted campuses that currently deny many transfer applicants—such as Cal Poly San Luis Obispo—could have more room to accept some of those students.

CSU could make the most effective use of capacity increases—and potentially of the capacity it already has—by establishing an explicit transfer representation goal for its campuses and their programs. As we describe in the Introduction , state law seeks to ensure that adequate spaces are reserved for transfer students by establishing a metric for upper‑division enrollment, but it does not formalize a metric specifically related to transfer enrollment—such as the one‑third transfer representation goal we discuss throughout this chapter. Further, CSU’s assistant vice chancellor of enrollment management services stated that CSU does not explicitly maintain such a transfer representation goal or use it for admission purposes. For example, the assistant vice chancellor for finance and budget administration confirmed that the CSU Chancellor’s Office provides campuses with an overall funded enrollment target for resident students, but it does not provide campuses—including Cal Poly San Luis Obispo—with any targets for enrolling a certain number of transfer students specifically.

In addition, San Diego State provided examples of its program‑level enrollment targets for academic year 2022–23 that showed the targets themselves were below one‑third for transfer students in some impacted majors like biological science and computer science. The associate vice president for enrollment management at San Diego State provided context for these targets, including various factors—such as being asked to enroll more students than anticipated—that led the campus to increase its overall enrollment target for freshmen students but not for transfer students that year. The vice president noted that increasing upper‑division capacity typically requires more time to plan and hire faculty than increasing lower‑division capacity does. Even so, these types of challenges underscore the potential benefits of having a mechanism in place to monitor transfer representation and a plan to increase transfer student enrollment in particular campuses and programs when warranted. 

CSU system officials expressed concerns that enrolling additional transfer students might disadvantage freshmen. When limited capacity exists, enrolling a greater number of transfer students could mean denying more freshmen applicants in certain campuses or majors—although not necessarily systemwide. Although state law provides that CSU and UC must achieve the upper‑division enrollment goal that we explain in the Introduction through programs aimed at increasing the numbers of qualified CCC transfer students without denying eligible freshman applicants, state law also requires campus enrollment plans to include adequate spaces for community college transfer students in all undergraduate colleges or schools. The Legislature also intends that CSU and UC prioritize the admission and enrollment of CCC students who have met transfer requirements over students entering at the freshman or sophomore levels. Further, state law authorizes the CSU Chancellor’s Office to establish enrollment quotas for each campus and, in doing so, it is required to place primary emphasis on the allocation of resources at the upper‑division level in order to help accommodate CCC transfers. If a particular campus or major has been using an enrollment process that clearly favors freshmen at the expense of transfer students, changing that process may be reasonable.

CSU could also explore options to increase transfer representation that allow it to maintain the number of freshmen it enrolls. For example, the CSU Chancellor’s Office could work with campuses and majors that may be denying qualified transfer applicants despite having low transfer representation to identify why this situation is occurring and to ensure that the campuses are taking reasonable steps to accommodate transfer enrollment. As part of this process, CSU could consider prioritizing capacity increases for additional transfer enrollments rather than making room for transfer enrollments by reducing freshmen enrollments. Alternatively, from a systemwide standpoint, the CSU Chancellor’s Office could consider whether it could offset any reductions in freshmen enrollment at particular campuses or majors by increasing freshmen enrollment at campuses or majors with higher transfer representation.

Another way in which CSU can increase transfer students’ access to their preferred campuses and majors is by continuing to seek opportunities to prioritize local transfer students for admission. In accordance with provisions such as the Budget Act of 2017, CSU has a process that requires campuses to give priority to local applicants who are eligible for transfer and seek to enroll in impacted programs. CSU’s process for prioritizing local students for admission allows each campus to determine the precise type and degree of local preference. For example, a 2023 CSU report stated that California State University, Fullerton (Cal State Fullerton) provided a GPA advantage of 0.4 to local transfer applicants. The report also stated that San Diego State selected local transfer applicants first in its ranking process, before any nonlocal applicant with equal preparation or GPA. These types of strategies help CSU continue to admit and enroll transfer students in line with the intent of state law.

UC Accepts More Than 75 Percent of Transfer Applicants, but Its Admission Rates Are Significantly Lower for Certain Campuses and Majors

Although UC admits fewer of its transfer applicants and has lower transfer representation than CSU does, it has nevertheless met its systemwide transfer representation goal. Figure 11 shows that most community college transfer students who apply to UC gain admission to at least one campus, although not necessarily to their preferred campus or major. Students may prefer a particular campus or major for a variety of reasons, including the potential future employment opportunities associated with earning a degree. They must also meet requirements specific to that campus or major, as we discuss in Chapter 2 . To increase the likelihood of transfer students enrolling in their desired fields of study, UC could do more to monitor and prioritize their admission to certain competitive campuses and majors.

Figure 11 UC Accommodates Many Transfer Students but Can Improve Access to Some Campuses and Majors

Source: Analysis of state law, the Master Plan, UC application and enrollment data, and other system documents.

*   As we explain in the Introduction , we derived this goal—to enroll one‑third of new resident undergraduates through transfer—from a UC goal that is related to an upper‑division enrollment requirement in state law.

Figure 11 includes analysis of four transfer metrics that we discuss in our report as they relate to UC—systemwide admission, systemwide transfer representation, admission to specific campuses and majors, and transfer representation at specific campuses and majors. For example, with regard to systemwide admission, we found that more than 75 percent of all community college transfer applicants gained admission to at least one UC campus during our audit period. In terms of transfer representation, the system enrolled slightly more than 33 percent of its new resident undergraduates through transfer. However, we found that some individual campuses and majors have low admission and transfer representation rates. A key at the bottom of the graphic indicates that we make recommendations related to these findings about UC campuses and majors.

UC Admits More Than 75 Percent of All Community College Transfer Applicants 

UC admits proportionally fewer of its transfer applicants than CSU does. However, UC still admitted to at least one of its campuses more than 75 percent of the roughly 170,000 community college transfer students who applied for admission from academic years 2018–19 through 2022–23. Table C.1 in Appendix C shows that UC’s systemwide transfer admission rate remained relatively constant each year during this period.

In addition, the UC system as a whole met its transfer representation goal of enrolling two incoming resident freshmen for every one incoming resident transfer student during this period. As Figure 12 shows, most campuses met this goal as well.

Figure 12 UC Met Its Transfer Representation Goal as a System, but Representation Varies by Campus

Source: Analysis of UC enrollment data from 2018–19 through 2022–23.

Note: Based on UC’s existing methodology, we calculated these ratios using only California residents and using all transfer students, even if those students did not transfer from community colleges. However, according to UC’s public dashboard, nearly 90 percent of UC’s transfer students are residents, and more than 90 percent of UC transfer students overall transfer from California community colleges.

*   A UC report from November 2023 states that UC does not include UC Merced when calculating enrollment related to its existing systemwide goal because, as a relatively new UC campus, UC Merced is still working to develop the academic programs, upper‑division capacity, and close relationships with community colleges that are necessary to attract and enroll resident transfer students equal to half of its incoming freshman class.

Figure 12 is a bar chart consisting of nine bars that show each UC campus’s percentage of transfer students among its new resident enrollees, with the campuses presented from left to right in decreasing order of transfer representation. One horizontal line shows that, systemwide, UC’s transfer representation is 33.4 percent, and another shows the transfer representation goal of 33.3 percent. UCLA is the UC campus with the largest share of transfer students among incoming resident undergraduates, at 39 percent. Three campuses fall under the 33.3 percent goal: UC Santa Cruz is at 32 percent, UC Riverside is at 30 percent, and UC Merced is at 11 percent.

One explanation for the variances in transfer representation among UC campuses is that many transfer students may choose not to apply to or enroll at certain campuses. For example, during our audit period, University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside); University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz); and University of California, Merced (UC Merced) admitted some of the highest percentages of transfer applications in the UC system—67 percent, 64 percent, and 59 percent, respectively. However, their rates of transfer representation were the lowest in the system, in part because many of the students they admitted did not enroll at those campuses. In fact, according to its 2023 Multi‑Year Compact Annual Report , UC excludes its Merced campus when determining whether it has achieved its transfer representation goal because, as a relatively new campus that opened in 2005, UC Merced is still working to develop academic programs, upper‑division capacity, and relationships with community colleges. By contrast, as Table C.2 in Appendix C shows, UCLA had the lowest transfer admission rate, but it also had the second highest transfer enrollment rate. Moreover, UCLA had the highest transfer representation among all UC campuses, as Figure 12 shows.

As we previously explain in Figure 7 , different stages in the transfer process may contribute to gaps in transfer outcomes across demographic groups. For example, in the cohorts we reviewed, Hispanic or Latino students represented about 49 percent of students who intended to transfer but made up just 29 percent of students who applied to UC—a 20 percentage point gap. Moreover, gaps exist in transfer outcomes between certain demographic groups of students who applied to UC and students whom UC admitted. Table C.3 in Appendix C shows UC’s admission rates by demographic group for community college transfer applicants during our audit period. Most notably, UC campuses admitted 39 percent of transfer applications from Black or African American and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander community college students in comparison to 48 percent of transfer applications from all community college students. These gaps generally align with UC’s public dashboard, which shows, on average, a 10 percentage point difference in the percentage of Black or African American and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander transfer applicants who gained admission somewhere in the system compared to all applicants. 8  

When we asked the UC Office of the President about these gaps, the executive director for undergraduate admissions provided several possible explanations. She asserted that the small number of Black or African American applicants compared to other populations may cause the disparity gap. As Table C.3 in Appendix C reveals, UC transfer applications from community college students who identified as Black or African American comprised only 3 percent of the roughly 687,000 transfer applications UC received during the audit period. The executive director added that other possible causes likely relate to courses that prepare students for their major, GPAs, and similar factors used in admissions.

UC’s Transfer Admission Rates Are Significantly Lower for Certain Preferred Campuses and Majors

Although UC admits a significant portion of transfer applicants to at least one campus, transferring to specific campuses and majors can be more challenging because of competitiveness within the UC system. UC transfer applicants do not specify a preference among the multiple UC campuses to which they may apply. However, factors such as admission rates and levels of transfer representation indicate that many transfer applicants are likely unable to access their preferred campus and major.

Some UC campuses have particularly low rates of admission for transfer students. UC Berkeley and UCLA had the lowest transfer admission rates during our audit period, admitting just 25 percent of all transfer applications. In contrast, UC Riverside had the highest admission rate—about 67 percent of all transfer applications. Table C.2 in Appendix C includes the total number of transfer applications campuses received from 2018 through 2023 and their admission rates based on those applications.

Some majors also have particularly low admission rates, even at campuses with higher admission rates overall. For example, UC Santa Barbara admitted only 11 percent of transfer applications for its computer science program during our audit period, whereas it admitted 58 percent of all transfer applications. Although UC does not have a process similar to CSU’s process for determining which campuses and majors are impacted, UC maintains a public dashboard that shows transfer admission data for specific majors. Its dashboard shows that in 2023, the computer science major had a 5 percent transfer admission rate at UC Berkeley and UCLA, 26 percent at UC Riverside, and 45 percent at University of California, Davis (UC Davis).

When resident transfer applicants who meet UC’s minimum systemwide eligibility requirements do not gain admission to any campuses and majors to which they apply, UC has a transfer referral process for admitting those students at a different campus. However, that process is not as robust as CSU’s redirection process. The text box shows UC’s minimum eligibility requirements for upper‑division transfer students. Meeting these minimum requirements does not guarantee that a student will be able to transfer into the UC system, which is the guarantee that CSU makes to all California residents through its redirection process. During our audit period, UC offered admission to about half of the students in its transfer referral pool. In addition, UC’s policy for transfer applicants during our audit period was to offer them referrals to its referral pool only if they were California residents who did not apply to UC Merced, were not offered admission to any other UC campuses to which they applied, and had last attended a California community college.

UC’s Minimum Eligibility Requirements for Upper-Division Transfer Students

• Complete a pattern of UC-transferable general education courses by the end of the spring term prior to fall enrollment at UC.
• Complete at least 60 semester (90 quarter) units of UC‑transferable credit.
• Earn at least a 2.4 GPA in UC-transferable courses (2.8 for nonresidents).
• Complete the courses needed for the intended major with the minimum grades.

UC does not guarantee admission to all students fulfilling these requirements.

Source: Regulations of the UC Academic Senate and UC admissions website.

According to data the UC Office of the President provided us, UC’s transfer referral pool during our audit period totaled nearly 1,900 students out of about 17,000 potentially eligible students—about 11 percent. Participating UC campuses—UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Merced—offered admission to 946 of these 1,900 students during the same period, or slightly more than half of the transfer referral pool. However, just 200 of the 946 students ultimately enrolled at UC. The executive director of undergraduate admissions at the UC Office of the President explained that one of the main reasons campuses cannot offer admission to more students in the transfer referral pool is that the campuses lack the capacity to accommodate them, sometimes because of limited space in certain majors. The executive director added that students’ lack of major preparation is another barrier.

Another indicator that some transfer students have faced challenges accessing their preferred campus and major is that certain programs of study, often in STEM disciplines, are disproportionately composed of freshmen. Although UC and most of its campuses met the transfer representation goal of enrolling at least one‑third of new resident students through transfer, certain disciplines—such as life sciences and engineering—accommodate far fewer transfer students compared to freshmen and do not meet this goal. In contrast, transfer students represent the majority of undergraduates in some non‑STEM disciplines, such as humanities. Although we observed similar trends at CSU, certain UC STEM disciplines have lower transfer representation than any of CSU’s disciplines. For specific UC campuses and the majors that comprise these STEM disciplines, disparities in transfer representation can be even more pronounced, as Figure 13 shows.

Figure 13 Transfer Representation Varied Significantly Among Specific UC Disciplines and Majors

Source: Analysis of UC application data, unaudited UC‑provided data on degrees awarded, and unaudited data from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara. All percentages are for academic years 2018–19 through 2022–23.

*   We calculated the transfer representation of new enrollees using UC application data, which UC raised concerns about, as we explain in our report text. Therefore, we also obtained and presented transfer representation of UC degrees awarded, which are unaudited data from the UC Office of the President and from UC Berkeley’s and UC Santa Barbara’s public dashboards. We limited all of these calculations to California resident freshmen and resident transfer students based on UC’s existing methodology for calculating transfer representation, except for UC Santa Barbara’s transfer representation of degrees‑awarded calculations, which include all students, because of limitations with filtering the public dashboard by residency.

Figure 13 is a diagram that shows that transfer representation varied significantly among specific UC disciplines and majors and that some majors with low transfer representation may be denying qualified transfer applicants. The top of the graphic shows that systemwide, UC disciplines such as engineering/computer science had lower transfer representation than other disciplines did, such as arts & humanities. Below those examples, the graphic explains that when examining majors that had low transfer representation at our two selected UC campsues, we identified some that exhibited indications that they may be denying qualified transfer applicants. A table provides specific examples of majors such as computer science at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara and shows their transfer representation percentages and their transfer admission rates. The bottom of the graphic includes an example from UC Berkeley in which the campus provided admissions data for its computer science major in Fall 2022. These data indicated that, although the campus admitted all transfer applicants who received the highest application score possible, it denied 108 transfer applicants who received the next highest score—which UC Berkeley defines as “Recommend” for admission.

UC Office of the President officials challenged the validity of using its data from students’ initial applications to measure transfer representation at the major‑ or discipline‑level. The UC Office of the President’s executive director for undergraduate admissions stated that UC campuses do not necessarily admit freshmen directly into a major, whereas they often admit transfer students this way. She stated that because many freshmen enter UC with majors undeclared or eventually enroll in majors different from those they listed on their initial application, enrollment data will change over time. However, when we followed up with the UC Office of the President and the campuses we reviewed to determine whether they had similar data from later in students’ time at UC, the data they provided generally showed the same trends we had previously identified. For instance, the UC Office of the President’s data show that certain STEM disciplines awarded a far smaller proportion of their degrees to transfer students than did non‑STEM disciplines. Figure 13 provides examples of majors for which multiple sources of data revealed low transfer representation.

The UC Office of the President’s executive director for undergraduate admissions told us that one likely reason STEM fields have lower transfer representation is that those disciplines require more major preparation courses that are challenging for students to fulfill at the community college level. Nevertheless, the executive director also confirmed that some transfer applicants who are qualified—meaning that they meet UC’s minimum eligibility requirements and also have the preparation required for the specific major to which they are applying—are denied admission to certain campuses and majors, in part because of those campuses’ and majors’ competitiveness and limited capacity. We identified further indications that some majors may be denying admission to qualified transfer applicants even though those majors have low transfer representation, as Figure 13 shows. If a UC campus denies qualified transfer applicants in a certain major and it also enrolls relatively few transfers compared to freshmen in that major, it raises questions about whether the campus is doing everything it reasonably can to accommodate qualified transfer students.

Ultimately, neither the UC system as a whole nor the campuses we reviewed have established goals or mechanisms to monitor transfer representation at the major or program level. As a result, they are unable to demonstrate whether they are making reasonable attempts to accommodate transfer students in competitive fields of study. Doing so would be consistent with the Legislature’s intent, which we describe in the Introduction, that the transfer system be implemented in such a way as to ensure the successful transfer of students to CSU or UC, including to the campus and major of their choice, if academic performance is satisfactory. It would also be consistent with the intent of the Legislature that campus enrollment planning processes provide for the equitable treatment of eligible entering freshmen and eligible community college transfer students with regard to accommodation in majors.

Despite Its Capacity Challenges, UC Could Better Prioritize the Admission of Transfer Students

Limited enrollment capacity contributes to students facing challenges gaining admission to their preferred UC campuses and majors. According to the UC Office of the President’s executive advisor for academic planning and policy development, UC has limited room to expand the total number of students it enrolls at most of its campuses. As we discuss earlier, physical capacity, operational capacity, and budgeted capacity are factors affecting overall enrollment capacity. For example, both UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara have been involved in litigation with local governments and advocacy groups that challenge those campuses’ enrollment growth relative to the amount of housing available for their students. In addition, specific majors or programs at these and other campuses have limited capacity relative to available faculty or classroom space.

In the face of these challenges, UC has established plans to increase capacity where feasible. According to a systemwide capacity plan that UC published in July 2022, UC projects to grow enrollment by more than 23,000 full‑time equivalent resident students before 2030, although the plan does not specify how many of these students should be transfer students. UC campuses have different responsibilities for accommodating this planned growth. For example, the plan states that UC Merced and UC Riverside will accommodate from 30 percent to 35 percent of the undergraduate enrollment growth. Meanwhile, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego will increase capacity primarily by enrolling a larger percentage of California residents and fewer nonresidents. Additionally, the May 2022 UC compact with the Governor’s administration calls for 1 percent annual enrollment growth systemwide for all resident students from academic years 2023–24 through 2026–27 in exchange for state funding to accommodate that growth. The compact specifies that 15 percent of this growth should occur at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego. The compact also specifies that UC’s overall enrollment growth should be consistent with its existing two‑to‑one transfer representation goal. 9

To achieve its broad enrollment goals, the UC Office of the President coordinates with campuses to establish specific enrollment targets each year. These campus enrollment targets are essential because they guide the campuses’ decisions about how many new students to admit. Each campus receives finalized targets from the UC Office of the President for both freshmen and transfer resident enrollees, which helps the UC Office of the President ensure that campuses are working to meet UC’s systemwide transfer representation goal. Nonetheless, these campus‑level targets do not always achieve the transfer representation goal at each campus. Further, the executive advisor for academic planning and policy development at the UC Office of the President stated that it does not specify any targets at the major or program level, nor does it oversee each campus’s process for distributing its overall campus enrollment target among its specific departments or majors.

Campuses’ approaches to achieving these broad enrollment targets vary, which is likely one contributing factor to some majors having low transfer representation. For example, UC Berkeley sets enrollment targets for incoming undergraduates for each college within the campus and for some majors that the college deans determine to have limited capacity. These targets include a specific number of transfer students to enroll as new students but not for all majors. However, when we reviewed these targets for certain colleges and majors, we found that many of them did not meet the one‑third transfer representation goal. 10  For instance, within its College of Letters and Sciences, UC Berkeley did not have a major‑specific enrollment target for freshmen entrants into computer science until Fall 2022, even though it had a relatively low enrollment target for transfer entrants that ranged from 37 to 58 students each year from 2018–19 through 2022–23. UC Santa Barbara’s director of institutional research, planning, and assessment stated that the campus does not set specific enrollment targets for each major except within the College of Engineering. The director provided a table of enrollment targets for new transfer students in this college, and it indicated that UC Santa Barbara had planned to enroll fewer than 60 total transfer students in computer science over the five‑year period from 2018 through 2022.

UC Office of the President officials expressed concerns that enrolling additional transfer students at the program or major level would require UC to deny enrollment to eligible freshmen applicants, especially if it did so for highly competitive programs or majors with limited capacity. As we acknowledge in the previous section about CSU, when limited capacity exists, enrolling a greater number of transfer students could mean denying more freshmen applicants in certain campuses or majors—but not necessarily systemwide. State law provides that the CSU and UC systems must not only achieve a specific upper‑division enrollment goal through programs aimed at increasing the numbers of qualified community college transfer students without denying eligible freshman applicants, but the law also requires campus enrollment plans to include adequate spaces for community college transfer students in all undergraduate colleges or schools. As we note in the Introduction, the Legislature has further declared its intent that CSU and UC prioritize the admission and enrollment of CCC students who have met transfer requirements over students entering at the freshman or sophomore levels. If a particular campus or major has been using an enrollment process that clearly favors freshmen at the expense of transfer students, changing that process may be reasonable.

UC could explore options to increase transfer representation within particular campuses or majors that allow it to maintain the total number of freshmen it enrolls systemwide. For example, UC could consider enrolling more transfer students in particular campuses or majors and offsetting any subsequent reductions in freshmen enrollment in those campuses or majors with increases in freshmen enrollment at other campuses or majors. Further, specific campuses or majors could consider prioritizing capacity increases to accommodate additional transfer students without decreasing the number of freshmen they enroll.

To ensure that campuses adequately prioritize transfer students for the space they do have available, the UC Office of the President could formalize its systemwide transfer representation goal and extend it to the level of campuses and their specific majors or programs. It could monitor campuses’ progress toward meeting that goal using degree data, enrollment data, or another appropriate data source. The UC Office of the President could then follow up with campuses that have concerning transfer representation trends, such as trends showing that competitive majors have low transfer representation and may be denying qualified transfer applicants. It could assess the reasons campuses provide for those trends and, when warranted, work with them to establish a plan to improve transfer representation by adjusting their admissions and enrollment processes to enroll additional transfer students or by taking other actions. For example, if a campus has one or more programs that are denying qualified transfer applicants despite having low transfer representation, the UC Office of the President could work with the campus to determine whether it is feasible to increase upper‑division capacity in those programs or to take other actions to enroll more transfer students.

Recommendations

Ccc chancellor’s office.

To assess and improve the State’s efforts to help community college students transfer, the CCC Chancellor’s Office should establish by September 2025 a goal transfer rate and a process for measuring and reporting that rate as it applies to the statewide system and to individual community colleges. The process for measuring the transfer rate should include identifying the proportion of transfer‑intending community college students who ultimately transfer successfully by using a methodology that the Chancellor’s Office determines best captures students’ intent to transfer and allows for timely analysis. The Chancellor’s Office should also incorporate this goal into any key strategic plans for the system.

To help community colleges improve their transfer rates, the CCC Chancellor’s Office should establish a process by September 2025 for identifying any specific best practices at community colleges that have had a measurable impact on the colleges’ transfer rates and sharing these practices with all colleges.

CSU Chancellor’s Office and UC Office of the President

To ensure that their campuses and degree programs adequately prioritize transfer students, the CSU Chancellor’s Office and the UC Office of the President should establish and begin implementing procedures by September 2025 for monitoring and publicly reporting the ratio of community college transfer students to other undergraduates in their systems, campuses, and specific disciplines, programs, or majors. The procedures should establish the following:

• Specific goals for adequate representation of transfer students among all undergraduates, such as a goal that transfer students represent at least one‑third of new enrollees or graduating degree‑earners. The systems should work toward meeting these goals at the system level and, where feasible, at the campus level and at the level of campuses’ specific disciplines, programs, or majors.
• A formal and documented method to identify when campuses or their specific disciplines, programs, or majors are below the goals and, when appropriate, to work with those campuses or programs to determine the possible causes for the low transfer representation and document plans for increasing it. For example, these plans could include the campus or program enrolling additional transfer students by expanding its upper‑division capacity or adjusting its enrollment targets, if doing so is feasible. In carrying out this process, the CSU Chancellor’s Office and the UC Office of the President should prioritize following up with the campuses or programs whose admissions processes may be denying qualified transfer applicants.

To best position the CSU and UC systems to admit and enroll more transfer students into their preferred degree programs, the CSU Chancellor’s Office and the UC Office of the President should establish formal processes by September 2025 for identifying the specific disciplines, programs, or majors where capacity increases at campuses would be most valuable. They should then prioritize those areas for future capacity increases. For example, both offices could use transfer representation data or data from their redirection or transfer referral processes to identify majors in which additional capacity would enable more transfer students to enroll.

• Prospective transfer students face complex transfer considerations, as Figure 14 shows. The Legislature and the State’s three higher education systems have designed transfer pathways in part to try to minimize this complexity.
• The Associate Degree for Transfer (ADT) offers important benefits to certain transfer students. However, only about one‑quarter of the students who transfer to CSU could take advantage of all of those benefits, in part because each community college may not offer every ADT, and each CSU campus may not accept every ADT.
• UC has not yet widely adopted the ADT model. Instead, it has established its own transfer options that do not provide the same level of benefits the ADT provides.
• Efforts to align curricula between CSU and UC are ongoing but have yet to make significant progress. UC could further streamline its transfer requirements either by widely adopting the ADT or by ensuring that its own transfer options emulate the ADT’s key benefits.

Students May Struggle to Meet Transfer Requirements Because of Differences Between Each System, Campus, and Major

As Figure 14 shows, community college students must navigate a complex series of decisions in preparation to transfer, particularly if they are considering applying to multiple campuses or majors. A key hurdle that transfer‑intending students often face is balancing various sets of curricular requirements, each tied to a distinct purpose. For example, the requirements for students to obtain associate degrees may be different than those they need to transfer to CSU and UC. Therefore, in some instances, students may decide to take courses that meet individual transfer requirements rather than those that would allow them to obtain an associate degree.

Figure 14 Students Face Many Potentially Complex Decisions When Preparing to Transfer

Source: Analysis of state law, course catalogs, student‑facing orientation materials and websites, and interviews with system and campus officials.

Figure 14 is an infographic that depicts the complexity of students’ transfer considerations, especially when students may apply to multiple campuses and majors. The graphic explains that the Legislature and the three higher education systems have attempted to streamline transfer pathways by introducing options such as the ADT, TAG, and UC Transfer Pathways. At the top of the graphic, to demonstrate the complex decisions that students may face when preparing to transfer, nine speech bubbles surrounding a group of students include the types of questions a transfer-intending student may need to consider. For example, one is, “Which university campuses might I want to transfer to?” Another reads, “Should I pursue an associate degree or can I meet transfer requirements without a degree?” Below this top portion of the graphic, a box depicts the key transfer options of the ADT for CSU, and TAG and UC Transfer Pathways for UC.

Additionally, CSU and UC transfer requirements often vary by campus and major. Major preparation courses—the lower‑division courses for a particular major—are a significant source of this complexity. Individual CSU and UC campuses sometimes require different lower‑division courses for the same major, as Figure 15 shows. Further, it is common for students to apply to multiple campuses: during our audit period, about 47 percent of CSU transfer applicants applied to two or more CSU campuses and 83 percent of UC transfer applicants applied to two or more UC campuses. As a result, students may need to take different community college courses to meet the specific requirements of each CSU or UC campus.

Figure 15 CSU and UC Campuses May Each Require Different Preparation Courses for Transfer to the Same Major

Source: Analysis of academic year 2022–23 course articulation agreements from ASSIST and campuses’ catalogs, websites, and admissions manuals.

Note: Recommended courses can differ in their impact on campuses’ admissions decisions, adding further complexity for students. For example, none of the recommended courses for Stanislaus State impact a student’s ability to gain admission, although taking them would reduce the number of courses students need to take after they transfer. By contrast, completion of UC Berkeley’s and UC Santa Barbara’s recommended courses may affect a student’s ability to gain admission.

*   We did not audit UC San Diego or CSU San Marcos, so courses for those campuses reflect our interpretation of information available from ASSIST articulation agreements and related campus webpages. We include information from these campuses to demonstrate that differences can exist even within the same region.

Figure 15 is a table that shows that CSU and UC campuses each require different preparation courses for the computer science major. The top of the graphic explains that we reviewed six campuses to which a community college student studying computer science may wish to transfer and identified four types of courses that were common to each of them, such as an introductory computer programming course and a calculus sequence. Below these common course types, a table shows that ten types of courses differed more significantly across the six campuses we reviewed, including between three San Diego-area campuses: San Diego State, CSU San Marcos, and UC San Diego. In the table, each campus has its own column and each course type has its own row. The table notes whether a particular course is either required or recommended, and how it may impact students’ chances of admission. For example, for San Diego State, six course types are listed as required and are shaded red to indicate that not completing such courses may impact admission. However, for Stanislaus State, only three course types are included, and they are all listed as recommended and shaded yellow, which indicates that not completing such courses does not impact a student’s chances of admission. These types of differences exist between the other campuses included in the table as well.

Moreover, students face an added layer of complexity because their completion of major preparation courses may affect them differently depending on the campus to which they apply. For example, with the exception of its impacted nursing program, Stanislaus State does not consider as part of its admissions decisions any major preparation courses, meaning that students can gain admission without having completed those courses. However, students would still need to complete those courses after they transfer, which could result in those students taking longer to finish their degrees. By contrast, San Diego State generally bases admissions decisions in part on the percentage of major preparation courses that students have completed, with each completed course contributing toward that percentage. Although San Diego State does not categorically deny students who have not completed all lower‑division courses, those students’ chances for admission to competitive programs may be lower. Similarly, UC Berkeley would consider students’ applications weaker if they had not completed all of the courses for computer science that we show in Figure 15 , but it would not automatically disqualify them from admission. However, UC Santa Barbara would deem ineligible to that major a student’s application that lacks any of its required courses. Students may find these differences difficult to understand when they are making decisions about which courses to take at the community college level.

Faculty drive the CSU and UC campuses’ different approaches to course requirements. Because faculty are the curriculum experts, they can mandate prerequisite courses that they deem necessary for students to succeed in their programs—and these programs will naturally differ between campuses because of different faculty and campus interests. Campuses can still take a rigorous approach to imposing transfer requirements. For example, UC Santa Barbara has established a process for one of its Academic Senate committees to evaluate faculty proposals to add supplementary admission criteria in certain majors. According to the executive director of the UC Santa Barbara Academic Senate, since 2019 the committee has approved increases in the admissions criteria for the physics, mathematics, and chemistry majors.

Even after students understand the CSU and UC lower‑division course requirements, they still must determine whether their community college offers courses that meet these requirements. The process through which colleges and universities establish that a course at one institution is similar to a course at another is generally referred to as articulation . Transfer students rely on the articulation process because it is the mechanism that enables their community college courses to count toward CSU and UC transfer requirements. However, articulation can be time‑consuming because it is decentralized and requires sustained collaboration between multiple parties at different institutions. For example, establishing that a single community college course is similar enough to a CSU- or UC‑required course often requires significant coordination between the community college’s articulation officer and the officer at the relevant CSU or UC campus, as well as review by faculty at the CSU or UC campus.

Although the higher education systems developed an online resource to provide students with valuable articulation information, this resource has limitations. The Articulation System Stimulating Interinstitutional Student Transfer (ASSIST) is a website that shows prospective California transfer students how community college courses may satisfy elective, general education, and major requirements at a particular CSU or UC campus. However, some CSU campuses have not maintained up‑to‑date articulation agreements on the website, making it more difficult for students to accurately determine whether their courses will meet transfer requirements. For example, until 2023 San Diego State did not always add its current articulation agreements to ASSIST, preferring instead to use its own website to provide better integration to its course catalog and campus software. San Diego State officials indicated that many local community college counselors preferred its website because of its ease of use. In addition, although CSU and UC campuses often refer students to ASSIST to understand their transfer requirements, the campuses do not follow a standardized format when listing these requirements, such as specifying whether and how recommended courses will impact a student’s chances of admission. Finally, officials in all three systems told us that ASSIST does not receive dedicated state funding to fulfill its mission of serving California’s public colleges and universities, which limits its ability to maintain and expand data storage and management, make improvements to the system to benefit students, and respond to legislative mandates.

In some cases, students may learn that their community college does not offer all of the courses that a CSU or UC campus has approved to fulfill its requirement. For example, none of our five selected community colleges had full articulation with San Diego State’s mechanical engineering major or with UC Berkeley’s computer science major. As we explain earlier, if students do not fulfill certain transfer requirements, they may be less competitive for admission or may need to take additional courses once they transfer. If a community college does not offer a course that articulates to a CSU or UC requirement, students striving to be competitive for admission may have to take the needed course at a different community college. However, doing so may add cost and complexity to their education. Moreover, in some instances, a campus may not accept a student’s courses as sufficient for admission if the student has a split series , meaning that they completed some of the course sequence at one community college and other courses at a different college. Community college counselors told us that challenges with articulation—such as not being able to locate an updated articulation agreement, or learning that a needed course is not offered or articulated—can sometimes discourage students from applying to a CSU or UC campus altogether.

Although data limitations with ASSIST made it difficult for us to identify and evaluate articulation gaps statewide, ASSIST administrators have been working to develop a standardized data format that they expect to become available before the end of 2024. This format will likely make it possible to identify where the most significant gaps in articulation exist for transfer students across the State. Performing such an analysis could help the three systems prioritize their efforts to articulate the courses that will most benefit transfer students.

Although the ADT Has Streamlined Transfers to CSU for Certain Students, Changes Would Broaden Its Impact

As we discuss in the Introduction , one of the intended purposes of the ADT is to serve as the primary transfer pathway between CCC and campuses in the CSU system, and the Legislature recently established a pilot program that will expand the ADT to certain campuses and majors within the UC system. Since the Legislature authorized it in 2011, the ADT has streamlined the process for some students who transfer to CSU. However, several factors prevent the ADT from fully achieving the objectives that the Legislature envisioned. Figure 16 summarizes the three primary benefits of the ADT and its shortcomings. In particular, the ADT has helped simplify transfer requirements and can reduce the number of units and amount of time that students need to obtain a degree. Nonetheless, relatively few transfer students actually realized the full promises of these benefits.

Figure 16 The ADT Offers Significant Benefits for Students, but Drawbacks Remain

Source: State law, CSU policy, analysis of CSU public ADT data and its internal graduation data, and public research reports.

Note: Students on a similar pathway are students who have earned an ADT and transferred into a major or concentration that the CSU campus has deemed similar to the student’s ADT.

*   Unit totals for ADT earners can exceed 60 units before or after they transfer if the students take courses outside of their ADT, or if they earn multiple ADTs.

Figure 16 is a detailed table in which we explain the three key benefits of the ADT for students, followed by three key shortcomings of the ADT. The table also includes examples and data that support and provide context for the three key benefits of the ADT. The three key benefits of the ADT are an admission guarantee to the CSU system, unit specifications that limit students’ time to obtain a bachelor’s degree, and assurances that courses taken will count toward transfer at CSU. The three key limitations are that the admission guarantee is not for any CSU specific campus or major, there are gaps in ADT availability across community colleges and CSU campuses, and the ADT has had little impact on UC’s admissions or transfer process.

In accordance with requirements in state law, CSU guarantees all ADT earners admission somewhere in the system, but that guarantee does not extend to a specific CSU campus or major. Further, although ADT earners still retain additional benefits over transfer students who do not earn an ADT—which we explain in the paragraphs that follow—since 2019 CSU has implemented a similar systemwide admission guarantee for all CSU‑eligible resident applicants through its redirection process, as we describe in Chapter 1 .

If a CSU campus has determined that the ADT in a particular subject area is similar to one of its own fields of study—meaning that an applicant with that ADT is on a similar pathway , as we explain in the text box —then the campus, if it is impacted, provides a fractional point increase to the ADT earner’s GPA during the application scoring process. 11  This advantage may be one reason that CSU transfer applicants who indicated that they had earned an ADT had an admission rate to CSU campuses that was about 5 percent higher than applicants who listed an associate degree on their application, as Table B.3 in Appendix B demonstrates. However, if the share of all CSU transfer applicants who earn an ADT continues to expand, this advantage will become less meaningful.

ADT Earners Only Receive the ADT’s Full Benefit if They Transfer to CSU on a Similar Pathway

For an ADT earner to be on a similar pathway, the following must occur:

• A CSU campus must determine that one or more of its majors or concentrations is sufficiently similar to the state-approved transfer model curriculum for the ADT in a particular subject area. This process is known as accepting the ADT .
• The student must transfer into one of the majors or concentrations for which the CSU campus accepts the ADT.

Example: A student earns an ADT in computer science and transfers into the computer science major at San Diego State, which accepts the ADT for computer science.

ADT earners who are not on a similar pathway when they transfer do not receive the full benefit of the ADT.

Source: Analysis of state law and CSU memoranda and public reports.

The ADT has also had a small but potentially meaningful impact on the number of units and amount of time that it takes students to transfer and earn a bachelor’s degree. One of the main promises of the ADT is that students can earn it within just 60 semester units at the community college level—generally equivalent to two years of full‑time enrollment—and can earn a CSU bachelor’s degree in a similar field within an additional 60 semester units of upper‑division coursework. The ADT thus enables students to earn a bachelor’s degree in four years.

Our analysis shows that students who earned an ADT and ultimately graduated from CSU did so with fewer units, both at the community college level and at CSU after they transferred, than other CSU transfer graduates did. For example, ADT earners on a similar pathway graduated with an average of 59 units at CSU, compared to 65 units for other CSU transfer graduates. When looking specifically at biological science as a discipline, the distinction between those on a similar pathway and other CSU transfer students is particularly pronounced: ADT earners on a similar pathway graduated with an average of 59 units at CSU compared to 65 units for ADT earners not on a similar pathway and to 72 units for transfer students who did not earn an ADT. Because most courses at the CSU campuses we reviewed consist of three or four units, these differences may mean that students not on a similar ADT pathway had to take multiple additional courses to earn their degrees.

Finally, the ADT has helped streamline the transfer process by creating a common framework of required courses across multiple campuses, which can reduce complexity for students. The ADT provides a preapproved package of courses that will meet transfer requirements across the different CSU campuses that accept it, minimizing the need for course‑level articulation. Specifically, for each ADT, CCC and CSU faculty from the relevant academic discipline developed a transfer model curriculum that serves as a framework of at least 18 units of required lower‑division courses toward that discipline, leaving room to complete general education courses. Each community college that decides to offer that ADT then identifies courses that meet these parameters through a statewide course identification process called the Course Identification Numbering System (C‑ID). Students who earn the community college’s ADT are therefore automatically eligible for transfer in that discipline.

Despite the ADT’s advantages, most community college students who transfer to CSU do not experience all of these benefits. As Figure 17 demonstrates, the share of CSU transfer students who earned an ADT before transferring has increased since academic year 2014–15 but was still only about half of all transfer students in academic year 2022–23. Further, only about half of those students—or one‑quarter of all CSU transfer students—were on a similar pathway, meaning that they could take advantage of all of the ADT’s benefits.

Figure 17 The ADT Has Become Increasingly Prevalent but Still Accounts for Only About Half of Transfers to CSU

Source:  Unaudited data from the CSU Chancellor’s Office and reports to its Board of Trustees.

Figure 17 is a vertical stacked bar chart that shows that the ADT has become increasingly prevalent, but still accounts for only about half of transfers from CCC to CSU. Vertical bars for each academic year from 2014-15 through 2022-23 show the rising percentage of CCC transfer students arriving at a CSU campus having earned an ADT. Each bar also distinguishes between ADT transfer students on a similar pathway, shown in dark blue, and ADT transfer students not on a similar pathway, shown in light blue. In the 2022-23 academic year, for example, about 50 percent of CCC transfer students to CSU had earned an ADT, but only a little more than 25 percent were on a similar pathway.

Transfer students may not receive the benefits of an ADT for a number of reasons. For example, they may decide not to pursue an ADT because they want to transfer into a CSU major or concentration for which no ADT exists, such as engineering. Similarly, students may earn an ADT but then apply to transfer to CSU in a different field of study, essentially forgoing the benefit of completing their bachelor’s degree within 60 units. Other students may not be aware that an ADT is a viable transfer option—a concern that a recently enacted state law may address by requiring that community colleges automatically place transfer‑intending students on an ADT pathway by August 2024, if an ADT exists for their intended major.

However, perhaps the most significant limitation to the ADT’s impact is that community colleges may not offer every ADT, and CSU campuses may not accept every ADT, as Figure 18 shows. For community colleges, offering a particular ADT means providing courses that meet the specifications of that transfer model curriculum, including the 60‑unit cap on required courses. For CSU campuses, accepting an ADT means accepting students who have earned that ADT as sufficiently prepared for one or more related majors or concentrations and providing those students the opportunity to receive a bachelor’s degree within 60 upper‑division units.

Figure 18 Community Colleges May Not Offer and CSU Campuses May Not Accept ADTs in All Fields of Study

Source: Analysis of data from CSU’s public ADT and transfer model curriculum databases as of Fall 2023, and CSU data for graduates.

*   Accepting the ADT means that a campus has deemed at least one of its majors or concentrations as similar to the ADT.

†   Cal Maritime accepts fewer ADTs than Cal Poly San Luis Obispo does, but Cal Maritime has limited and specialized programs.

Figure 18 is a diagram showing that community colleges may not offer and CSU campuses may not accept ADTs in all fields of study, which can limit the benefits of the ADT for students. The top of the graphic shows that to receive the full benefits of the ADT, students must both attend a community college that offers and ADT in that field and enroll in a CSU campus that accepts the ADT in that field. Community colleges offer on average about 26 of 40 ADTs and CSU campuses accept on average about 29 of 40 ADTs, with significant variation across individual colleges and campuses. For example, two CSU campuses accept all 40 ADTs, but Cal Poly San Luis Obispo accepts only 11 out of 40 ADTs. The bottom of the graphic provides an example specific to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that shows that the campus does not accept the ADT in some popular fields, such as business administration and computer science, which limits the ADT’s benefits for students.

The ADT’s prevalence is particularly limited in some STEM fields, as Figure 19 shows. As a result, fewer students in these STEM fields transfer to CSU with an ADT or on a similar ADT pathway. For example, in Fall 2022, only 32 percent of students who transferred from community colleges to CSU in the computer and information sciences discipline had earned an ADT, and only 13 percent were on a similar pathway. By contrast, about 72 percent of CSU transfer students in the psychology discipline had earned an ADT, and about 47 percent were on a similar pathway.

Figure 19 Gaps in ADT Availability Are Most Pronounced in STEM Fields

Source: Data from CSU public dashboards related to the ADT and undergraduate student origins.

*   We present transfers in the most popular non‑STEM and STEM majors as a percentage of all CCC transfer enrollees to CSU in Fall 2023.

†   Information systems is a standalone major and a concentration in both the computer science and business majors. Some CSU campuses have determined that the Business Administration ADT is similar to an information systems concentration within their business major.

Figure 19 consists of two tables that show that gaps in ADT availability are most pronounced in STEM fields. The first table is for non-STEM fields, and it shows that three of the most popular majors for transfer enrollment in the CSU system—psychology, business administration, and sociology—have relatively wide ADT availability across community colleges and CSU campuses, meaning that many colleges offer the ADT and many CSU campuses accept it. The second table is for STEM fields and shows some noticeable shortcomings in ADT availability. For example, computer science is the third most common major by enrollment within the CSU system, but only 58 of 115 community colleges offer an ADT in this field and 15 out of 23 CSU campuses accept the ADT. Public Health is another STEM field with similar shortcomings. By contrast, biology is an example of a STEM field with relatively wider ADT availability.

Although ADTs now exist in 40 subject areas that include most majors in which CSU’s transfer students enroll, there are notable STEM fields in which no ADT exists. For instance, no ADT exists in engineering, even though nearly 2,500 students who transferred from community college to CSU—or just about 5 percent of all transfers—enrolled in an engineering major in Fall 2022. The committees that draft transfer model curricula have continued to explore adding an ADT in engineering fields. 12 However, representatives from all three systems have indicated that including all of the necessary coursework for certain STEM programs within the current 60‑unit limit is challenging, and we discuss steps taken to address this challenge later in this section. Nonetheless, because STEM majors tend to include more course requirements and units than other majors do, STEM transfer students may benefit the most from the ADT’s streamlined curriculum and unit guarantees. In general, increasing the use of the ADT in STEM fields would likely require both expanding its impact in existing fields, such as computer science, and adding it in new fields, such as in engineering majors.        

Another reason that students may not transfer on a similar ADT pathway is that CSU campuses may accept an ADT as similar to only some of their relevant majors or concentrations, limiting its benefits for students who decide to enroll in other majors or concentrations. For example, 19 out of 23 CSU campuses accept the ADT in economics. However, 11 of those 19 campuses accept the economics ADT for only one major or one concentration within that major. For instance, San Diego State’s economics major contains four possible concentrations, but that campus accepts the economics ADT in only one of these. By contrast, some other CSU campuses—such as Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Pomona—accept the economics ADT for additional concentrations within the economics major, maximizing the ADT’s utility for students transferring to those campuses. Given that the ADT framework allows it to prepare students to transfer into various types of related majors and concentrations, CSU campuses should have a clear rationale in situations when they limit its benefits.

The text box summarizes some of the reasons community college and CSU officials provided for not offering or accepting the ADT in certain fields. One significant barrier to community colleges offering ADTs in certain fields is the requirement that the ADT’s coursework not exceed 60 units. For example, Diablo Valley’s senior dean of curriculum and instruction told us that the college identified courses for the computer science ADT that totaled 61 units. She stated that faculty could not reduce the units to meet the 60‑unit limit because they believe that the 5‑unit calculus courses they developed for an associate degree in computer science provide students with the best possible academic preparation. However, she noted that another college in the same district offers the ADT in computer science with calculus courses that are only 4 units.

Key Reasons for Existing Gaps in ADT Availability

Key Reasons for Not Offering the ADT in Certain Fields

• No similar program or major exists at the college.
• The college cannot fit all of the required courses within the ADT’s 60-unit limit.
• The college does not offer all of the courses needed to develop the ADT.
• No one individual or department at the college has clear administrative responsibility for developing an ADT in a particular field.

Key Reasons for Not Accepting the ADT in Certain Fields

• No similar degree or major exists at the campus.
• The coursework required after transfer for a student to earn a particular bachelor’s degree exceeds 60 units.
• The ADT does not adequately prepare students for success in the campus’s program.

Source: CCC and CSU policy memos and interviews with officials at the CSU Chancellor’s Office, the five community colleges we reviewed, and one of the CSU campuses that we reviewed.

Citing similar concerns, a statewide committee composed of faculty, administrators, and students recommended in a December 2023 report that the Legislature should raise the unit limit for ADTs for certain STEM majors to 66 units provided that there is clear evidence of the necessity for the increase. 13  Because one purpose of the ADT is to limit the units that students need to transfer, if the law is amended to increase the unit totals for certain transfer model curricula, the higher education systems would need to weigh the costs and benefits of establishing those higher‑unit ADTs. Further, the systems could target fields in which significant and widespread gaps in ADT availability exist because of challenges with the 60‑unit threshold. For instance, 58 of the 115 community colleges offer the computer science ADT, suggesting that although the 60‑unit threshold may be a barrier for that ADT, many colleges have found a way to overcome it. A specialist in the educational services and support division of the CCC Chancellor’s Office told us that when some community colleges can offer an ADT within 60 units and others cannot, it suggests that compromise may be needed within colleges rather than an increase in the unit cap statewide.

Some CSU officials asserted that the ADT may not adequately prepare transfer students for success in certain campus programs and that campuses consequently cannot award some bachelor’s degrees with only 60 additional units. For example, San Diego State does not accept the ADT in child and adolescent development even though the campus offers a bachelor’s degree in child development. According to the director of curriculum services, San Diego State’s curriculum toward this degree includes a minimum of 65 units of upper‑division credit—53 units toward the major and 12 units of other upper‑division coursework—and therefore an ADT earner would not be able to complete the degree in 60 units. However, 17 of the 23 CSU campuses do accept the child and adolescent development ADT in at least one concentration, demonstrating that designing an ADT‑compatible degree is possible.

Although some campuses may assert that the ADT is not adequate preparation for their specialized programs, the ADT is merely half of the degree—the lower‑division courses. Thus, it allows CSU campuses some flexibility to design the 60 units of upper‑division coursework to meet the particular needs of their programs or majors. In fact, some CSU campuses accept all or virtually all of the 40 existing ADT types. For instance, except for an updated version of the communication studies ADT that the campus plans to review, Stanislaus State accepts the ADT in all of the fields for which it offers a related degree.

Although the Legislature intended the ADT to be the primary transfer pathway, state law that authorized the ADT neither explicitly requires the CCC Chancellor’s Office to monitor community colleges’ decisions to offer an ADT, nor does it require the CSU Chancellor’s Office to monitor campuses’ decisions to accept ADTs, as the text box illustrates. 14  According to the specialist within the educational services and support division of the CCC Chancellor’s Office, the CCC Chancellor’s Office proactively monitored individual colleges’ adherence to their statutory responsibility to create ADTs and followed up with those not in compliance until 2019. He added that the system stopped monitoring colleges’ efforts because of limited resources and because state law did not require it to do so.

The CCC and CSU Chancellors’ Offices’ Oversight of Campuses’ Decisions to Offer or Accept the ADT

The statute that established ADTs requires the following:

Community Colleges

“ … create an ADT in every major and area of emphasis offered by that college for any transfer model curriculum approved subsequent to the commencement of the 2013–14 academic year within 18 months of the approval.”

However, this law does not expressly require the CCC Chancellor’s Office to monitor this requirement, such as by evaluating colleges’ rationales for not offering an ADT.

CSU Campuses

“ … make every effort to accept the ADT in each of the concentrations.”

Similarly, this law does not require the CSU Chancellor’s Office to evaluate campuses’ rationales for not accepting an ADT.

Source: State law.

For its part, the CSU Chancellor’s Office provides minimal monitoring of campuses’ acceptance of ADTs. For example, it requires campuses to report publicly whether they accept an ADT for a given major or concentration, but it has made only limited efforts to document and evaluate campuses’ detailed rationales for changes that result in discontinuing ADT pathways. The assistant director of undergraduate transfer programs stated that the CSU Chancellor’s Office largely defers to campuses to make decisions about their programmatic curriculum, including how it relates to similarity with the ADT. Finally, the CSU Chancellor’s Office tracks and reports publicly whether students transferred to CSU with an ADT and whether they were on a similar pathway. However, the data it displays do not distinguish between ADT earners who were not on a similar pathway because the campus to which they transferred did not accept their ADT and ADT earners who simply decided to pursue a different field of study.

Strengthening system oversight of community colleges’ decisions to offer ADTs and CSU campuses’ decisions to accept them would provide more assurance that both CCC and CSU are doing everything they can to help students transfer and graduate successfully.

UC Has Transfer Options That Are Comparable to the ADT, but They Lack Some of Its Key Benefits

UC has three transfer options that are in some ways comparable to the ADT, but they are not designed to provide the same level of benefits that the ADT can provide, as Figure 20 demonstrates. UC’s primary transfer options are the Transfer Admission Guarantee (TAG), which guarantees admission to a specific campus and major, and UC Transfer Pathways, which outlines courses that will make transfer students competitive for admission into certain majors at any participating UC campus. A student who applies for a TAG and completes Transfer Pathway courses would be using what UC refers to as Pathways+, which it considers a third transfer option and which provides transfer students the benefits from both TAG and Transfer Pathways. Although each of these transfer options offers different features, all three lack some of the most important advantages of the ADT.

Figure 20 UC’s Transfer Options Approximate the ADT’s Key Benefits but Are Not as Successful in Streamlining Transfer

Source: Analysis of state law, UC Transfer Pathways and TAG information, and campus and system admissions requirements.

*   We did not include Pathways+, which is simply a combination of UC Transfer Pathways and TAG.

Figure 20 is a chart that compares the three key benefits of the ADT to features of UC’s transfer options—most notably, TAG and UC Transfer Pathways—to show that UC’s options are not as successful in streamlining transfer as the ADT is. The three categories for comparison between the ADT and UC’s options relate to admissions, unit frameworks, and course approval. For example, the ADT contains a finite list of centrally-approved courses that will automatically count for credit at any accepting CSU campus, whereas UC Transfer Pathways courses do not necessarily correspond to actual courses at community colleges that have been approved for transfer credit. Furthermore, students applying to multiple UC campuses may end up taking more courses than needed because of differences in campuses’ transfer requirements. The bottom of the graphic contains an example from the UC Transfer Pathway in biology, showing instances in which the courses that campuses require may differ from those listed on the UC Transfer Pathway—potentially adding complexity for students.

TAG Guarantees Admission to Certain Campuses and Majors, but It Is Not a Comprehensive Transfer Option

TAG provides community college students guaranteed admission to a participating UC campus and major if those students earn a specific GPA and meet existing campus and major admission requirements. Whereas the ADT’s admission guarantee is for the CSU system as a whole, TAG guarantees admission to a specific UC campus and major, which provides more predictability for transfer applicants. TAG is relatively popular among transfer students: according to data from a CCC‑UC Transfer Task Force report issued in July 2022, 30 percent of the students who applied to transfer to UC from 2018 through 2021 had a TAG.

However, TAG is not a comprehensive transfer option. Students may apply for and secure a TAG from only one UC campus. Further, as the text box shows, three campuses and certain majors at the other six campuses do not offer TAG. One of the main reasons that the three campuses do not offer TAG is that they are concerned about their capacity to accommodate the number of students who would use it. For example, the assistant vice chancellor and director of undergraduate admissions at UC Berkeley told us that the campus is not able to offer TAG because it likely could not set a GPA requirement high enough to reasonably limit the number of students who would use it.

Several UC Campuses and Majors Do Not Offer TAG

Campuses that do not offer TAG:

• UC Berkeley
• UC San Diego

Examples of majors that some TAG-participating campuses exclude from the guarantee:

• Computer science (Davis, Irvine, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz)
• Mechanical Engineering (Santa Barbara)
• Business Administration (Irvine)
• Dance (Irvine and Santa Barbara)
• Music (Irvine and Santa Barbara)

Source: UC TAG webpages.

Likely in part because some campuses and majors do not offer TAG, many students who apply for a TAG do not ultimately use it for its admission guarantee. For example, a student may apply for a TAG in computer science at UC Merced. However, the student who obtains that TAG in computer science at UC Merced is not precluded from applying to any of the other eight UC campuses. In other words, many transfer students may secure a TAG as a back‑up option rather than as a direct route to their preferred option. In fact, according to a UC report from 2021, more than 80 percent of TAG applicants ultimately enrolled somewhere in the UC system, but only about 40 percent of those applicants enrolled at their TAG campus.

Another shortcoming of TAG is its somewhat uneven use among different community colleges and demographic groups. The community colleges with the highest transfer rates tend to have a larger share of TAG applicants. For example, the 10 community colleges with the highest transfer rates, which represent 25 percent of all UC transfer applications, accounted for 29 percent of all TAG applications during our audit period. The use of TAG also varies among different demographic groups. For example, from academic years 2020–21 through 2022–23, Asian community college students had the highest usage of TAG, with nearly 12 percent of their transfer applications being associated with TAG, whereas only 8 percent of transfer applications submitted by Black or African American community college students were associated with TAG. The executive director of undergraduate admissions at the UC Office of the President also provided us with data, which we did not audit, that showed larger disparities in TAG use among certain demographic groups. For example, the data show that across three fall application cycles beginning in 2019, and among resident community college applicants considered eligible for admission, only about 20 percent of Black or African American applicants to UC were associated with TAG, compared to more than 36 percent of Asian applicants to UC.

Ultimately, TAG is unlikely to be able to serve as a comprehensive admission guarantee because the most competitive campuses and majors likely will not have enough capacity to guarantee admission to all eligible transfer applicants. Nonetheless, it can be a useful tool for guaranteeing admission and would be more effective if it served transfer students more equitably. In Chapter 3 , we discuss some approaches that community colleges could take to ensure that students receive key information and support to help them transfer, including through equity plans that address transfer‑related disparities across demographic groups. We also discuss opportunities for data sharing that could help UC campuses conduct more targeted outreach to transfer‑intending students.

UC Transfer Pathways Functions as Admissions Guidance, but It Does Little to Streamline Transfer Requirements

Unlike TAG, UC Transfer Pathways does not serve as an admission guarantee. Rather, the goal of the program is to help students improve their chances of admission. As of August 2024, UC had published a Transfer Pathway webpage for each of the 20 most popular UC majors for transfer students. Each webpage lists the types of courses that will prepare transfer students to be competitive for admission in those majors across the UC system. However, in practice, the UC campuses we reviewed—UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara—did not directly use the Transfer Pathways as a factor in their admissions processes. Admissions officials at those campuses stated that their application review processes do not include a consideration about whether applicants have completed one of the Transfer Pathways. Perhaps for this reason, Table C.3 in Appendix C shows that UC applications from community college students who self‑reported completing a UC Transfer Pathway had similar admission rates to applications without that designation.

Another function of UC Transfer Pathways is to provide a single expansive set of preparatory courses for the same major systemwide. However, because the Transfer Pathways course lists encompass the needs of multiple campuses, they may include courses that some UC campuses do not require. For example, a UC systemwide special transfer committee report from mid–2023 explains that the UC Transfer Pathway for sociology identifies as preparation for transfer two introductory courses in sociology and a statistics course. Thus, students seeking to transfer to any UC campus might logically conclude that they need to take all three courses in order to obtain admission. However, the sociology programs at UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Barbara do not require any of the Transfer Pathways courses for admission.

Further, UC Transfer Pathways focuses on transfer admission requirements rather than on the lower‑division courses that would best prepare a transfer student to complete upper‑division coursework within a reasonable number of units. For example, UC Santa Barbara’s lower‑division preparation for the biology major includes a statistics course. However, this course is not part of the biology Transfer Pathway because it is not a requirement for admission—although the Transfer Pathway does mention this difference and indicates that a statistics course may be needed before graduation for some of UC’s biology majors. Similarly, both UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley include a yearlong physics course sequence in the preparation for a biology major, yet these courses are also not part of the official biology Transfer Pathway. In instances such as these, students may need to take the courses in question after transferring, which could add units and time to earning their degrees.

Finally, UC Transfer Pathways lacks the essential guarantees that the ADT provides related to time to graduate and course transferability. Specifically, UC has not streamlined campuses’ requirements into a limited set of lower‑division preparation courses that will prepare students to graduate in two years after transferring to a UC campus. By contrast, CSU campuses that accept the ADT for a certain major guarantee that a student can graduate within 60 units of transferring, regardless of whether the student has fulfilled all of the specific lower‑division courses that the particular campus would otherwise require. The ADT similarly helps reduce complexity for students around transferability—students earning an ADT receive 60 units of transferable credit, meaning that they would not need to determine whether every course they take articulates with every relevant CSU campus’s requirements. UC Transfer Pathways does not offer a comparable guarantee, although UC campuses may decide to prioritize articulating their Transfer Pathways courses with community colleges.

By Aligning Their Transfer Requirements, CSU and UC Could Improve the Transfer Process for Community College Students

Using the cohort data we discuss in Chapter 1 , we found that about 21 percent of community college transfer applicants to either CSU or UC applied to both systems, and about 26 percent of ADT earners applied to a UC campus. In other words, about a fourth of all relevant transfer applicants were subject to requirements for both CSU and UC campuses. These data underscore the fact that many students could benefit if the systems minimized the differences between CSU and UC requirements. To that end, the CCC Academic Senate has been leading an effort in which CSU and UC have been participating to align UC Transfer Pathways with ADT course requirements to streamline the transfer process for students interested in both CSU and UC.

Nonetheless, several factors make it difficult for CSU and UC to align their transfer requirements. As we discuss in the Introduction, the Master Plan and state law have established CSU and UC as two separate systems with distinct missions. For example, these sources indicate that UC should be more selective than CSU and serve as the primary state‑supported agency for research. Even within each system, faculty at each campus have certain authority to develop that campus’s academic curriculum, and as a result, these curricula may vary significantly.

Moreover, changes that require collaboration among the three systems can be challenging. No single intersegmental oversight body exists for California’s institutions of higher education, and faculty and officials at the three systems generally agreed that the establishment of such an oversight body would be problematic. For example, the past and current presidents of the CCC Academic Senate told us that such an oversight body would remove input and control from those who have the best working knowledge of the policy and curriculum issues of each system. In addition, UC’s constitutional independence limits the Legislature’s ability to compel the system to engage in such cross‑system efforts.

In the absence of an oversight body, many of the three systems’ collaborative efforts to streamline transfer requirements—such as developing or revising ADTs and aligning CSU and UC requirements—have relied on ad hoc committees or those that lack dedicated state funding and require voluntary faculty participation. According to faculty leaders from all three systems, this lack of institutional funding has significantly delayed or impaired efforts to improve the transfer process. In fact, since the effort began in 2019, these efforts have resulted in the successful alignment of only two disciplines, as Figure 21 demonstrates.

Figure 21 The Academic Senates Have Had Little Success Aligning CSU and UC Major Requirements

Source: C‑ID website, including pages for the Transfer Alignment Project and transfer model curricula, and the UC Transfer Pathways admissions webpages.

Figure 21 summarizes the efforts of the systems’ academic senates in aligning CSU and UC major preparation requirements, and it shows that they had little success in doing so as of October 2023. Text at the top of the graphic introduces the Transfer Alignment Project, which the CCC Academic Senate has led in collaboration with the CSU and UC Academic Senates. The project’s goals were to align major requirements if feasible and to communicate the rationale and benefits of separate pathways if not. The graphic shows that as of October 2023, only two disciplines were successfully aligned: political science and sociology. By contrast, five disciplines were found not feasible for alignment: biology, business administration, economics, mathematics, and philosophy. Three additional disciplines— anthropology, English, and history—were still being explored for potential alignment at that time. The bottom of the graphic explains that as of Summer 2024, the systems are exploring potential alignment for the five disciplines they previously found not feasible for alignment, along with eight additional disciplines.

 Despite these challenges, CSU and UC and their campuses could do more to streamline requirements, especially considering that they pertain only to undergraduate education and transfer students’ lower‑division preparation before transferring. Efforts to align course requirements have continued, with added impetus from recent recommendations of the ADT Intersegmental Implementation Committee. Consisting of representatives from all three systems, this committee explicitly called for drafts of transfer model curricula that prepare students to transfer to both CSU and UC in pathways such as engineering, biology, chemistry, and computer science. The director of the Transfer Alignment Project, the main body that is working to align curricula between CSU and UC systems, believes that alignment will be most successful in mathematics and physics, with continuing work also in biology.

The text box lists options for UC to do more to align its lower‑division requirements with the ADT. The first option is for UC campuses to accept students with the ADT as sufficiently prepared for transfer if an ADT exists in that discipline. This scenario would essentially be an expansion of recent legislation, which establishes the new UC ADT pilot program. That program must begin at UCLA for at least eight majors by academic year 2026–27 and must be extended to at least 12 majors at each of five UC campuses by academic year 2028–29, with the intent that it be extended to at least 12 majors at every UC campus by academic year 2031–32. UC faculty and system officials have stated that the ADT does not always provide adequate preparation for their programs. However, the ADT framework often balances specific requirements with some flexibility at the lower‑division level. For example, the ADT in psychology has a required set of three core courses supplemented by relatively flexible categories in which students may choose from several types of relevant lower‑division courses. Further, because the ADT framework does not include any upper‑division courses, it allows for significant specialization at universities.

UC Could Do More to Align Its Lower-Division Major Prerequisites with the ADT

For a major that is not already included in the ADT pilot project, a UC campus could:

1. Agree to accept the ADT as sufficient transfer preparation.

2. Agree to the same types of parameters of the ADT, but for UC’s own set of courses, such as the relevant UC Transfer Pathway.

After individual campuses make good faith attempts at alignment and provide rationales to the UC Office of the President, it could allow them to opt out of both options.

Source: Analysis of state law; UC, C-ID, and Transfer Alignment Project webpages; and UC reports.

Under the second option listed in the text box , UC campuses could agree to offer the benefits of an ADT but for UC’s own set of courses, such as the UC Transfer Pathways, for majors that are not included in the ADT pilot project described earlier in this section . In other words, UC could ensure that campuses participating in this option for a particular major accept a UC Transfer Pathway as sufficient transfer preparation, and it could also ensure that the pathway limits the number of units students need before and after transfer and that the pathway courses are consistently articulated across UC campuses and community colleges. These types of benefits could potentially help further reduce the time and units it takes transfer students to earn a UC degree. For example, students who transferred to UC within four years of their initial community college enrollment averaged about 70 units of transferable credit in the cohorts we analyzed. Further, precedent exists for a UC‑sanctioned associate degree built from the UC Transfer Pathways: first offered in Fall 2019, the CCC and UC systems collaborated through a pilot program to form UC Transfer Pathways associate degrees in chemistry and physics that 23 community colleges still offer.

The systems have demonstrated that collaborating toward streamlined requirements is possible. For example, state law effective January 2022 spurred the development of a singular general education pathway that CCC students would need for transfer and admission to both CSU and UC, known as the California General Education Transfer Curriculum (Cal‑GETC), which will take effect in Fall 2025. Cal‑GETC ensures that only a single 34‑semester‑unit option exists for general education courses at the community college level, down from 37 or 39 units in prior course patterns. This change will not only simplify requirements for students at the community college level but may also allow more space for major prerequisites to fit within the ADT’s 60‑unit limit.

Individual campuses have also identified some solutions to retain curricular autonomy while still meeting transfer students’ needs. For example, UC Berkeley’s computer science program requires major preparation courses that rarely articulate with community college courses, so it has created one‑unit bridge courses for students to take after transfer that supplement their previous education with minimal impact to the time necessary to earn a bachelor’s degree. Likewise, UC Santa Barbara offers nearly two dozen courses that it designed specifically for transfer students, including bridge courses in biology, mathematics, and physics. Despite the difficulties CSU and UC face in aligning the lower‑division coursework they require, faculty in both systems can and should work together to further streamline transfer pathways and reduce complexity for transfer students.

Legislature

To help create transfer pathways for students in majors that require a large number of units, the Legislature should amend state law to allow certain transfer model curricula for the ADT, such as in STEM fields, to exceed the existing lower‑division 60‑unit requirement, if both the CCC and CSU systems agree. The Legislature should include conditions for this unit expansion, such as when many community colleges or CSU campuses have demonstrated an inability to fit courses within the 60‑unit requirement for that particular transfer model curriculum.

To ensure that community college students can centrally access the information they need to prepare for transfer, the Legislature should require all CSU campuses—and should request all UC campuses—to publish their existing articulation agreements and transfer requirements on ASSIST rather than only on their own external websites. Further, articulation agreements for preparation in each major should use a standardized format or common language to describe lower‑division requirements so that it is clear to students whether taking specific courses will impact their chances of admission or the time it will take them to earn a bachelor’s degree after transferring.

To ensure that CSU, UC, and CCC continue to make progress on streamlining transfer requirements for students, the Legislature should consider appropriating funding and requiring annual status reporting for the following efforts:

• Developing or revising transfer model curricula and expanding the ADT’s use.
• Aligning CSU and UC transfer requirements.
• Identifying and reducing barriers to further articulation between community college courses and CSU and UC transfer requirements.

CCC Chancellor’s Office, CSU Chancellor’s Office, and UC Office of the President

To ensure that a lack of course articulation is not a barrier to transfer, the three systems should collaborate by September 2026 to analyze articulation data and develop a plan for addressing the gaps in articulation that most negatively affect community college students. For example, the analysis could identify the articulation gaps that are most likely to reduce students’ chances of admission or to add to students’ total number of units or amount of time to transfer and earn a bachelor’s degree.

CCC Chancellor’s Office and CSU Chancellor’s Office

To help close existing gaps in the ADT’s availability and impact within their systems, the CCC Chancellor’s Office and the CSU Chancellor’s Office should each document a process by September 2025 for requesting and analyzing specific rationales from community colleges that have decided not to offer the ADT for a particular transfer model curriculum or from CSU campuses that have decided not to accept one as similar to their related majors or concentrations. These processes should also include taking the following actions:

• Review a selection of the rationales for not offering or accepting the ADT, with a focus on the areas in which it would most benefit students to have an available ADT pathway.
• Using criteria such as whether other community colleges or CSU campuses are able to offer or accept the ADT, and consulting with the systemwide academic senates or other faculty as necessary, determine whether the selected rationales are reasonable and make recommendations to the colleges or campuses as appropriate.
• To the extent their reviews identify specific challenges in offering or accepting the ADT in certain subject areas, notify the appropriate committee or group so that it may consider those challenges when revising transfer model curricula.

UC Office of the President

To streamline and simplify campuses’ lower‑division course requirements for transfer applicants in the most popular UC majors, the UC Office of the President should work with its Academic Senate and campuses to develop and begin implementing a plan by September 2026 for reviewing and updating the UC Transfer Pathways. Specifically, the plan should include the UC Office of the President taking the following actions for each UC Transfer Pathway:

• For pathways in which related ADT transfer model curricula exist, identify and publicly post which UC campuses agree to accept the ADT as sufficient coursework to be competitive for admission and to be able to earn a bachelor’s degree within a specified amount of time or units after transferring.
• For the UC campuses that do not accept the ADT as sufficient coursework, and for those pathways in which no related ADT transfer model curricula exist, update the pathway by establishing the community college courses that a student must complete before transferring to be competitive for admission and to be able to earn a bachelor’s degree within a specified amount of time or units after transferring. The Office of the President should limit the pathway to those courses that all participating campuses agree are reasonably necessary, and it should consider aligning these courses with any relevant ADT transfer model curricula.
• Regularly monitor articulation for pathway courses at participating UC campuses to ensure that the articulated pathway courses are available and consistent across community colleges.
• Require and evaluate rationales from any UC campuses that neither accept the ADT as sufficient coursework nor participate in the pathway.
• Community colleges play a crucial role in helping students navigate the transfer process. However, their processes for doing so have some weaknesses. For example, they have not consistently provided students with counseling and education plans that can help to ensure that the students meet transfer requirements. The CCC Chancellor’s Office could provide more specific guidance and monitoring to help improve colleges’ efforts.
• Although CSU and UC have existing programs and processes to help community college students transfer, these efforts do not reach all transfer‑intending students. Expanding and standardizing data sharing among the three systems would help improve CSU’s and UC’s outreach efforts by enabling them to better identify and support transfer‑intending students.

Although Community Colleges Serve a Critical Role in Helping Students Transfer, Their Processes for Doing So Have Weaknesses

Community colleges play a critical role in helping students navigate the complexities of the transfer process. However, we identified weaknesses in community colleges’ processes for providing information and support to potential transfer students. Figure 22 summarizes our observations. To ensure that community colleges across the State make consistent efforts to help students transfer, the CCC Chancellor’s Office should increase its guidance and oversight in these areas.

Figure 22 We Identified Weaknesses in Community Colleges’ Approaches to Creating an Effective Transfer Environment

Source: Analysis of state law, regulations, public research and reports, and documents from the CCC Chancellor’s Office and selected community colleges.

*   Lassen, the fifth college, met this recommended staffing level according to an ad hoc, internal calculation by the CCC Chancellor’s Office for Fall 2023. However, Lassen did not meet the recommended staffing level according to the same calculation for Fall 2022.

Figure 22 includes an overview of actions that create an effective community college transfer environment and provides examples of related weaknesses that we identified at the five colleges we reviewed. For example, community college should maintain transfer centers and counseling services with sufficient staff. However, we found that none of the five colleges had met all of the recommended transfer center staffing criteria as of academic year 2022-23, and four of the five colleges did not meet the broader recommendation to have one counselor for every 370 students.

The Community Colleges We Reviewed Have Not Consistently Provided Students With Counseling and Education Plans

Counseling and education plans are critical to colleges’ efforts to assist students in transferring—so critical, in fact, that state law generally requires community colleges to take an active approach in seeking out, counseling, and monitoring the progress of transfer‑intending students. Colleges must make reasonable efforts—especially early in a student’s time at a community college—to provide an opportunity for the student to develop an education plan, which essentially functions as a roadmap of courses that the student needs to take. Students may have abbreviated education plans to meet their short‑term needs, or they may develop longer‑term, comprehensive plans that take into account their education goals and the steps they need to take to meet them, as the text box describes. According to CCC’s Vision for Success , colleges should strive to have all students complete an education plan to help them focus on a clear path from the beginning of their college education, and that equally important is the quality and frequent updating of those education plans. Similarly, the Vision for Success indicates that it is best practice for students to receive ongoing, proactive advising. Otherwise, community colleges run the risk that some students may not receive the guidance they need.

State Law Includes Key Requirements for Student Education Plans

Districts or colleges shall provide each student with an opportunity to develop one of the two following types of education plans:

• Abbreviated education plans, which are designed to meet the immediate needs of students and are usually for one or two terms.
• Comprehensive education plans, which take into account students’ career and education goals, their majors, the institutions to which they may wish to transfer, and the steps they need to take to complete their identified courses of study.

Student education plans must be accessible, timely, and recorded in electronic form. Further, the district or college must review the plans as necessary to ensure that they continue to accurately reflect the needs and goals of the students.

Source: California Code of Regulations, title 5, section 55524.

However, only two of the five colleges we reviewed—Clovis and Lassen—had a process to regularly identify the students who had not developed education plans and contact them to schedule counseling appointments to do so. The other three colleges also took key steps to provide students with counseling and education plans, some of which we describe in the text box . However, the colleges’ efforts were not always consistent or comprehensive. For instance, as we show in the text box , Santa Ana conducted a targeted outreach process similar to Clovis’s process but completed this process only once during the period we reviewed. 15

Examples of Community Colleges’ Efforts to Provide Counseling and Education Plans

Diablo Valley: It widely publicizes its counseling, education plan, and transfer center services but acknowledged that it does not have a college-wide process for identifying and reaching out to the students who have not received the services.

Clovis: Staff identify the students each semester who do not have education plans and reach out to them to schedule counseling appointments.

Lassen: Officials explained that each semester, counselors identify students who need education plans, and a staff member contacts these students to schedule appointments.

Santa Ana: In only one of the years we reviewed, staff called students who lacked education plans to ask them to connect with counselors to develop plans.

Victor Valley: Each semester, staff identify students who have completed 30 or more units and contact them to schedule counseling appointments. However, this effort is meant to provide information about graduating, and no similar process exists for contacting students who have completed fewer than 30 units.

Source: Analysis of selected colleges’ program reviews, data, and other documents, and interviews with college officials.

Furthermore, although the Vision for Success states that colleges should strive to have 100 percent of students complete an education plan, only Clovis and Lassen regularly monitored the percentage of their students who had developed education plans. For example, Clovis reported in an internal program review that 52 percent of its enrolled students in academic year 2021–22 had completed comprehensive student education plans and that a much larger percentage had completed some type of education plan. The other three colleges we reviewed did not consistently document their progress in providing students with education plans. Santa Ana performed such an analysis to show progress it had made as part of its 2021 efforts, but it did not report this type of data consistently in its program reviews or similar documents. If colleges do not monitor this type of information, they risk not understanding whether their counseling and education planning efforts have been successful in reaching all students.

Certain specialized programs that serve specific groups of students take a more hands‑on approach to providing counseling and education plan services. For example, Extended Opportunity Programs and Services (EOPS) is a program designed to encourage community colleges to establish and implement programs to help students who face certain economic, linguistic, and educational challenges. State law requires that as a condition of receiving EOPS funding, colleges must provide eligible students with three counseling or advisement contact sessions each term and must develop an education plan for each of these students. In part because EOPS and similar programs receive specific state funding, colleges may lack the resources to follow the same strategy with the general student population, but the colleges can strive to emulate this hands‑on approach as much as possible with their general populations by proactively engaging with and monitoring students. We describe later in this chapter how the CCC Chancellor’s Office could provide guidance and clarify expectations related to this type of proactive engagement.

We also found that the format and content of the five colleges’ student education plans did not clearly meet all of the key criteria we include in the text box . For example, only Clovis and Victor Valley routinely included in the education plans we reviewed the institutions to which students may wish to transfer, largely because their templates have a designated area for that information. The other three colleges did not have such designated areas in their plans—especially those they provided to students through an online format—even though the plans had spaces to document students’ broader education goals and majors. Counselors at these three colleges sometimes included students’ potential transfer destinations in the electronic notes they attached to the plans or wrote to document education plan meetings, but this practice was not standardized. Routinely documenting this element helps ensure that counselors are guiding students to meet the specific requirements of the institutions they wish to attend.

Regulations also require education plans to be accessible and recorded in electronic form. Four of the five colleges we reviewed transitioned to making education plans available through interactive online systems before or during our audit period. Clovis currently provides all of its education plans as PDF documents, an approach that lacks some of the functionality that online systems can provide. These online systems can allow students to access and update their plans at any time and to register for classes through the same system. Moreover, Chancellor’s Office officials told us that all campuses should use an electronic system for education plans. Clovis’s dean of student services stated that the college tried using such a system but that counselors preferred not to use that particular system because it did not accurately account for some key course information and did not come with additional counselor resources for interventions when students make changes to their plans. The dean also stated that Clovis is open to using an electronic education planning system as long as it works accurately and effectively. Notwithstanding Clovis’s concerns, community colleges should be able to ensure both that education plans are accessible online and that staff actively review them.

In fact, CCC’s Vision for Success states that colleges should monitor student progress more closely and intervene more assertively using strategies such as online tools that help students clearly see their own progress toward their educational goals, alerts that remind students of upcoming deadlines, and automatic flags for intervention when students miss an enrollment deadline or fail a class. This type of functionality could help colleges meet another important requirement: reviewing an education plan and its implementation as necessary to ensure that it continues to reflect a student’s needs and goals. The education planning systems at the colleges we visited already include functionalities such as allowing students to request counselor reviews, tracking which counselors have reviewed an education plan, logging the counselors’ notes, and showing whether the student actually enrolled in the planned courses. Wider and more consistent use of these types of interactive education planning systems could help colleges ensure that students receive critical transfer services.

The Five Colleges We Visited Do Not Have Sufficient Numbers of Transfer and Counseling Staff

Several indicators suggest that the five community colleges we reviewed lack the number of staff they require to provide important transfer‑related guidance to students. This is due, in part, to challenges associated with funding additional positions. For example, although regulations require each community college district to designate a location on campus to serve as the focal point of transfer functions (transfer center) and provide staffing for it, transfer center staffing was a concern officials raised at each of the colleges we visited. A college’s transfer center generally coordinates transfer activities. For instance, it may organize transfer outreach events or provide counseling appointments. The CCC Chancellor’s Office recommends that a transfer center have at least three to five full‑time positions, including a director, one or two counselors, and one or two support staff.

 However, none of the five colleges we visited had met all of the Chancellor’s Office’s recommended transfer center staffing criteria as of academic year 2022–23. Without adequate staff, transfer centers may struggle to provide guidance and outreach to help students transfer. For example, Victor Valley—which reported only 1.5 full‑time equivalent transfer center positions in 2022–23—conducted a program review that identified transfer center staffing as a challenge and stated that in several instances, students who visited the transfer center left the office without receiving prompt help. The program review also found that students may need to wait up to two weeks for a scheduled appointment. Victor Valley’s transfer center coordinator told us that the college assigned a part‑time counselor to the transfer center in Spring 2024 and is working to hire an additional support staff person. Beyond the five colleges we reviewed, transfer center officials statewide have consistently ranked staffing as the top operational barrier they face.

Staffing challenges also limit students’ ability to receive guidance outside of the transfer center. For colleges’ broader counseling efforts, the CCC Academic Senate recommends that community colleges maintain a ratio of one counselor for every 370 students—and it adopted a resolution in Fall 2022 to work with the CCC Chancellor’s Office to advocate for incorporating that ratio into regulations. However, four of the five colleges we reviewed reported significantly higher ratios, as the text box shows. The colleges used different methodologies to calculate their counselor‑to‑student ratios, making comparisons between them difficult. Nonetheless, officials at all five colleges acknowledged that their levels of counselor staffing were insufficient. For example, a form to request additional counselor positions at Diablo Valley states that there are not enough counselors to meet the student demand for services, and that as a result, it is not uncommon for students to have spent a year or two at the college without seeing a counselor—leading to consequences such as students making mistakes in course selection.

Counselor-to-Student Ratios and the Methodologies Used to Calculate Them at the Five Colleges We Reviewed

Examples of counselor-to-student ratios that the colleges calculated:

Clovis: 1:952 in academic year 2020-2021.

Diablo Valley: 1:538 expected in Fall 2024.

Lassen: 1:234 for its non-incarcerated student population as of academic year 2020-21.*

Santa Ana: 1:891 in Spring 2023.

Victor Valley: 1:724 in Spring 2023.

Examples of the differing methodologies the colleges used to calculate the ratios above:

• Clovis used the full-time equivalent (FTE) of counselors based on the time they have available to meet with students.
• Santa Ana used full-time faculty and excluded part‑time counselors.
• Victor Valley included general students and calculated separate ratios for students in specialized programs.

Source: Internal program reviews, hiring request forms, and related documents from the colleges we reviewed.

*  Lassen reported a ratio that year of 1:1,000 for its incarcerated student population. However, Lassen was also the only college we reviewed for which the Chancellor’s Office calculated a ratio below 1:370 in either 2022 or 2023: it calculated a ratio for Lassen of 1:416 in Fall 2022 and 1:256 in Fall 2023.

The CCC Chancellor’s Office has measured and reported counselor‑to‑student ratios in the past: for example, it reported a ratio of one counselor for every 563 students in academic year 2017–18. More recently, it conducted an internal, informal calculation that showed average ratios of 1:420 in Fall 2022 and 1:440 in Fall 2023, with significant variation by college. However, the assistant vice chancellor for data, visualization, and research indicated that the CCC Chancellor’s Office has not established a permanent process for monitoring and reporting these ratios because such monitoring is not a requirement in state law and because these ratios provide limited value in directly measuring student success. Specifically, he added that although the ratios are informative about workloads, their value is limited because they do not show the full picture of the factors that directly impact student success. Nevertheless, establishing a consistent methodology to measure and report community colleges’ counselor‑to‑student ratios could help the CCC Chancellor’s Office identify where staffing challenges may be affecting students’ ability to receive critical guidance about transferring.

Funding is a key barrier to increasing staffing levels. The CCC Academic Senate has stated that as colleges receive new funding to provide for an increase in student enrollment, they do not simultaneously receive equal funding to increase support services, such as counseling. In addition, a state law—commonly referred to as the 50 percent law —requires community college districts to annually spend at least half of their education expenses on the salaries of classroom instructors. Because the law does not allow a college to include the portion of a salary that is related to counseling as an instructional cost, hiring counselors can make it difficult for colleges to comply with the law. Four of the five community colleges we reviewed indicated that funding limitations like this hinder their ability to hire counselors. The fifth college, Santa Ana, classifies its counselors as faculty who perform both counseling and counseling‑related instruction, which it has concluded allows the college to include counselors as part of the salaries of classroom instructors. The State has earmarked funding for some specialized programs, such as EOPS, which community college officials told us is not subject to the 50 percent law and can result in these programs having more counselors per eligible student. However, these programs do not serve the general student population.

The Colleges We Reviewed Could Improve Their Plans for Helping Underrepresented Students Transfer

State law and CCC goals establish that community colleges should provide services to students from historically disadvantaged or underrepresented groups to help them achieve outcomes like successfully transferring. For example, state law established the Student Equity and Achievement Program to assist community colleges in boosting the achievement of all students with an emphasis on eliminating achievement gaps for students from traditionally underrepresented groups in higher education. As we explain in Chapter 1 , significant gaps still exist in transfer rates between certain demographic groups, likely for a variety of reasons—some of which may be difficult for community colleges to address. However, colleges can position themselves to reduce achievement gaps as much as possible by identifying the causes for their gaps and measuring the effectiveness of their subsequent efforts to address those causes.

State‑mandated equity plans are community colleges’ most comprehensive tool for addressing gaps in transfer outcomes. State law requires community college districts to maintain student equity plans for each college in exchange for receiving Student Equity and Achievement Program funding to serve, among others, high‑need or disadvantaged students, whom the equity plans refer to as disproportionately impacted students . To meet this requirement, the CCC Chancellor’s Office collects an updated equity plan for each college every three years that includes the college’s research about equity gaps, describes its goals for disadvantaged groups, and identifies specific activities that are likely to help it meet those goals and address disparities. Transfer rates are one important metric, but these plans also measure gaps related to other outcomes, such as student retention and certificate and degree completion.

As part of their student equity plans, colleges are asked to identify the causes of their transfer‑related equity gaps so they can begin to address them. However, we were unable to determine if the five colleges we reviewed had appropriately performed this step because their equity plans did not always articulate how they had researched and established these causes. For example, Santa Ana’s and Victor Valley’s 2022–25 equity plans identified students’ lack of awareness of transfer requirements and resources as a key structural barrier to transfer, but the plans did not specify how the colleges had arrived at this conclusion—such as by analyzing data to show disproportionate awareness of transfer across demographic groups. Although the equity plans of these two colleges indicated that they had conducted student surveys, it was unclear whether the survey results informed their analyses of structural barriers, and their plans stated that the colleges intended to regularly review data to further understand why gaps may persist. In Diablo Valley’s plan, the college wrote that it lacked the infrastructure to conduct deeper inquiries to understand the causes of its equity gaps and the effectiveness of its existing activities to address those gaps. Without a more complete understanding of the underlying causes of students’ disproportionate outcomes, colleges are not in a position to most effectively use their limited resources to close equity gaps.

Although the CCC Chancellor’s Office has produced an equity plan template that asks colleges to identify structural barriers that have produced inequitable outcomes and to include changes they will make to reduce those inequities, it does not provide guidance about how to correctly identify the causes of those barriers. This lack of detail contrasts with the guidance the CCC Chancellor’s Office has provided in other areas: for instance, it established guidance for how colleges should measure which demographic groups experience the largest gaps in equity.

Over the course of our audit period, the CCC Chancellor’s Office improved certain aspects of its template and guidance for colleges’ equity plans. During this period, community colleges submitted two equity plans: one covering academic years 2019 through 2022 and a second for academic years 2022 through 2025. The CCC Chancellor’s Office made several changes to its template and guidance between these two plans. For instance, the 2019 through 2022 equity plan template asked colleges to evaluate all equity gaps for each metric, whereas the 2022 through 2025 template asked colleges to focus on at least one disproportionally impacted student group for each metric, including transfer. Although not all of the five colleges we reviewed made similar statements, Diablo Valley and Lassen both indicated that the broader focus of the first version of the equity plan template reduced its effectiveness.

In general, the CCC Chancellor’s Office’s changes have provided a more focused approach for identifying and addressing specific equity gaps. However, the changes to the equity plan template and the format in which colleges have reported their progress—including within annual updates—have made it difficult to hold colleges accountable for implementing action items. In particular, the equity plans covering 2022 through 2025 for the five colleges we reviewed did not provide clear information about whether the colleges had implemented their planned activities from the prior equity plan or whether they had experienced success in closing equity gaps because of those activities. Although the new template contains a section for colleges to summarize the activities from 2019 through 2022, the colleges we reviewed often included only lists of all their recent activities or initiatives without explaining which student populations those activities served or how successful they were in meeting their own goals. Figure 23 summarizes our concerns about the equity plan with respect to monitoring colleges’ progress.

Figure 23 The Template for Community Colleges’ Equity Plans Does Not Ensure That Colleges Adequately Track and Report Their Progress

Source: CCC Chancellor’s Office template for the Student Equity Plan covering 2022 through 2025 and analysis of selected colleges’ equity plans.

Figure 23 is a graphic that shows that the template for community colleges’ equity plans does not ensure that colleges adequately track and report their progress. A box at the top of the graphic explains that the most recent equity plan template did not specifically require colleges to report outcomes for various metrics, such as outcomes related to transfer, nor did it require colleges to report the effectiveness of their specific activities toward meeting their goals. A box at the bottom of the graphic provides examples of how equity plans could better hold colleges accountable for addressing equity gaps and explains that the CCC Chancellor’s Office should provide guidance to colleges, including for helping colleges undertake inquiry to identify causes of equity gaps.

Beyond the initiatives contained in their equity plans, community colleges may also address demographic disparities in metrics such as transfer rates through special programs that serve traditionally underrepresented groups. These programs can have several benefits for students, including priority registration, financial aid or other monetary benefits, counseling and tutoring, and a dedicated study space. However, these programs are often too limited in their funding and resources to serve all underrepresented students. For example, Umoja—a learning community dedicated primarily to the academic success of Black or African American students—exists at more than half of all community colleges in the State, but it served only 6,200 students during Fall 2022, which was less than 9 percent of the 70,400 Black or African American students enrolled statewide. Because these programs are unlikely to be able to reach all students who could benefit from them, it is even more critical that colleges develop thorough and effective equity plans to guide their efforts in reducing demographic disparities.

The CCC Chancellor’s Office Could Provide More Specific Guidance and Monitoring to Help Improve Colleges’ Transfer Efforts

When we asked officials in the CCC Chancellor’s Office about its guidance and oversight related to the issues we describe throughout this section, they provided several examples of existing systemwide guidance and professional development opportunities, such as guidance that all students should develop an education plan. However, the officials also acknowledged that limited authority and resources can be a challenge: for example, they stated that the Chancellor’s Office does not provide customized guidance that delves into each college’s operations and unique circumstances because that falls within the sphere of local control. We recognize that the CCC system is decentralized and involves significant local control at the community college district level. Even so, these limitations do not preclude the CCC Chancellor’s Office from taking a greater role in certain critical areas. In fact, state law requires the Chancellor’s Office to establish guidelines related to the provision of counseling and education plans. Because the CCC system has already established regulations for these critical services, the Chancellor’s Office is well positioned to provide more specific guidance to colleges and monitor whether they are adhering to the regulations.

The CCC Chancellor’s Office currently monitors colleges’ transfer‑related efforts primarily by collecting and publishing certain data and by overseeing the colleges’ mandated transfer center reports and equity plans. It is also currently developing a Vision‑Aligned Reporting system, which will be designed in part to help track and analyze colleges’ student service metrics—including certain transfer and counseling metrics. However, as part of these efforts, it could improve aspects of its oversight to address some of the concerns we discuss earlier. For example, it already collects and publishes data about community colleges’ education planning and counseling services, but these data do not show the percentage of students who have current, comprehensive education plans or the percentage who have received timely counseling services. Chancellor’s Office officials agreed that publishing this type of data may be useful for improving the State’s transfer efforts but would require a clear and consistent methodology for colleges to provide and for users to interpret the data. Further, the CCC Chancellor’s Office could provide more detailed guidance about the specific actions colleges should take—such as the practice of identifying and reaching out to students without education plans—to monitor students’ progress and ensure that as many students as possible have received critical guidance to help them transfer.

CSU and UC Could Use CCC Data to More Effectively Engage Transfer‑Intending Students Early in Their College Education

Like CCC, CSU and UC also have roles in helping community college students understand transfer requirements and navigate barriers. State law makes all three systems of higher education responsible for providing students with clear information about transfer options. CSU’s and UC’s efforts in this area are clearly critical given that they impose specific requirements that community college students must meet to be eligible for transfer. As the text box shows, best practices exist for CSU and UC to help students navigate the transfer process. Although CSU and UC have several programs and methods for advising community college students, the systems have lacked the CCC data necessary to identify and reach transfer‑intending students early in the transfer process. As a result, some students may not receive resources and information from CSU and UC that could help them transfer.

Best Practices for Universities Providing Information to Transfer-Intending Students

1. Identify potential transfer students. 2. Conduct targeted communications, outreach, and recruitment. 3. Provide tailored advising and counseling.

Source: Reports from the Aspen Institute, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students, and the California Governor’s Council for Post-Secondary Education.

CSU and UC campuses provide outreach and guidance to community college students, but their efforts can be limited in scope without data to identify and contact transfer‑intending students more effectively. For example, Stanislaus State embeds advisors at three local community colleges. According to its dean of admissions, this approach allows the advisors to contact potential transfer students earlier in their collegiate paths. However, the benefits of this program are understandably limited to students at those three community colleges. CSU and UC campus representatives also host and attend various informational events for transfer students, but these events similarly may not reach all students who intend to transfer.

Similarly, CSU and UC have systemwide programs and processes to help transfer‑intending students, but the systems could reach more of these students if they used CCC data to systematically identify them. For example, as the text box shows, both systems offer online transfer planning tools that provide useful information for those students who are aware of them. In compliance with state law, both systems have also pursued dual admission programs that could help eligible students transfer more easily. Although transfer planners and dual admission programs are helpful resources for advising and supporting students, they may not reach all eligible students, especially if students are not sure of their specific transfer goals.

CSU and UC Each Have Systemwide Planning Tools and Programs for Transfer‑Intending Students

CSU and UC each have their own versions of the following:

Transfer planners are online tools that allow community college students to log their community college coursework to track their progress. The transfer planners also provide students with important information from the university system, such as major-specific feedback before application periods and information about upcoming visits from campus admission representatives.

Dual admission grants high school seniors who meet certain requirements, including attending a California community college, conditional admission to a CSU or UC campus.

Source: CSU and UC websites and state law.

Officials at the CSU and UC campuses we visited said that they have been largely dependent on community college students identifying themselves as transfer‑intending students or independently learning of key tools and programs. One reason has been that the three systems—CCC, CSU, and UC—operate independently of each other in many ways, as we discuss in Chapter 2 . Thus, data on transfer‑intending students largely exists in CCC’s data system but not in CSU’s and UC’s systems.

In 2021 the California Governor’s Council for Post‑Secondary Education recommended that the State implement an integrated admissions platform by 2030 that could provide CSU and UC with comprehensive information on transfer‑intending students. In the meantime, the three systems could coordinate their efforts to provide greater numbers of transfer‑intending students with key transfer information and thus increase transfer rates. Specifically, by sharing community college data with CSU and UC campuses, CCC could help those campuses reach out to students, which could facilitate the transfer process as Figure 24 shows. CCC could share data specifically for students who have indicated their intent to transfer or who demonstrate behavior consistent with intending to transfer, similar to our method for establishing cohorts of transfer‑intending students. CSU and UC could use the data to provide tailored advising and help guide the students to successfully transfer. Finally, CSU and UC should continue to share data with CCC about their students who have successfully transferred, to enable individual community colleges to evaluate the success of their transfer‑related efforts.

Figure 24 The Sharing of Community College Data Would Help CSU and UC Campuses More Effectively Facilitate Transfer

Source: Analysis of CSU and UC programs, services, and data sharing agreements, and interviews with system and campus officials.

Figure 24 is an infographic that demonstrates how the sharing of community college data would help CSU and UC campuses more effectively facilitate transfer. The first panel explains that although CSU and UC have a role in helping transfer-intending students navigate barriers to transfer, they lack data to identify all of these students systematically. The next panel shows that sharing community college data with CSU and UC campuses would help those campuses reach out to the appropriate students. Specifically, the community college system could send key information about transfer-intending students to CSU and UC campuses for outreach, advising, and recruitment, and CSU and UC could send CCC campuses information about how many and which of their students have applied or successfully transferred. Finally, a third panel explains that CSU and UC campus officials told us that it would be helpful to receive comprehensive data on transfer-intending students so as to be able to provide them services such as tailored counseling and advising.

The three systems have already begun to take steps toward this type of data sharing. Most notably, officials from the CCC Chancellor’s Office and UC Office of the President stated that in Fall 2023, CCC began sharing with UC some of its enrollment data—such as students’ basic contact information and fields of study—for purposes of outreach. However, the data did not include when the students intended to transfer. According to UC Santa Barbara’s executive director of admissions, the data did not allow that campus to identify potential transfer students. For instance, UC Santa Barbara contacted students from the data who informed it that they did not intend to transfer—such as an older student who was taking an art class for personal benefit. CSU’s assistant vice chancellor of enrollment management services informed us that CCC has also shared data with CSU about community college ADT earners for purposes of outreach but that CSU currently does not have any formal memorandums of understanding with CCC on data sharing for outreach purposes.

Officials at each of the CSU and UC campuses we reviewed told us that it would be helpful for them to receive comprehensive data on potential transfer students for outreach and recruitment purposes. In fact, UC Santa Barbara’s executive director of admissions stated that she believes all UC campuses would benefit from having contact information from community college campuses for outreach purposes. Although legal barriers exist to sharing students’ data, they do not appear to prevent CCC from sharing helpful information about transfer-intending students. The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) generally requires colleges and universities that receive federal education funding to have written permission from a student in order to release information from that student’s education record. However, there are some exceptions, including for disclosing directory information such as a student’s name, address, major, and degrees received. More significantly, CCC’s application for new community college students asks them if they consent to share their personal information to universities to promote outreach and to enhance transfer.

Nonetheless, officials from the three systems stated that data quality and timing pose challenges to the success of this type of data sharing. CCC Chancellor’s Office officials explained that the community colleges use different tools to record information that is received during counseling or academic planning sessions, and they do not share information about students’ potential transfer destinations with the Chancellor’s Office. As a result, it may be difficult for the CCC Chancellor’s Office to collect and share information about the specific CSU and UC campuses to which students are interested in transferring. Those officials also stated that the CCC Chancellor’s Office does not have up‑to‑date contact information for community college students because it does not receive directory information from the colleges. The officials further added that the Chancellor’s Office does not receive fall term data from colleges until at least the end of January, which may be too late for students to receive guidance about critical issues such as the spring term courses that would best prepare them to transfer. CSU’s assistant vice chancellor of enrollment management services agreed that the timing of data sharing for outreach purposes is important. She added that CSU would need this information at least a year before students complete their community college education to have enough time to reach out to them so the student avoids a break in their enrollment when transferring.

CCC Chancellor’s Office officials added that establishing a common information system for all community colleges would help solve these issues, as well as many other challenges. Such a system could allow the Chancellor’s Office or other entities to access accurate, updated information about the transfer‑intending students at each community college. However, Chancellor’s Office officials indicated that such a system could cost well over $100 million and take several years to implement.

To help community colleges provide students with the information they need to transfer, the CCC Chancellor’s Office should disseminate guidance to districts and colleges by September 2025 that includes the following:

• Specific actions that districts or colleges should take to ensure that as many transfer‑intending students as possible receive counseling and have a current, comprehensive education plan. For example, these actions could include routinely identifying and reaching out to schedule counseling appointments with the specific students who do not have a current, comprehensive education plan.
• Guidance about the format and content of education plans, including how districts or colleges can ensure that the plans are accessible online and contain a student’s potential transfer destinations. The guidance should also include any ways in which online education planning systems could assist districts or colleges in meeting the objectives we include in this recommendation.

To help evaluate and improve colleges’ efforts to advise students about transfer, the CCC Chancellor’s Office should develop a method by September 2026 for community colleges to monitor and report the percentage of their transfer‑intending students who have a current, comprehensive education plan and the percentage who have received timely counseling services. For example, the Chancellor’s Office could refine the data that it collects and publicly reports to ensure that it shows these types of metrics. Further, the Chancellor’s Office could consider following up with districts or colleges that have low percentages of such students to help them improve.

To help ensure that community colleges have the staffing necessary to assist transfer‑intending students, the CCC Chancellor’s Office should establish a process by September 2025 for identifying community colleges with staffing levels that are insufficient to provide necessary transfer‑related guidance and taking follow‑up action when warranted. For example, using existing staffing criteria and information it already collects, the Chancellor’s Office could identify colleges that lack sufficient transfer center staffing or have inadequate counselor‑to‑student ratios. It could then notify or follow up with officials at these colleges to help advocate for increasing their staffing levels or to support the colleges’ efforts in other ways.

To ensure that colleges are making effective efforts to close equity gaps in student transfer rates, the CCC Chancellor’s Office should update its equity plan template or its related equity plan annual report template by September 2025 to require colleges to report outcomes related to their established goals. The Chancellor’s Office should also provide guidance to help colleges address the root causes of their transfer‑related equity gaps and to evaluate the effectiveness of their initiatives designed to reduce those gaps.

To improve outreach efforts and help students transfer, the three systems should establish formal agreements by September 2025 to share information for outreach and recruitment purposes about transfer‑intending students in a manner permitted by FERPA and any other applicable privacy laws. The agreements should:

• Ensure that the information that CCC shares with CSU and UC is specific, detailed, and timely enough to allow CSU and UC campuses to conduct tailored outreach to students to help them transfer. In particular, the CCC Chancellor’s Office should evaluate its options for determining students’ intent to transfer and work with CSU and UC to ensure that the data it shares is useful for their campuses’ outreach purposes.
• Specify that CSU and UC will also regularly share information with CCC about their students who successfully transferred, in a format and level of specificity that allows community colleges to assess the effectiveness of their transfer efforts.

We conducted this performance audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards and under the authority vested in the California State Auditor by Government Code section 8543 et seq. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on the audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.

GRANT PARKS California State Auditor September 24, 2024

Staff: Vance Cable, Audit Principal Michelle Sanders, PMP, Audit Principal Nick Versaci, Senior Auditor Maggie Carroll Taylor Gray, Ph.D. Bikash Gupta Parris Lee

Data Analytics: Ben Ward, MSA, CISA, Audit Principal Ryan P. Coe, MBA, CISA Andrew Jun Lee Grant Volk, MA, CFE

Legal Counsel: Natalie Moore

CCC TRANSFER DATA

We used data from CCC to create cohorts of transfer‑intending students who enrolled as first‑time CCC students during academic years 2017–18, 2018–19, and 2019–20. We then used data from CCC, CSU, and UC to determine the cohorts’ students’ rates of transfer and to explore related trends. Table A.1 shows the statewide rates of transferring within four years of enrolling in the CCC system for students in our 2017, 2018, and 2019 cohorts. Table A.2 , Table A.3 , and Table A.4 display the colleges or campuses with the highest and lowest transfer rates within the CCC, CSU, and UC systems. Table A.5 and Table A.6 show that transfer rates vary by demographic group and region. Finally, Table A.7 , Table A.8 , and Table A.9 present information related to students’ earned college units, time spent in community college, and degrees earned before transfer.

CSU TRANSFER DATA

We used CSU’s application and enrollment data to identify trends in application denials and admissions and in enrollments of transfer applicants from CCC. Table B.1 shows that the CSU system as a whole admitted more than 90 percent of community college transfer applicants to at least one campus. However, Table B.2 shows that admission rates varied significantly by individual campus. Table B.3 and Table B.4 also show that admission decisions varied across several demographic categories relative to the applicants’ GPAs and the types of degrees they earned. Table B.5 examines more closely the degrees applicants earned and shows that students who transferred from a community college with an ADT graduated with fewer accumulated units than their peers. Finally, Table B.6 shows admission decisions grouped by academic discipline.

UC TRANSFER DATA

We used UC’s application and enrollment data to identify trends in application denials and admissions and in enrollments of transfer applicants from community colleges. Table C.1 shows that the UC system as a whole admitted more than 75 percent of community college transfer applicants to at least one campus during our audit period. However, Table C.2 shows that admission rates varied significantly by individual campus. Table C.3 and Table C.4 also show that admission decisions varied across several demographic categories relative to the applicants’ GPAs and the type of pathway they completed. Finally, Table C.5 shows admission decisions grouped by academic discipline.

SCOPE AND METHODOLOGY

The Joint Legislative Audit Committee (Audit Committee) directed the California State Auditor to conduct an audit of the CCC Chancellor’s Office, the CSU Chancellor’s Office, and the UC Office of the President to evaluate California’s higher education systems’ efforts to improve the rate of community college transfers to CSU and UC. Table D lists the objectives that the Audit Committee approved and the methods we used to address them. Unless otherwise stated in the table or elsewhere in the report, statements and conclusions about items selected for review should not be projected to the population.

Assessment of Data Reliability

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, whose standards we are statutorily obligated to follow, requires us to assess the sufficiency and appropriateness of computer‑processed information that we use to support our findings, conclusions, or recommendations. In performing this audit, we relied on student and course data that we obtained from CCC and admission and enrollment data that we obtained from CSU and UC. To assess the reliability of these data, we reviewed existing information about the data systems, interviewed people knowledgeable about the data, performed dataset verification, and performed electronic testing of key data elements. As a result of this testing, we found the data to be sufficiently reliable to support our findings, conclusions, and recommendations.

California Community Colleges, Chancellor’s Office

California State University, Office of the Chancellor

University of california, office of the president, california community colleges, chancellor’s office.

August 28, 2024

State Auditor California State Auditor 621 Capitol Mall, Suite 1200 Sacramento, CA 95814

Dear Mr. Parks:

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the California State Auditor’s report around streamlining the process for students to transfer from community college to a four-year public university; we appreciate the collegial and exceptional work you and your team have put into this challenging area in developing this important report and look forward to future discussions with the Legislature and our four-year partners about implementing the report’s recommendations.

In September 2023, the California Community Colleges Board of Governors adopted Vision 2030, a bold new framework for action to improving the lives and conditions of millions of Californians through our 116 open-access colleges. A central strategic direction of Vision 2030 is equitable baccalaureate attainment – ensuring that students who desire the knowledge and skills conferred by a bachelor’s degree have access to such a pathway at minimal cost, either through transfer to the California State University (CSU), the University of California (UC), partnering independent nonprofit four-year institutions, or through one of our expanding community college baccalaureate programs.

We value our collaboration with our four-year partners through the continued implementation of the Associate Degree for Transfer (ADT) pathway at the CSU, the forthcoming trial of the ADT as a pathway to the UC, and recent state investment in Program Pathways Mapper that represents intersegmental baccalaureate completion pathways and the new “dual admissions” programs being implemented at both segments. At the same time, we are pleased to be able to offer baccalaureate degrees of our own, especially for our large number of “place bound” students, many of whom are located far from a four-year public university and cannot commute or move. Thanks to the support of the Legislature in passing Assembly Bill 927 in 2021, 37 community colleges now offer 45 four-year bachelor’s degrees in critical fields ranging from dental hygiene to cybersecurity and data analysis.

With regard to your findings and recommendations, we remain concerned about ongoing equity gaps in transfer attainment by our students, something that is front and center in our Vision 2030 goals for our system, and we appreciate you highlighting other areas, such as addressing students’ basic needs, that have an outsized impact on our transfer success rates. A persistent challenge for us remains consistent and timely data. Due to the decentralized nature of our system, the lack of a common data platform hampers our ability to collect timely and reliable data on transfer rates and gaps and hinders our ability to be able to accelerate transfer for the students of California through real-time data sharing with four-year system and institutional partners. “Let the data flow” has been a consistent mantra of mine since becoming chancellor in 2023, and I look forward to carrying forward recommendations around improvements to our data, research, and systemwide policy leadership.

We understand the recommendations around access to transfer counseling. Our colleges often use all counselors to support transfer-seeking students, whether they are assigned to Umoja programs, Extended Opportunity Programs and Services (EOPS), general counseling, or the Transfer Center of the institution. Even so, reliable digital infrastructure at the colleges remains a concern to track, document, and monitor student progress and interactions, something our system is working hard to address through our reimagination of key digital tools like CCC Apply, the Common Data Platform and eTranscript and the continued development of Program Pathways Mapper to assist both students and college staff supporting them to have ready access to the information necessary to improve their readiness for and ability to transfer. Our colleges are also affected by a longstanding state law that requires 50% or more of educational expenses to go towards instructor salary and benefits, but the salaries and benefits of faculty who are counselors are not accounted for in the numerator of the 50% law. Further, this limits our ability to maximize investments in digital infrastructure and counseling services. We will continue to work to find creative solutions to address the need for more counseling support and implement the recommendations of the report while maintaining compliance with the laws governing funding and expenditures.

Thank you for the chance to respond to this audit and for your hard work on this critical issue.

Sonya Christian Chancellor, California Community Colleges

Mr. Grant Parks State Auditor California State Auditor 621 Capitol Mall, Suite 1200 Sacramento, California 95814

Thank you for the opportunity to review and respond to the draft audit report on Community College Transfers. The CSU agrees with the recommendations detailed in this audit report and will work to implement them.

The CSU values the tens of thousands of California Community College transfer students it admits every year and recognizes that transfer students have been essential to the success of the CSU since its inception.

Strengthening transfer pathways is a top priority for the CSU. To this end, the CSU launched the Transfer Success Pathway program and the CSU Transfer Planner application in summer 2023. In addition, the CSU continues to expand the number of Associate Degree for Transfer (ADT) similar pathways it offers and improve the transfer student experience.

On behalf of the CSU, I extend my appreciation to the audit team for their hard work and collaboration throughout the audit process.

Mildred García, Ed.D. Chancellor

2023-123—CSA Confidential Audit Report UC Office of the President Response

I appreciate the time and effort the California State Auditor’s (CSA) office committed to identifying ways in which the University of California can increase accessibility for community college transfers and improve the overall transfer process. Supporting California students in successfully transferring to the University has been and continues to be a top priority.

The University shares the goals of CSA’s report, which align with the significant progress we have made since the 2018 MOU between the UC Office of the President and the California Community College Chancellor’s Office. Through this partnership, our institutions are working to ensure that transfer students have the support they need not only to enroll, but also to graduate and succeed after college. Adequate preparation of transfer students for upper division work in their major is essential for student success.

The University also continues to work closely with the Legislature and the Governor on ways to prioritize enrollment goals, including expanding access for California resident undergraduates as well as transfer students, while balancing the limited space available at our campuses. We share report’s goal of increasing transparency about how campuses and disciplines are making progress toward these targets. Campuses use many factors to determine enrollment targets appropriate for their respective departments and majors. These factors include student demand, faculty and staff levels, and physical space, and are unique to every campus. UCOP does not have the same level of local information or expertise to make these decisions on their behalf.

We are proud that fall enrollments of UC students who started in the California Community Colleges grew from around 37,000 in fall 2015 to 46,500 in fall 2021. While there have been declines in transfer applicants post-pandemic, we are optimistic those numbers will recover. As we look to the future, the University remains deeply committed to expanding opportunity and access for all California students, including the nearly one-third of entering UC students each year who are transfers.

After the release of the report, my office will work with the Academic Senate and our campuses to further review the audit findings and map out a course of action needed to implement the recommendations. We look forward to continuing our work with state and local education leaders and partners to improve the transfer process.

Michael V. Drake, MD President

• Lower‑division education typically encompasses the first two years of a four‑year degree program and includes courses that may be prerequisites for upper‑division courses, and upper‑division typically encompasses the final two years, with courses more specific to the major program of study. ↩︎
• UC’s goal includes only California resident students. Because CSU had not adopted a related goal at the time of our audit, we used a methodology similar to UC’s to calculate the transfer representation goal in our review of both systems, as we explain in Chapter 1 . Like UC does, we limited our calculations to resident students. ↩︎
• Research has identified that some students may struggle to complete transfer‑level English and math courses. The Legislature passed Assembly Bill 705 in 2017, which required community colleges to maximize the probability that a student will enter and complete transfer‑level coursework in English and math within a one‑year time frame, in part by using measures such as high school coursework and grades to place students into English and math courses and to generally avoid placing students into remedial coursework. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, significantly more students are now completing transfer‑level English and math courses than before the bill’s passage. ↩︎
• CSU and UC generally require upper‑division transfer students to have obtained at least 60 transferable semester units—equivalent to about two years of full‑time enrollment. However, on average, students who transfer to CSU or UC exceed this minimum number of units, as Table A.7 in Appendix A shows. ↩︎
• CSU’s dashboard numbers differ from the campus‑specific admission rates we calculated because CSU removes duplicate applications from the totals. In other words, the dashboard shows whether a student gained admission to the system as a whole, even if the student submitted multiple applications and some campuses denied the application. ↩︎
• The CSU application process does not ask transfer applicants to specify their preferred campus and major if they apply to multiple campuses, which limited our ability to reach precise conclusions about students’ admission preferences. Additionally, only four campuses allow all applicants to select an alternate major on their application. ↩︎
• In 2014 state law required CSU to develop a redirection process for eligible applicants with ADTs who are not admitted to the campuses to which they applied. In June 2017, state law mandated CSU to establish a policy to also redirect eligible applicants without ADTs who were not admitted to the campuses or programs to which they applied, which CSU implemented in 2019. ↩︎
• UC’s dashboard numbers differ from the campus‑specific admission rates we calculated because UC removes duplicate applications from the totals. In other words, the dashboard shows whether a student gained admission to the system as a whole, even if multiple campuses denied the application. ↩︎
• According to UC’s Multi‑Year Compact Annual Report from November 2023, the State agreed that UC should prioritize increasing its enrollment over meeting its transfer representation goal. However, monitoring transfer representation and looking for opportunities to enroll additional qualified transfer students where feasible, as we recommend later—especially when campuses or majors have more than enough qualified transfer applicants—could help the UC Office of the President meet its transfer representation goal while also increasing its overall enrollment. ↩︎
• UC Berkeley distinguished between residents and nonresidents in the college‑specific enrollment targets we reviewed but not in the major‑specific targets. ↩︎
• Throughout this report, we use the phrase accepts the ADT to mean that a CSU campus has determined that a particular transfer model curriculum for the ADT is similar to one or more of its majors or concentrations. ↩︎
• State law also requires that on or before December 31, 2024, the ADT Intersegmental Implementation Committee develop a plan for the periodic analysis and creation of additional transfer model curricula for the ADT to respond to evolving workforce demands, including STEM degree pathways. ↩︎
• As of August 2024, the Legislature has passed, but the Governor has not yet signed, a bill that would implement this recommendation by authorizing the adoption of certain STEM ADTs that contain up to 66 units of lower division coursework, when supported by clear evidence and rationale. ↩︎
• State law requires the ADT Intersegmental Implementation Committee to establish reporting deadlines before January 2025 for CSU campuses’ decisions about whether to accept ADTs. Although the committee has discussed a requirement for a CSU campus to provide a rationale if it removes its acceptance of an ADT, as of August 2024 it had not issued any formal recommendations on this topic. ↩︎
• Santa Ana completed this effort in 2021. According to Santa Ana’s dean of counseling, it conducted this process again in Fall 2023, but its efforts were still in progress when we conducted our audit work. ↩︎