Power to the Transfer

“The folklore of community colleges is that students can transfer to their local state college, a highly selective college, or a top-tier research university. The reality is that for the Black, Latinx, and Native American students, for whom community colleges are their first and only choice, few successfully transfer despite high aspirations. This book can help university leaders build transfer cultures that are racially conscious, and it can help students, staff, and faculty learn to become builders of racially conscious
transfer receptive cultures.”
—ESTELA MARA BENSIMON, Dean’s Professor in Educational Equity, University of Southern California

The authors of Power to the Transfer are well-known and tenacious warriors of the community college transfer movement. Their book addresses a serious gap in the scholarship of the transfer function: color-blindness. Community colleges have always been represented as an exemplar of the flexibility and accessibility that is attributed to American higher education. The folklore of community colleges is that students can transfer to their local state college, a highly selective college, or a top-tier research university. The reality is that for the Black, Latinx, and Native American students, for whom community colleges are their first and only choice, few successfully transfer despite high aspirations. This book can help university leaders build transfer cultures that are racially conscious, and it can help students, staff, and faculty learn to become builders of racially conscious transfer receptive cultures.

~Estela Mara Bensimon, Dean’s Professor in Educational Equity, and Founding Director, Center for Urban Education, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California