Community colleges are a critical component of American higher education. For many working adults and lower-income students, these institutions provide an accessible, affordable pathway to obtaining a bachelor’s degree. A four-year college is an increasingly expensive proposition. For the 2025-2026 academic year, the average annual in-state tuition and fees at a public college totals $10,340; at a private college, it’s $39,307.
With these financial pressures weighing heavily on young adults and their families, the opportunity to enroll in community college classes and transfer to a four-year institution is a cost-saving option well worth considering. But there’s a major issue facing the transfer students who choose this path: Many of them aren’t ready to do the work that their new schools demand.
Many students who choose to transfer to a four-year institution aren’t ready to do the work that their new schools demand.
Sarah Karamarkovich, a research associate at the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, observes that among first-time, degree-seeking students who enroll in a community college, typically about one-third of those students transfer to a four-year institution. “Of those students, about half of them earn a bachelor’s within six years of starting community college,” she says.
In a Brookings report published in September, Lois Miller, an assistant professor of economics at the University of South Carolina, looked at the outcomes for Texas community college transfer students who were accepted into a four-year institution right above its grade point average (GPA) cutoff and compared them to students who were denied admission right below the GPA cutoff. She noted that some GPA cutoffs for transfer students are extremely low. For example, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Houston only required transfer students to have a GPA above 1.8.
Miller discovered that the community college transfer students who were “barely admitted” to four-year institutions are more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree than those who were narrowly rejected. But she also reported that the accepted transfer students went on to earn less than the rejected applicants: “Students earn[ed] around $7,000 less annually … The negative effects persisted for 10 or more years after the initial transfer decision.”
In Texas, each four-year institution has a different set of requirements for the community college credits it will accept. Miller says new students may find that they can’t transfer their credits to a four-year institution or have certain courses count as prerequisites—which are some of the perils of taking courses that seem appealing instead of considering whether those courses actually line up with the academic work they intend to do at a university.
“I don’t think that’s unique to Texas, I think that happens in a lot of other states too, but I do think that Texas is relatively more decentralized than maybe some other states are,” Miller told the Prospect. She proposed that the Texas community college system focus on tuning up student academic counseling services and that universities raise their GPA cutoffs to admit transfer students who are better equipped to do the work once they’re accepted.
John Fink, a senior research associate at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center, agrees. Fink says advising offices should help students plan their postsecondary education with certain end goals in mind—something some community college students fail to do. Staff advisers could also assist students with drafting year-by-year plans so they can see how long their studies might take and how much it will cost to reach their educational goal. These year-by-year aims would also help community college instructors plan their class schedules more effectively.
“Colleges can actually do a much better job scheduling the courses that students need based on everybody’s plans instead of how it’s currently being done, which is we schedule how many sections and what times based on how we did it last year, which is how we did it last year, and the year before,” Fink says.
Community college dual enrollment programs for high school students could also have a positive impact on student achievement in four-year institutions. These programs allow certain students to take courses for college credit. Community colleges and their high school partners should use their dual enrollment program offerings to reach out to students who might not otherwise go to college. Fink notes that dual enrollment has long been a proven strategy to help students make good decisions about higher education. Collecting and publishing data on success rates also helps.
Community colleges can ensure that high school students, low-income workers, new immigrants, and people seeking new skills can keep pace with shifting workplace demands. One way to measure success is to track students after they graduate to learn whether they found a job or if they transferred to a four-year college.
This would allow community colleges to showcase students’ achievements as well as their own programs. “We’re trying to think about, of all community college awards, which ones would be high-opportunity,” Fink says. “So we generally look at the earnings after, and then for transfer majors, the likelihood of completing the bachelor’s because we know from other research that the general associate of arts doesn’t have much labor market value unless you get the bachelor’s degree.”