The community college mission includes such diverse goals as preparing students for job entry, teaching literacy, and satisfying students' personal interests. Measuring the colleges' transfer rates by no means tacitly elevates the transfer function above these other functions; it merely helps institutions estimate the effects of interventions on…

Accurate data on the number of students who transfer from two-year colleges to senior colleges are not available because the ways of counting transfers vary greatly from system to system and state to state. While most studies define transfer students as those who have taken courses at a community college and subsequently enroll at a senior…