California community college students will be guaranteed admission to UC — if they meet requirements

Sproul Hall at the UC Berkeley campus on Wednesday, November 1, 2017, in Berkeley, Calif.. Sproul Hall at the UC Berkeley campus on Wednesday, November 1, 2017, in Berkeley, Calif.. Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close California community college students will be guaranteed admission to UC — if they meet requirements 1 / 13 Back to Gallery

Good news for thousands of California community college students hoping to transfer into the University of California: Succeed in a rigorous set of courses, and your UC admission is guaranteed.

Students who begin community college in fall 2019 and do well in courses that UC faculty helped develop — the required grade-point average is still to be determined — will win admission into a UC campus under an agreement announced Wednesday by the two higher education systems.

The courses will lead to an associate degree for transfer into UC, similar to the degree established in 2013 for guaranteed transfer into California State University. Applicants may not get into their first choice, but will be admitted into one of the nine undergraduate UC campuses.

“I’m pleased that President Napolitano and I and our two Faculty Senates were willing to come together and improve access to more transfer students,” California Community College Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley said, noting that transfer students at UC do as well as or better academically than those who begin as freshmen.

UC President Janet Napolitano said in a statement that collaborating with the community colleges “will not only make it easier for qualified students to transfer to the university, it will help ensure that they excel once they arrive.”

Currently, 21 community college majors satisfy UC rigor, UC officials said. The majors are some of the most popular at UC, they said, including psychology, anthropology, business administration and sociology.

Gov. Jerry Brown has said he considers increasing the number of UC transfer students to be a money-saver for the state. He has withheld $50 million from UC’s budget in part until the university complies with state audit requirements, but another condition is that UC sign up one transfer student for every two freshmen who enroll.

UC has already achieved those numbers systemwide across its nine undergraduate campuses, said Claire Doan, a UC spokeswoman. But UC is also “working hard to hit the target for each campus,” she added.

In all, UC enrolled 20,000 transfer students this year — the most in its history. UC’s enrollment of transfer students rose by 19 percent from 2013 to 2017, records show.

Most of those students, but not all, come from community colleges. UC increased the number of community college transfers by 18 percent during the same period, adding 2,819 more community college transfers.

The Chronicle also looked at community college transfers into CSU before and after its guaranteed admission program began in 2013. Surprisingly, the increase of transfer students slowed after it began.

In the four years before the program was set up, CSU added 18 percent more community college transfer students — an increase of 6,589 students, to 44,236.

In the four years after it began, community college transfers rose by 9 percent — an increase of 5,306 students, to 61,871.

Although it’s not clear why the guarantee of admission didn’t accelerate transfers into CSU, Paul Feist, a spokesman for the community college system suggested that lingering effects of the recession could be the cause.

“Both systems were recovering from drastic cuts,” he said.

Doan of UC said it was too early to predict how UC’s new admissions guarantee might impact transfer enrollment.

But UC faculty and students have repeatedly complained to the governing Board of Regents that classroom space and dorms haven’t kept pace with rising enrollment.

In a nod to that reality, the new agreement promises that if transfer enrollment grows as as result of the admission guarantee, leaders of UC and the community college system will together ask the state for more money — “a pre-requisite for transfer students’ success at the university.”

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov