Transfer Between Community Colleges and 4-Year Colleges: The All-American Game

In this article, the authors introduce a novel way, using the metaphor of a baseball game, to evaluate and measure community college student progress for those whose stated goal is to transfer to a 4-year institution and, ultimately, earn a bachelor's degree. The proposed framework of “the Transfer Game” is an outgrowth of the Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students (TRUCCS) project, which is a longitudinal study of 5,000 community college students from the 9-campuses of the Los Angeles Community College District. The goal of the project is to explain how the “all-American game” provides a method to measure, comprehend, and visualize student progression, and identify the factors that predict both success and barriers. The framework provides a scholarly comparison of the all-American game of baseball to the All-American invention of the community college.