By Robert Oliphant

Anxious parents should check for themselves the recent assertion that "remarkably few community college students transfer to prestigious private schools despite being highly qualified" [LA Times, 6/21/06 ]. Certainly a quick look at Barron's 1,670-page Profiles of American Colleges for 2005 (currently available at both Borders and Barnes and Noble) will be far more reassuring to Americans than the questionable "bad news" that CC transfers are destined for what the study calls "nonselective four-year colleges."

Fulltime equivalent students and flesh-and-blood college graduates . . . . Selective or nonselective, four-year colleges all use "Carnegie unit" arithmetic in counting their students, via which each 15 units registered and paid for counts as one "full time equivalent" student (FTE), Barron's, for example, lists the yearly fulltime-equivalent undergraduate enrollment for UCLA as 23,685, as opposed to the roughly 30,000 actual flesh-and-blood bodies who do the actual studying, drinking, and fender-bending.

Of these 23,685 FTE students, Barron's lists 4,265 as entering freshmen, noting (via compulsory NCAA statistics) that only 57% (2,441) will receive their baccalaureate degrees in the traditional four years - roughly 10% of FTE and only 8% of the flesh-and-blood creatures hanging out on campus. Surprisingly enough, though, Barron's lists the actual number of baccalaureates awarded in one year (2002) as 6919: almost twice as many as the entering freshman class and three times as many as we would predict on the basis of NCAA figures.

This overall pattern of freshman attrition and baccalaureate explosion permeates Barron's statistics, past and present, for American higher education as a whole. It also raised two potentially embarrassing questions: (a) Where do most of America 's baccalaureates have been coming from if not from the freshman-sophomore programs of low-cost two-year community colleges? and (b) Why do researchers persist in frightening high school students and their parents with gloom-and-doom findings about a secondary and postsecondary educational system which in the long run demonstrably still rewards the industrious more the privileged and the persistent more than the precocious?

The consciousness-of-guilt premise . . . . We all know from watching the evening news, along with "Cops, " that flight and other forms of evasiveness have traditionally been interpreted by rational citizens as indications that those involved are guilty of improper behavior. Consequently, as a first step toward answering our two somewhat tendentious questions, we can determine via Barron's what proportion of 4-year colleges and universities actually refuse to release their campus statistics regarding the baccalaureate explosion described above.

In California, for instance, the evaders comprise 23% of those covered by Barron's (both 2005 and 2002) including "selective" private universities like Pepperdine (listed as "very competitive by Barron's) and UC public universities like Santa Barbara: also listed as "very competitive." Nationwide, as might be expected the evasiveness level is somewhat lower: about 20%.

As matters now stand, any concerned American parent can legitimately phone the President's office of an "evader college" and ask (question-a) how many baccalaureate degrees were awarded last year and how many of them went to students offering transferable credit from community colleges. Along the same lines (question-b), such parents can also phone or email the Jack Ken t Cooke Foundation and ask why the researchers insisted upon using out-of-date figures (1992-2000) to demand changes in an American system of higher education that is actually working both effectively and democratically - especially in today's climate of high-stakes achievement testing.

High priced colleges versus high stakes testing . . . . By way of illustration: The California Bar Association lists on its web site its July 2005 bar exam pass results for first-time test takers. These results show pass rates of only 42% and 33% for UC Berkeley and UCLA, where tuition for out-of-state students is $30,000 yearly. In contrast, the private sector Ventura and Santa Barbara Colleges of Law, where tuition is roughly $12,000 yearly, have pass rates of 44% and 45%, and Concord College of Law (a low cost correspondence school) has a pass rate of 50%, i.e., 21 successful candidates out of 40 test takers).

To put it somewhat abrasively, educational researchers today may be corrupt; but they are certainly not stupid. They know very well that baccalaureate degrees are earned in specific junior-senior fields (chemistry, business, engineering, etc.), and they also know that those who earn degrees in these fields must meet the standards of national accrediting agencies like the American Chemical Society and the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, along with those of post-baccalaureate programs in other schools. Hence the need for industrious and persistent community college transfers (much like the GI Bill working-class students of years past).

But even more important, our educational researchers also know that freshman-sophomore programs today simply treat their students as cash cows producing scads of FTE via overcrowded classrooms and underpaid instructors. In an industry where high FTE is sacred, it's inevitable that many researchers will be tempted to ignore the facts of our educational market economy, coining phrases like "nonselective colleges" (it doesn't appear in Barron's) in favor of perpetuating elitist illusions that tempt prep school Pinocchios into leaving home for a freshman-sophomore Pleasure Island world of drinking, drugs, casual sex, and occasional violence. Hence the grotesquely high level of evasiveness on their part and on the part of some college presidents.

TO CONCLUDE . . . . As indicated at the outset, concerned parents and students can check for themselves the factual assertions made here. The conclusions, like any flight of journalistic fancy, are of course open to question and debate, in which connection Americans certainly have reason to worry about our climate of silence about how professional educators keep, and ought to keep, their Carnegie unit books.

As for the profession as a whole: There's no doubt that Dickens' Fagin is a fascinating character, along with being a master educator and role model for aspiring young criminals. Let's hope, though, that our university presidents and researchers set their career-integrity sights a bit higher in the years that lie ahead. Their entering freshmen deserve it. So do their parents. And so does our nation.

SPECIAL NOTE. . . .  For parents especially, I believe the optimistic case made here is greatly strengthened by the following quote from the Los Angeles Times of Friday, June 23, 2006 .

 " OAKLAND . . . . Number of UC Transfer Students Rises by 2.4%. . . . The University of California said Thursday that it has admitted 16,620 transfer students for the fall from California community colleges, up 2.4% from 2005.  The proportion of Latino, African American, and Native America Students in the transfer group also rose, from 19% in 2005 to 19.9% this year.

"At UCLA, students from those underrepresented minority groups constituted minority groups constituted 19.2% of the admitted transfers this year, up from 17.8% in 2005.

"The annual transfer report also showed that African Americans made up 3.1% - or 155 students - of the 5,030 California transfers admitted for the fall.  The figure is up from 2.7% last year."