College Transfer Plan Helps Translate PCC Into UCLA

If David Abramian had had his way, he would have played football for UCLA and gone on to a professional football career.

But UCLA neither offered him a spot on the team nor accepted him as a student. He enrolled in one college, then another, finally transferring to Pasadena City College last fall, still hoping to get to the Westwood campus and work on a pre-med degree.

He abandoned his dreams of a football career because of a bad knee, but now, if all goes as planned, Abramian will enroll in pre-med at UCLA next year as a result of a new cooperative program set up between the two schools last year.

PCC is one of 10 community colleges in Los Angeles County that guarantee admission to UCLA’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences after students have satisfactorily completed two years of academic work at the junior college level. Admission to UCLA’s other colleges is not guaranteed.

Transfer Alliance

The Transfer Alliance pilot program assures admission to UCLA if students get at least a 3.0 (B) grade average in classes in biology, literature, philosophy, psychology, history and English.

“They (UCLA) said if I took part in this program, I would get the red carpet treatment,” said Abramian, a 20-year-old sophomore from Montebello.

“I’ve been doing a little more than what is asked for at PCC to prepare myself for UCLA,” said Abramian, who has maintained a 3.0 average at PCC.

There are now 29 PCC students hoping to transfer to UCLA through the program. Gayle Byok, director of academic program development at UCLA, said that part of the program is designed to improve courses at community colleges so that more emphasis is placed on writing, research and developing a fast reading pace.

‘Transfer Shock’

Byok said courses at the community colleges are also being designed to provide a continuity of curriculum so that students don’t suffer from what she called “transfer shock.”

According to Byok, surveys of students who had earlier transferred from community colleges to UCLA showed that they thought they would have benefited from more training in writing and science. Under the new program, faculty from both the community colleges and UCLA are meeting to develop a curriculum that will facilitate the change from one academic environment to the other.

The program is also expected to increase the number of transfers from community colleges to universities.

Last year, only 5,300 of about 1.1 million students in community colleges statewide transferred to the University of California system.

The number of transfers to UCLA from community college students have dropped by more than 50% over a 10-year period, from 1,224 in 1974 to 602 in 1984. The drop in transfers from PCC to UCLA was less, from 76 in 1974 to 51 in 1984.

Other colleges in the Transfer Alliance are Santa Monica, Los Angeles City, Los Angeles Valley, Pierce, El Camino, Los Angeles Harbor, College of the Canyons, West Los Angeles, and Long Beach City.

Byok said that there are about 550 students in the program at the 10 colleges. She said that UCLA wanted to start out small because universities cannot guarantee an unlimited number of admissions. Because faculty interaction was a primary concern, colleges that already had faculty members working with UCLA were given first consideration.

The Transfer Alliance Program is one of several PCC programs geared to helping students eventually get a four-year college degree.

Humanities Block

In 1984, PCC began offering a Humanities Block program, funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, under which students can take a one-term interdisciplinary course encompassing philosophy, English and history. Writing assignments in the English component directly relate to reading in the philosophy and history session.

“In the Humanities Block, papers are much more complex and it prepares them to go on to a four-year university,” said Jane Hollinger of the PCC English department. Hollinger and Bill Goldmann, who teaches political science, are two PCC faculty members who have worked with the UCLA faculty in developing the Transfer Alliance Program.

Goldmann, who teaches the humanities course, said he thinks it is one reason UCLA chose PCC for the transfer program.

Although PCC faculty and administrators support the Transfer Alliance, at least one counselor would like to see the program expanded to include other four-year universities. For example, Santa Monica also has a transfer arrangement with California State University, Northridge; Pepperdine University; Loyola-Marymount University and USC.

“We want to open the program wider and make agreements with other four-year universities to guarantee admission,” said Robert Navarro, counselor in charge of honor students at PCC. Navarro said he will meet with representatives of Occidental College next month and hopes to bring other schools into the program.