The Road to A Bachelor’s

As a community college transfer student applying to Harvard, Markus A. Besselle ’07 summed up his thoughts: “Markus + Getting into Harvard = Hell freezing over.”

While almost half of all undergraduates in the country are enrolled in community college, they only account for six percent of transfers to Harvard and less than one percent of the student body.

“Top students at community college have a lot to offer elite colleges,” said Josh Wyner, vice president for programming at the Cooke Foundation, a foundation that provides scholarships for students at community college. Community college students include large populations of minorities, students from single parent families or who are the first in their families to attend college, and low income students that four-year colleges seek to recruit to increase diversity, according to Wyner.

But many private top-tier colleges, such as Harvard, are not reaching out to encourage applications from community colleges.

Community college students at Harvard commented that applying to the college was a decision that they had to research on their own. Besselle, a former Vista Community College student in California, and Joseph K. Cooper ’07, a graduate of Florida’s Manatee Community College, both had to proactively seek out application materials to Harvard. When asked about the availability of Harvard application materials at his community college, Besselle responded, “An application to Harvard at my community college? Yeah right!”

Cooper added that he had to contact Harvard in order to determine which application to send in, as he wasn’t sure whether he should fill out the Transfer, Extension School or Visiting Student application.

Gaining admission to Harvard as a transfer from community college is often seen as out of the question for community college students. While Cooper and Besselle sent in applications on their own initiative, they both remarked that most community college graduates would be too intimidated to apply to Harvard. According to Cooper, the prospect of even applying to Harvard is “daunting, to say the least.”

“My favorite professor in community college could only remember one other student of his applying and he had been teaching there for thirty years or more.”

Out of only 75 admitted transfers in the class of 2009, Harvard “enrolled about 5 transfer students from two year colleges,” according to Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73, director of admissions for Harvard College.

Lewis added that the Harvard’s admissions office does take differences in educational circumstances into account when making admissions decisions.

“I think it is fair to say that in many cases a candidate from a community college would indeed increase the diversity of the student body here,” she said.

Although Harvard’s efforts to encourage applications from community college students are limited, there is a national trend indicating an increase in the number of four year colleges and universities seeking to admit these students. Many colleges try to attract such applicants using articulation agreements, which provide for the automatic transfer of community college graduates to four year universities.

Most recently, the University of Virginia (UVA) instituted a guaranteed admissions agreement with the Virginia Community College System, which enables community college graduates who achieve a 3.4 GPA and meet certain course requirements for automatic admission into the UVA College of Arts of Sciences with junior standing.

“[We wanted to] encourage community college students to consider coming to UVA by giving such students a game plan,” said Greg Roberts, UVA’s associate dean of undergraduate admissions.

With several universities making the effort to reach out to community college students, some hope that private top-tier institutions will join in the effort.

“I think it is important for universities, like Harvard, to make it clear to transfer students on their website that slots are available for community college students in selective four-year schools,” Wyner said. “Community college students just need to know that the opportunity for them to gain admittance to America’s top universities does exist.”

Or as Cooper concluded, “Harvard is a scary word out there. I think it would be nice to hear ‘apply to Harvard’ more.”