All community colleges offer a full range of academic courses that enable a student to prepare for transfer to a university. If you are a "transfer" student and plan carefully, you may transfer to a university as a junior after two years of community college work. Each community college will have a Transfer Center with counselors/advisors to help you organize a program that will be acceptable so that you will not lose any credits when you transfer. Use www.assist.org to help you select the proper courses at the community college that will meet the specific GED requirements for your major at the UC/CSU universities to which you plan to transfer.
Transfer Admission Agreement/Guarantee (TAA/TAG)
Guaranteed Admission is more commonly referred to as a Transfer Admission Agreement or Transfer Admission Guarantee program. A TAA/TAG is a contractual agreement between you, the community college, and the university you wish to transfer to. Students who meet and maintain stated admission and major requirements are guaranteed admission to a specific university. Note that this does not guarantee the major. Students preparing to write a TAA/TAG should meet with a Transfer Center counselor or academic advisor as early as possible to develop an education plan and select appropriate coursework.
Both the CSU and UC systems have commitments to these students and provide pathways and guarantees (TAG for UC, ADT for CSU) to encourage local community college students to continue their educations. Some campuses are more friendly to transfer than others; UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego allow transfer but do not participate in the TAG program, and some CSU majors have no articulated classes past the 39 GE units students can transfer.
While the workforce pathways and easy admission criteria are their greatest selling points, community colleges aren’t without their issues. Admissions processes are often complicated. Counseling services and classroom experiences can be uneven. Classes can be impacted and it may take a few semesters before being able to enroll in required courses. Many students may take classes for fun, but drop out before the semester ends. Most CCCs have a graduation rate of 30%.
Moreover, the transfer pathway is anything but easy. CSU and UC requirements differ, making it hard for a student to prepare for both. Within each system’s schools, requirements also differ, again making it difficult for a student to prepare for more than one UC or CSU campus. Further, students who want to go into “hard science” majors at competitive UCs (biology majors at UC San Diego, for example), should expect to spend 3–4 years at the community college in order to complete all general education and major preparation classes that are required for transfer.
Counter to the common advice that the community college is great for students who don’t know what they want to do, unless a student knows exactly what they plan to major in and which college they want to go to, the CSU/UC transfer path can be long and frustrating.
Pulled from "California Public System 101: CCC"
