Community College Students in Calif. Are Guaranteed Admission to 9 HBCUs

The pipeline from community college to a four-year university can be shaky, since students often attend community college in hopes of improving their grades in order to gain admission to a four-year institution.

The California Community Colleges system may have found a way to make that transition a bit easier: It has signed an agreement with nine HBCUs so that all of its students who wish to transfer to any one of the participating historically black schools are guaranteed admission, so long as they have a minimum GPA of 2.5, KGO-TV reports.

The nine participating HBCUs who made the deal with the California system are Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C.; Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn.; Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo.; Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala.; Talladega College, also in Alabama; and Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. 

Apparently it’s a win-win for both California community colleges and these HBCUs. Getting into four-year colleges in California has become “increasingly hard,” KGO-TV explains, and HBCUs have seen their student-body numbers dwindle significantly in recent years.

Now all of California’s African-American community college students who clear the GPA hurdle and would like to transfer have a spot at one of the nine schools.

Olevasami Brown, a student at a California community college, explained how he used to think that attending an HBCU was simply unattainable for him. “I felt like the gap between achieving and transferring was a little too wide for me, but with this announcement today, I feel that dream is so much closer,” Brown said. 

There are approximately 160,000 African-American students enrolled in California’s community colleges. 

According to KGO-TV, a few of the better-known HBCUs, like Howard University, Morehouse College and Spelman College, are expected to join the agreement eventually.

Read more at KGO-TV.