Distance and Transfer with Dr. Darla Cooper & Dr. Daisy Segovia

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:

 Learn about the impact of distance on student transfer success.

Apple | Spotify | YouTube

When we talk about student transfer success, conversations often focus on GPA, support services, or articulation agreements. But what if one of the biggest factors is something as simple—and as complex—as distance?

In this episode of the Student Success Podcast, Dr. Darla Cooper and Dr. Daisy Segovia from the research & planning nonprofit, The RP Group, unpack the findings of their latest research on how geographic distance from a public California university significantly affects transfer outcomes for community college students. With over one million California students tracked across six years, the data tells a powerful story—one that challenges assumptions and calls for policy, funding, and support changes to level the playing field for students in “university deserts.” While it's a study of California colleges, the methodology and findings can be applicable to all states dealing with this issue.

Key Research Findings

• Distance matters: Students attending community colleges more than 25 miles from the nearest public university are less likely to transfer. Rates drop even more dramatically past 80 miles.

College Transfer Rates by Distance to Nearest University

• California’s higher ed map is uneven: UC and CSU campuses are clustered along the coast, while many community colleges—especially in rural and border regions—are far from any transfer destination.

University Deserts in the California Community Colleges System by Tier

• Demographics differ by distance:
  • Tier 1 colleges (80+ miles away) serve higher percentages of Latine, Native American, first-generation, and low-income students.
  • 28% of all Native American students in the study were enrolled at Tier 1 colleges.
• Distance impacts students throughout the transfer journey, not just the final step. More Tier 1 students stalled at early stages, like never reaching required math or English.
• Out-of-state transfer is more common in university deserts: Students at distant colleges are far more likely to transfer out-of-state (38% at Tier 1 colleges, compared to 16% at non-desert colleges), especially when neighboring states offer closer or more accessible options.
• Some groups are hit harder: Male students, low-income students, and students of color—especially Black, Native American, and Pacific Islander students—experience greater negative impact from geographic distance.

     Recommendations for Practice and Policy

✔️ Recognize distance as a structural barrier in policy and funding decisions, especially for states that include transfer rates as part of their funding formula.
✔️ Invest in regionally focused bachelor's degree programs offered by community colleges, especially in Tier 1 areas.
✔️ Support transfer centers and partnerships between community colleges and nearby universities, both in-state and out-of-state.
✔️ Provide transition-focused financial aid, such as relocation and housing financial support during transfer—when students need it most.
✔️ Strengthen data-sharing and research capacity at the local level so individual colleges can analyze and address geographic gaps in transfer specific to their students.
✔️ Explore equity-driven financial aid reforms that allow students in university deserts to take state aid across borders if California cannot meet their needs.
✔️ Avoid defaulting to online learning as the only solution—recognize that it’s not appropriate or accessible for all students or majors.

This episode—and the study behind it—reminds us that equity in higher education isn’t just about what’s taught in classrooms or offered in student centers. Sometimes, it’s about how far a student has to go just to get in the door.

Key chapter markers
0:00: Introduction to the "Why" of the Study
4:43: The Study on Geographic Barriers
11:15: Mapping University Deserts
17:42: Who Lives in University Deserts
27:20: Impact on Transfer Outcomes
38:09: Solutions and Policy Recommendations

About Dr. Darla Cooper
Dr. Darla M. Cooper is an educational leader and expert in research and evaluation dedicated to using inquiry, data, and evidence to improve the lives of all community college students. She is currently the Executive Director for The RP Group and has worked in the California Community Colleges system for over 25 years. At The RP Group, she has led landmark research projects that aim to improve student success: Student Support (Re)defined, Through the Gate, African American Transfer Tipping Point, and Geographic Barriers to Transfer. Dr. Cooper has also worked on national projects: Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence and the American Association of Community Colleges’ (AACC) Pathways Project. She holds degrees from the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Southern California.    

About Dr. Daisy Segovia
Dr. Daisy Segovia brings nearly two decades of research experience spanning public policy, psychology, and higher education to her role as Senior Researcher at The RP Group. She currently leads a statewide project investigating geographical barriers to transfer for community college students, with a particular focus on Latine, rural, and low-income students. As a first-generation college student who earned an associate’s degree from Riverside Community College and a BS from UC Davis, she brings a personal understanding of the challenges facing community college students. She also holds a PhD in Psychology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

About Dr. Al Solano
Dr. Al Solano is the Founder and Coach of the Continuous Learning Institute, where he partners with colleges and universities to strengthen student success and equity through sustainable, campus-driven practices. A strong believer in the power of kindness, Al coaches higher education teams using his signature framework—the “Three Cs”: Clarity, Coherence, and Consensus.

With decades of coaching experience, Al has worked directly with more than 50 institutions and trained thousands of educators nationwide. His widely used, practitioner-focused articles on student success strategies, institutional planning and implementation, and educational leadership are embraced by campuses across the country.

Al began his career in K–12 education, later serving in roles at two community colleges. A proud community college transfer student, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a doctorate in education from UCLA.

Transcript

AL Welcome to the Student Success Podcast. If you work in higher ed and want to learn ways to support students, check out today's episode.

[Quote teaser] “Geography affects college enrollment and basically that research says that students who live farther away from their college options are less likely to actually attend college.” - Daisy

[Quote teaser] Darla “I just don't like this idea of limiting people's choices and just telling them, figure it out, move, right? Move to where the program is, move to where the university is. Just do an online program. Pick one of the ones that are close to you.” - Darla

AL In today's Student Success Podcast episode, we're diving into a crucial, but often overlooked factor in transfer success: distance. We may think that the impact of geography is obvious, but Dr. Darla Cooper, executive director and senior researcher, Dr. Daisy Segovia of the nonprofit organization, the Research and Planning Group, bring data and storytelling together to reveal just how much location shapes student outcomes. They also provide promising recommendations to address this challenge. Welcome Darla and Daisy, let's learn about this study.

Darla We were hoping just to give a little bit of background as to why this study. And so years ago we did the through the gate study that looked at transfer specifically honing in on students who had completed all or most of their transfer requirements but then didn't transfer. And in looking at all of that was that study, one of the findings that came out of it seemed to point to distance from the nearest public university as possibly a negative factor impacting students of a likelihood of continuing on to transfer. And so we said, I think we need to dig into this a little bit more. So we went and asked for more money from Ascendium. Thank you to Ascendium for funding that. And I'll let Daisy get into the details about the questions. This is her project. She did all the heavy lifting. She's closer to it than anyone, and I love hearing her talk about it anyway.

Daisy Our research questions was really, I guess, our broader research questions to see how distance affects these college-going decisions. And specifically, what we were looking into is this idea of education deserts. So if you're familiar with the term food desert, whereas an area that has scarce healthy food around. With education deserts, basically, these are areas that don't have a lot of options for students to attend colleges. So they don't have community college options, they don't have any universities nearby, and the research that has taken a look into this has kind of used two different things to define what an education desert is. And that's first is the distance of how far away are these students from their college going options, and the second thing is how broadly accessible these universities are. A common definition that's used in the research is an area is considered an education desert if they have no public university within 25 miles of their house that has at least an 80% acceptance rate. Now, with a lot of this research, that 80% acceptance rate, what that kind of does is that any area where their only option is a community college gets kicked out of a university desert criteria because we accept everyone. We have 100% acceptance rate, right? And so we really wanted to see how taking this definition of an education desert and using it not really to say like, do they have community college and university deserts, but to identify where they don't have specifically like a four-year transfer option for our community college deserts. And so we had more specific research questions based off of all of this where are these university deserts in our California education system? And then who are the students who are attending colleges in these areas? And then more importantly, what is the relationship that exists between attending a college in a university desert and then their ability to transfer to a four-year university?

AL Let's unpack the, well, if you want to talk a little bit about the methodology, that's fine. Or if you want to just hit home with the findings, whatever you'd like to do.

Daisy Yeah, so let's get the methodology out of the way. So similar to all the other studies that we do that looks into transfer, we followed first-time students who showed some behavioral intent to transfer. So basically, through the data, they look like they might be a student who's intending to transfer. For this study specifically, we looked at students who began between 2012 and 2017, followed those students for six years, mapped where they went to college, mapped the proximity to their nearest public university within California. So in our education system, that would either be University of California or Cal State University. And then we saw how they compared with each other as far as their transfer behaviors and their transfer rates. So all in all, for this study, we have a little over a 1 million students that we. took a look at to see if we can find some kind of relationship between the distance and their transfer outcomes.

AL That's a very small "n". I'm really disappointed in you [sarcastically stated].

Daisy Yeah, sorry, it's not billions, but a millions is pretty good. Yeah.

AL One million. That's awesome. Okay. Oh my gosh. Six years worth of data with one million. Anything else about the methodology? Was there anything qualitative? Did you talk to any students? Was this purely quantitative?

Daisy Not yet. That's the desert. So it comes at the end. But for this study specifically, we did quantitative research just looking at the data that we have access to now, crunching some numbers and seeing. Because really, this is the first dive into education deserts within California and specifically with community college students. And so we wanted to put our toes in the water and see, is there a relationship that that exists between this distance and the transfer outcomes. And then as we'll talk about a little bit later, that is spurring additional spinoffs about what we found and trying to get at some more answers.

AL Cool, all right, so thank you for that summary of the methodology, so let's dig in. What did you find?

Daisy Yeah, so first let's talk about the mapping. If you look at our California education system here, we have, like I said, two big systems. We have the University of California. They have nine campuses throughout California. And then we have the California State University campuses. And there are 23 of those. So all in all, our students have 32 options for them to transfer to. And when you start mapping where these colleges are located, surprisingly, they're not all evenly spaced out out of California. So it's not like we said, we're going to build a college or university every so many miles. A lot of them are clustered around specifically the coast. So there's a lot in Northern California, like in the Bay Area space. And there's another cluster down South and Southern California, along LA, Orange County, and San Diego. So we're already seeing that the decisions that were made about where to put these universities, right, might affect students, because if you're not living in these proximities, if you're not along the coast, you might have fewer options for you to transfer to. So already seeing some of results, some finding there, because when you map it out, there's specific locations where these universities tend to be located. And then when you map our community colleges, we have 116, 115 if you don't count the completely online one, you see the same pattern where there's large clusters around the up there in the Bay Area and then along Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego. But one of the things with our community colleges is they tend to be more spread out. So they tend to be more in the really far north of California, more in central California, and more options like along the borders of Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona. And so even though we do have more options for students to attend community colleges, because it's to be more spread out, for the most part, they are also closely clustered in those key areas. So to see first if there's this relationship between the distance and the transfer rates, we did this kind of, and it's too bad that the listeners can't see this really cool scatter plot that I made, but you can look at the report, it's in there. We graphed the overall transfer rate for every college, and then how far away they were to their nearest UC or CSU. And within 25 miles, remember the research says that 25 miles is that cut off. Within that 25 miles, you're not really seeing a pattern or relationship between the distance and the transfer rates. There's a lot of variability there. They go below 20%. Some have rates that are higher than 50%. But there's just a big cluster of transfer rates within that 25 miles. But interestingly, once you get to that 25-mile marker, you start to see the transfer rates going down a little bit low. They start going down, essentially. And so at that 25-mile mark, there was no college that had a transfer rate that was above 40%. And then the farther they got away from the distance, the lower that transfer rate got. And then once you continue on the distance, we saw another significant drop in transfer rates once they hit that 80 mile mark. So we're seeing similar findings from the research that already exists that that 25 miles seems to be the important cutoff. But then we're also seeing maybe the secondary cutoff with that 80 miles. And so when we initially were looking at how to define a university desert within California, they usually use like the broad access definition. And so we looked to see what the acceptance rates were of these universities. We saw that when we incorporated these acceptance rates into our university education desert, it put a large chunk of our colleges in that definition. So about 42% would have been considered a university desert if we considered that acceptance rate. And then we had some that even though they had no broad access university nearby, they had several limited access ones. So maybe some colleges that had lower transfer rates or lower acceptance rates, but there are still several of them around them, right? And so once we took that out of their definition of a university desert, we saw a pattern that made more sense. And so even some colleges that had really high transfer rates, only had some the some few options. And so we decided to not use the broad access part of that definition and just soley identify a university desert based off how far away that college was from their nearest UC or CSU. So just using that 25 mile marker.

AL Did you find one or two that were drastically impacted?

Daisy Yeah, so if you take a look at that scatterplot, you'll see once you get past that 80 miles, the transfer rates tend to really start to drop. But there are two colleges that are the furthest away. One college is slightly less than I think it was 168 miles away, and the other one's over 200 miles away. And those two colleges had really drastically different transfer rates. One had below 10% and the other one had above 30% so I'll talk about that a little bit later once we start diving into these results, but we want to keep that in mind just like when we were looking at this like oh why is this one dot or one college like an outlier even though it's the furthest college away from from their nearest California option.

AL And by the way, I have show notes, so send me the scatterplot and I'll add that so people can follow through the show notes.

Daisy Yeah, awesome. So based off of what we discussed, like what would be the best approach to define the university desert in California, we came up with this double tier system of what would be considered a university desert. And so that first tier is going to be the colleges that are the farthest away from their nearest California option. And these are going to be the colleges that are at least 80 miles away from UC or CSU. And then those that are a tier two university desert are going to be at least 25 miles away, but less than 80 miles away from their nearest CSU or UC. So we split up these university desert into these two tiers just to really emphasize that farther distance really does make an impact, and then everyone else is not considered to be a university desert college. And these are the ones that have any option of a UC or CSU within the 25 miles. So let's talk about who falls into each of these tiers. So in our first tier, remember these are gonna be the ones that are the furthest away, at least 80 miles. These ended up having seven different colleges that were 87 to 211 miles away from the nearest California University. In our sample, this comprised about 18,000 students, a little bit more than that, and what's interesting about these colleges is that almost all of them, so six out of the seven, are located in areas that we consider to be rural. So smaller places farther away from things at that end. If you look at when you start mapping these in California, you see that these are all the colleges that are along the border of California. So they are up against Oregon, up against Nevada, and up against Arizona and then the Mexico border. So these are all kind of the farther away colleges. In our tier two university desert category, 22 colleges fell into this tier. They were 27 to 78 miles away from the nearest California University, and in our sample, this is about 139,000 students. With this one, there's a little bit more of variability in what kind of locations they were located in. So 36 percent were in cities, 27 percent were in suburbs, and the rest were in either a rural area or a town. But when you map these on the California map, you see what I call it the middle-ish of California. So they're not along the borders. They're not along the coast. They're this little line that goes down the middle of California. But again, you're seeing they're far away from the coast. So they're a distance from their nearest university options. And then everyone else is not a university desert. So they were the ones that were located within the coast mostly. So, when we take a look to see who are the students that are being served by these university desert colleges, we see some key things that I'll point out.

Daisy Number one is there is a difference in the demographic makeup of the students who are being served by these colleges. So one of the key things is more Latine students were in tier one and tier two compared to the non-university deserts. There were significantly fewer Asian students that we're attending the university desert colleges. especially in tier one. And even though our Native American students usually comprise a very small percentage when you take account of the whole student population, if you look at just Native American students by themselves as a whole, 28% of them were located within a tier one university desert. So the farthest away from our university's address. So we're already seeing that there's a difference of who are going to these community colleges in the university desert, meaning that these perhaps are students that are going to be more impacted by whatever relationship the distance is having on these transfer outcomes. We also saw that there were more first generation students in this tier one and tier two compared to the non-university education desert, and more low income students, as well as more students that are involved in programs such as like EOPS. So, all in all, to drive the point that the students that are attending these colleges do tend to look them roughly differently than students that have closer options nearby. And so when we start to take a look to see if this is affecting their transfer outcomes, one of the first things we took a look at, because we're not just really interested like, if they make it through the gate, right?

Daisy We want to see how this affects their journey to that gate. And so we had this concept from our first study called the transfer continuum, which categorizes the different steps that a student has to go through to get to that gate. And there's five different steps for this. The first one being that the student just seems like they're a transfer explorer. And so these are students that are kind of accumulating units. They have between 12 to 44 transferable units under their belt, but they haven't quite made any more progress beyond that. If a student moves on to the next step, which is what we considered a momentum students, they have a little bit more units. They have between 45 and 59 units, and they have at least a 2.0 GPA. So they're maintaining a good GPA to to start meeting those transfer requirements. And then the students that are near the gate are the students that have more than 60 units. So usually there's more than is required to get those transfers requirements done and they have that 2.0 GPA, but they're missing either their English or their math requirement. So almost there. We're close. Just just need that English or math and then the next group are those students that are at the gate. So they're at the gate. Not quite through it. They have all their transfer requirements or they've gotten an ADT, an associate's degree for transfer, meaning that they could ideally transfer, just not through the gate yet. And then those who are transfer achievers are the ones that made it through the gate and have transferred to a university. And so thinking of this trying to transfer continuing, we're also just kind of curious, like if it's not just affecting the final outcome, but if it's affecting their journey along the way. And what we saw is that, yes, the distance is affecting not just the outcomes, but the journey within. And specifically we saw that a larger proportion of those tier one students, did not make it past the explorer stage. So they are staying within just accumulating units but not maintaining the GPA or getting their English, moving on to the other steps. And then what we saw is that those who were past that explorer stage were more likely to stop at the gate. So if they didn't get stuck at the explorer stage, then they were getting stuck at the gate. And again, we saw kind of this correlation of like the farther away that they were from a university the lower their transfer rate. So once we looked at that who actually made it to to university, tier one had the lowest transfer rate at 28 percent, tier two had a 33 percent transfer rate and those that were not in the university desert had the highest transfer rate at 36. So we're seeing this almost linear relationship between the distance and their transfer outcomes. And then again, because we wanted to see that there were different demographic makeup of the students who are attending these colleges.

Daisy So we did see a difference. When we looked at gender or their ethnic and racial makeup, as well as whether they were involved in any kind of special population. We saw that for male students, they seem to be more impacted by distance. Those that were for the furthest way had the lower transfer outcomes compared to the male students that were closer. But for female students, we saw that they were similar throughout the three different categories. So they don't seem to be as impacted as male students. We also saw that there were differences in transfer rates for first-generation students, low-income students, and EOPS students where their transfer outcomes were exacerbated by the distance again. The students in tier one if they were first generation had lower transfer rates since the first generation students in tier two. We also saw performance gaps in the transfer rates that were evident among our ethnic and racial groups and again that distance is the differences were exacerbated by this distance and so for example specifically for tier one students they experience the larger disparities across many of their ethnic groups. Asian students, for example, those in tier ones, their transfer rates were considerably lower than those in even tier two., and the non-university deserts, we also saw the same kind of pattern for our Black and African-American students, our Native American students, and the other kind of racial groups. So we're seeing that this distance, we're seeing those usual disproportionate impacted students as even exacerbated by that distance. So 2hat we wanted to see next is, OK, we know that some students are not making it through the gate as much as other students, but does it impact where they go? And so we took a look to see where their transfer journeys took them. And we saw differences, again, of where students are going. For the most part, we saw that most students, or just overall, are going to the CSU system, which is not surprising considering they have more campuses. They tend to take more of our students. So this was true across all of our three groups, but those in the tier one were slightly lower than the other two groups. But one of the things that really stood out was that those were that were in the tier one, they were tier one students transferred at a state at a rate almost double as a student in the other tiers. So the tier one students transferred at a state at 38% rate, whereas those in tier two was only 20 and those that are not in the ancient deserts we're only at 16%. So again, now we're seeing not just differences in who gets to transfer, but where they transfer to, specifically if they even stay within California.

AL So can we hypothesize that tier one, that significantly larger percentage that go out of state is because they've been in these little towns all their lives and the closest California university is still farther away. So might as well just go beyond California. Is that what we can hypothesize you think?

Daisy I think that's definitely a good hypothesis. And if you take a look at, we could actually see where the student ended up going. And we are working on creating a map that's going to show all that. But let me go back to that example of those two colleges that were furthest away. So what we saw when we started to take a closer look into this is we saw that the proximity of those out-of-state options helps kind of mitigate those lower transfer rates. So those two colleges of the furthest away, College of the Siskiyous was 211 miles away from the nearest California option, which was Cal State Humboldt and they had a 32% transfer rate, but they were only 40 miles away from the nearest out of state option, which was Southern Oregon University. So, of course, if your option in California is to travel 200 miles, which I'm sure cannot do. Like, as a student, if you want to stay home, drive back and forth 200 miles, right? But you could go to Oregon and only drive that’s 40 miles, 45 minute drive, according to Google Maps. So yeah, we saw that a lot of the students from College of the Sisikiyous were going to Southern Oregon University because that is a closer option. And when we looked at the other college, which is the second furthest away, which is Palo Verde College, it was 166 miles away from their closest California option. And they only had a 8% transfer rate. But when you took a look at their out-of-state options, their nearest out-of-state option was even further away than their nearest California option. So their nearest option was in Nevada, it was 189 miles away. So that would still be like a three hour drive. So they don't have any options within California. They don't have any options outside of California. So it's no surprise that their transfer rate is so much lower just because these students have nowhere to transfer if they don't want to get up and fly somewhere, essentially. What we're really seeing here is that, yes, the distance really does matter for students, not just for their opportunities to transfer, but where they end up getting to transfer. When we calculated how many miles a student traveled on average, those in the first tier, not surprisingly, had to travel more than 400 miles to the nearest transfer or actually did travel more than 400, which is, you know, a lot higher than those in tier two and in tier one. So just reinforcing what the previous research that says is that if it's nearby, that is a viable option. You're probably more likely to want to go there. It's logistically probably easier to go there, you know, that sort of thing. And so, yes, we can hypothesize that they have those out of state options too.

Darla Our question brought up something different for me, Al, which was another finding related to the out-of-state transfers. When we looked at it by race ethnicity, there were certain groups in those university deserts that were more likely to go out of state, and that was our African American, our Pacific Islander, and our Native American students. I mean like way more likely from those areas in our state to leave the state. So I thought that was an interesting finding and kind of speaks maybe a little bit more to what you're saying about wanting to leave wherever they are and wanting to try something different and obviously having the means to do that. Because that's the other piece of all of this is, it's not just I don't want to, I literally can't. I have a home here. I have a family here, I have a job here, my community is here, this idea of place boundedness. I mean, that term makes it sound like you have no choice. And a lot of our students don't. We've talked to a few students, just more anecdotally in conversation so far, and they talk about, I don't have the means to move. It costs money to move. It also costs more to live in these other parts of the state, right? When you're moving from a rural area to an urban area, there's a cost of living adjustment that has to happen. And so all of these factors are coming into play, but it's so fascinating, you know, just looking at all of this.

AL Yeah, in fact, I was talking to a college president the other day because she was happy that they got more money for scholarships. The Foundation. And I said, can I be honest with you? These scholarships often actually are not helpful because they offset financial aid. Like, so financial aid is like, oh, you got something? All right, now we're gonna take something away then. And it doesn't really help the student. But what would help a student, because I was out of state transfer, was I really needed money that summer when I was moving. If you're gonna give me a scholarship or give me money of some sort, I'd need that help for that transition. And we're kind of getting into implications for recommendations and practice and solutions, but because you've done such a wonderful job quantifying the impact of geographical distance, that could be something that practitioners do with the data, right? We need to allocate more scholarship, more funding to help them transition as opposed to while they're still in, right? So again, I might be jumping a little bit. Thank you for sharing that, Darla. That is fascinating, especially if, what if, again, I'm just guessing, hypothesizing, what if for a very long time in those communities, these student groups that you mentioned, I don't know, maybe they haven't felt a sense of belonging. Had to find it out of state. So very interesting. OK.

Daisy Yeah, just a Darla's point, there's a lot of cost of living adjusting that needs to be done, not just in the cost financially, but the cost culturally. Some of these students are coming from towns that probably have a population that are smaller than the student population at a university. And so that could also be a culture shock. And I think, hypothesizing, they need that financial means to help them get there, but also some other additional support to help them adjust to that environment, to being away from what they know, probably different lifestyle, that sort of thing. So there's a lot of things that can kind of speak to how we can help students get that. But all in all, I think our findings answer the question of does distance matter? Yes, it does. Distance matters. It affects students, their options of where they can go, and that's affecting their transfer outcomes. And so we're really seeing that 25 miles seems to be still an important marker. That was the minimum it took to affect our transfer rates. We even saw that our students that were in these university desert colleges didn't progress as far in our transfer continuum. So it's not just affecting their final outcome, it's affecting their journey along their way as well. And that we're generally seeing the further away that a college is, the lower their transfer rate is. But if you have that out-of-state option or another nearby option, it can mitigate some of those lower transfer rates. And particularly, we're seeing that some students are being more affected by this distance than others. Some of these performance gaps were exacerbated by this distance, especially for our Latine, our first gen, and our low income students. So it's really critical that we uncover the factors that are impeding what is getting in the way of our students' progress toward their goal of transfer. And so these findings just really underscored this urgent need that we need to address the influence of distance on our educational opportunities. Because I think when we have these conversations about what are our barriers for our student success, distance is not part of that conversation. It's usually like money is a big aspect, academic support, those type of things. But when you really think about it, if you are requiring one student to cross the street, and there it is, and you're requiring another student to go the entire length of California to get to a college, those two students don't have the same opportunities. And those two students are going to need different types of support.

AL In your initial research, when you're looking more broadly nationally that this is an issue and then you dug deeper into California, which by the way, there's a lot of listeners who are outside of California and I'm sure if they were to do a similar study, they probably, I would guess, find similar findings. So if you're out there listening, I hope you do this for your state too. But when you were finding out about this national phenomenon, were you already seeing some solutions that were in place, such as I've seen four-year universities have a presence at a community college, something that's prevalent, that works. Is that something we should be recommending as long as it's affordable, right? We don't want some $80,000 a year private university trying to go on our community college campuses and have massive debt. So, have you seen that?

Darla What we can't say is we don't know about effect yet, but we do in our report offer some of the things that you're talking about. I mean, that would actually be a really good study. You need to write that down, Daisy, of the impact of having, because I know when we were doing this study, we're going around doing presentations and someone would say, oh, well, that college has a center nearby, meaning that there's some university, public university that has a center nearby which is helping with their transfer rate. But the flip side of that is most university centers, at least the ones that I've seen, they're not comprehensive universities. There's a limited number of majors that you can pursue and finish your degree solely at that center. So, good for you. If the major you want, the career you wanna pursue matches what's available at the center that's close to you. But what if it doesn't? Then what happens? So university centers was one of the options, we talked about baccalaureate degree programs at the community college that will be regionally based right. They're looking that, as part of my understanding, I'm not an expert on this, but part of my understanding is when they're applying for this they are looking at their own regional needs these community colleges that are trying to bring bachelor's degree programs to their campuses. So they're looking at the career landscape. They're looking at industry in their local area. They're not trying to produce bachelor's degree just for the sake of producing bachelor's degrees. They're trying to improve their community, meet community needs. So if that's the case, we need more of that. We need we need more of those opportunities that fit that community's need. The first thing actually that most people kind of bring up as a solution is distance ed, which that's where you're able to complete an entire degree. But to tell a student who lives in one of these desert areas, you must. You know, you can do an online degree like in a flippant kind of way. Well, I find that disrespectful. Online learning is not for everyone. Again, it depends on the program. It depends on the cost, as you just mentioned. Some programs don't lend themselves to online learning. You need in-person lab experience or something along those lines. And then just some people prefer to learn differently, right? They prefer not to learn in an online place. So again, I just don't like this idea of limiting people's choices and just telling them, figure it out, move, right? Move to where the program is. Move to where the university is. Just do an online program. Pick one of the ones that are close to you, you know, that the center close to you offers. I think that's the message to where it's just not equitable. And that's really one of our main points is the system is set up to where you have to figure it out. The burden is on the student to go to the education instead of us figuring out ways to provide the education to where the students are. And that's really the point, one of the biggest points. This is an equity issue, especially if you go back to what Daisy shared about who is living in these areas of the state who is being disadvantaged by these distances, they are students who have historically been disadvantaged in our education system, historically minoritized and underserved, right, in our system.

Daisy Well, I think you hit on most of them. One of the things we also found from presenting these, because we did go across the state and nationally to present these findings, one of the things that pops out of my mind is that those that had maybe better transfer outcomes were like, well, we have a relationship with this university. We have agreement with this out-of-state to not charge the students out of state tuition, those sort of things. So I think really strengthening those partnerships with universities I think would be a key solution to tackle this so that we can ensure that there's a smoother transfer between the pathways from our community colleges to these universities, whether they be in state or out of state, and then especially for those colleges in that tier one that along those borders those out-of-state partnerships are really going to be important. And just thinking about the policies that exist, thinking about how some of those rules may be disadvantaging those students that have to go out of state. And so if you go out of state, you're not taking California money with you to help pay for that college. So they have to find the means to go out of state. And sometimes that means paying higher tuition. You know that sometimes that means paying for travel that sort of thing. And so there's already, policy out there that let students go to Historically back institutions to take the California money with them to those things that we so we could think of something parallel to that where we can allow some students to take their money out of state to help them meet those needs if California can't meet their needs. I think one of the other key things that you mentioned, Al, is like, yes, we did it specifically for California, but we did the distance from the community colleges to the university. There could be many university deserts within a specific area. So I think it's important for individual colleges and individual institutions to try to replicate these findings at their local levels to see if they can find similar things. They can pinpoint to which students are farther away from them. Are they even getting those students to their college and to examine what the transfer movement looks like for their students and if that reveals any kind of collaboration opportunities or opportunities to provide those students more support.

AL Small colleges, community colleges, are already underfunded in so many ways. They rely on a lot of grants, federal grants, and we know what's happening there these days. And in California and in many other states, they have moved toward a different student funding formula that looks at completion as one variable. Does a study like this, could it help impact, influence that formula because then, these institutions in these deserts, if you will, will be at a disadvantage financially with completion. So is there a way to weight somehow this formula for these institutions, given that decades ago, they were kind of set up to fail, in many respects, when it comes to having a new funding formula, right? It's not just about butts in seats. And I'm not against the new funding formula per se, actually. I like it, for the most part. But we also want it to be fair. Any thoughts on maybe perhaps this can help influence policy?

Darla We actually wrote about that as well, the Student Center Funding Formula. And we didn't do the math, the exact math, but like you, we can hypothesize that everything we're saying means that certain colleges are being disadvantaged because they're not going to have higher transfer rates, at least not anytime soon. And that equates to dollars in the formula. Now, there could be some that argue that they get their money because they have higher Pell percentages, something like that. But it's like, wow. What that those two things aren't aren't the same just because I can make it up over here me having a higher Pell has whole other implications that have nothing to do with transfer in some respects. So I I think there absolutely is an argument for needing to take a look, and that was our so part of our bigger note, is that and Daisy mentioned it earlier, you've got to take distance into account when you're with all these policies, it is a variable that affects students and their options, their true ability to benefit at the same rate as students who have multiple choices. And Daisy, I don't know if you want to talk about this, but another finding that was really interesting is that we just repeated about how we did look at acceptance rate because that comes up, the university's acceptance rate. And so like, you could live across the street from the university, but if they only take 10% of the people, then is that really accessible to you?

AL I'll be remiss if I didn't mention Dr. Kevin Walthers at Allan Hancock, because he is such an advocate for this. I think his college, that college has that issue, right? It's not far from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, which is, I don't know if you can call it a broad access institution. And then Santa Barbara, UC Santa Barbara isn't exactly across the street, but it's the nearest UC. That's not a broad access institution. And so some of the things that I know he's been fighting for in other presidents is what you mentioned earlier, the baccalaureate at the community college. What I find ironic, do you remember like, oh, this is like 15, 18 years ago, the CSUs were making an argument and they were using words like equity when the UCs were balking against them having doctorates, right? And they have some doctorates now. And now, the CSU are saying no to community colleges having a baccalaureate and not even thinking about that we can accommodate them. There's sufficient number of students. We're not taking any students away, right? Just the irony there, huh?

Darla Dr. Walthers is on our advisory committee. We didn't mention that up front, but this project and a lot of our larger projects, we recruit people who, you know, kind of with an interest, with experience in the area that were just that where we had one for African-American Transfer Tipping Point, we had one for Through the Gate, we had one for Student Support Redefined and Student Support Redefine was the first one. And after that experience, it was so helpful. We said, we have to have these advisory committees. And once again, we had one for our Geographic Barriers project. And I, like you, I've been hearing of him for years before as well. And so he was probably first on my list to reach out to say, would you like to be a part of this project? And so he's been very vocal in our advisory committee. Obviously, I just saw an article. He often will send me an article that he has written. Alan Hancock is interesting because and they are really, there's nothing close. Forget broad access or otherwise, being where they're located. Again, like you mentioned, you've got Cal Poly, very hard to get into. You see Santa Barbara, also hard to get into. So the broadest access college nearest them is all the way at CSU Channel Islands, which is I think 100 miles away or something along those lines. That's not reasonable to just tell a student, that's it. That's your choice. You don't necessarily think of where Santa Maria, where Allan Hancock is located as a desert, and especially, it's like, well, Cal Poly is right there, Santa Barbara. Although I wouldn't want to do that Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, I've done it. I wouldn't recommend that as a regular commute. They're just in this, those students just don't have the options that may look like they have. And so we've been definitely trying to not just look at, obviously, how those students are affected, but there are others throughout the state who... There's some where you hear that name, and if you happen to know where that college is, because that's the other thing, people don't know where these colleges even are when they hear the names. But if you happen to know, there's some you hear and you go, oh yeah, okay. That makes sense, desert, not going to be a university anywhere around there. But there are others like the Alan Hancock where it might not initially come to your mind as a university desert, but it is because of circumstances like we've just been discussing.

AL Thank you so much for doing this study because to some will be like, well, yeah, no brainer, distance maybe, yeah, but you quantified it. You gave it a story. There's students' real lives behind this and like in so many cases, it's usually our historically most disproportionately impacted students that we have to think about here. So thank you for quantifying it. We did summarize with some ideas, recommendation, practices. Anything else, or maybe your next step might be something qualitative? We can wrap up with that.

Daisy Yeah, so one of the things about this study, as all studies do, is it really just spurred more questions, right? And so now we can, I think, definitely say that just distance does matter. But then there are a lot of other questions that are remaining, such as, like, what is driving the students' decisions to transfer or not? And especially since we saw those differences among the different student groups, just like what is driving the decisions for some groups and not others. And then what is specifically about that distance that's really preventing them from transferring, and how do we help them overcome these barriers and what resources do we need to get to these students to help them along their journeys? And so, yes, we have our next step is our next study. Al, as you foreshadowed earlier today, we're doing more qualitative work this time around. So we're going to be. going specifically to those rural colleges, they were like the furthest away, and talking to practitioners, administrators, to students there, to the faculty there to really talk about how they help their students transfer, what are the decisions that students are using to decide to transfer or not transfer, and what it is that we can do to help them. So we can really tie down how we can help students. And so hopefully, I'm really excited about this next step of this new spin off of our research that we'll actually get to talk to some of these different people and hopefully get some more answers and probably spur more questions, but at least get some additional answers for now.

AL Thank you both so much for participating in the Student Success Podcast.

Daisy Yes, thank you very much for having us.

Darla Thank you, Al.

AL Thank you for listening to the Student Success Podcast. You can subscribe to the show and newsletter on the Continuous Learning Institute link below, and of course, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.