Imagine that you are a California community college student planning the next steps in your academic career. You start by selecting your field of study and utilize transfer planning tools, such as ASSIST.org, to decide which courses you need to complete within two years to transfer to one of your dream schools.
At first glance, your path to a four-year degree appears to be fairly straightforward. But after consulting with your academic adviser and taking a closer look at course requirements, you realize that what you thought was a clear path has become a complex maze. The one math course you need to transfer to your second-choice school quickly becomes five math courses when you consider the requirements for transfer to your top school.
This scenario is a reality for some California community college students seeking to transfer to a four-year public university. It certainly was for me.
In my own transfer journey, I felt consistently overwhelmed trying to navigate department websites, course catalogs and articulation agreements to figure out which courses I would need to transfer. At one point, I was taking 11 classes in one semester at two separate schools in an attempt to meet all the requirements.
My first attempt to transfer was met with a handful of rejection letters that stemmed from my miscalculation of lower-division expectations, which differed across campuses. This inconsistency in course requirements delayed my academic journey by an entire year. Now I am a graduate student in the UC system and an education policy advocate working to streamline transfer pathways, particularly for underrepresented students.
Over the past decade, there has been new focus on the obstacles students in STEM fields face along the transfer path. Xueli Wang documented the experiences of aspiring STEM students as they navigated different trajectories on the quest for transfer. Our recent research at Just Equations, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, identified common obstacles holding students back: math anxiety, complicated transfer policies and course scheduling conflicts. There is still more work to be done to better understand how math functions as a barrier and as an opportunity for STEM and non-STEM fields.
To this end, we took stock of math requirements for transfer across California’s public universities in highly sought-after STEM majors (biology and computer science) and less math-intensive majors (business and psychology). Across all four majors, our analysis showed wide variation in the number of courses and the specific course requirements, which can cause a transfer-intending student to get lost in the maze of requirements and delay academic progress.
For example, a Bay Area student who is transferring locally in biology would have to take just one math course in precalculus for San Francisco State and Cal State East Bay, but five courses in math (not including precalculus) for UC Berkeley’s biology program.
To be sure, if a student were to satisfy the requirements for UC Berkeley, they would be able to transfer to any of the other campuses. But that student would be taking almost double the number of courses needed to be considered transfer eligible in this particular major, for only a slim chance at admission to Berkeley.
A student transferring to a UC or CSU in computer science faces another type of hurdle when it comes to satisfying course requirements in differential equations and discrete mathematics. Multiple campuses require either one or the other; in the case of UCLA, both are required. This inconsistency in requirements puts the onus on a student to take both courses to remain eligible for admission to all schools.
Even in psychology, a transfer student applying to UC San Diego and Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo would have to satisfy UCSD’s three-course requirement (Calculus I, Calculus II and Statistics) although only Statistics is required at Cal Poly.
As a psychology major myself, when I learned that I needed to complete Calculus I to be eligible for UC or CSU transfer, I had to scramble to take the course. After doing so, I was able to transfer into UC Riverside but ultimately was not accepted into the psychology program and redirected to my alternative major, education and human development. Fortunately, this journey led me to greater fulfillment and purposeful career choices. However, this is not the case for every student. Both STEM and non-STEM students risk becoming tangled in confusing requirements that could deter them from attending a four-year college altogether.
To be clear, the courses and curricula at each campus are shaped by faculty expertise and department priorities—reflecting the value placed on institutional autonomy. We do not want to compromise that. But there must be a balance between institutional innovation and system alignment.
Several recent reports, including “Set Up to Succeed” by Complete College America and the Campaign for College Opportunity, explore systemic misalignment within California’s K–12 and higher education institutions that exacerbates the transfer maze and impedes students’ educational progress.
The question for educators and advocates is: Where can we, collectively, identify the unnecessary dead ends and establish clear pathways for all students? That is the opportunity ahead of us and how we can turn California’s transfer maze into a direct route to student success.
