“The Next Person Probably Would Have Dropped”: How the Classroom Influences Transfer Progress for Community College Students of Color

Background: Community colleges have played an essential role in expanding access to higher education for students from historically minoritized backgrounds, many of whom enter with aspirations to transfer. However, community colleges operate within a broader transfer ecosystem in which students of color continue to experience disproportionately low transfer rates. As critical sites where students make academic progress toward transfer, classrooms remain underexplored in transfer research and in efforts to understand and address transfer disparities. Focus of Study: This study is guided by the strategic racial equity framework and examines classroom interactions and policies in relation to the transfer trajectories and aspirations of community college students of color. The study also explores faculty perceptions of their role in students’ transfer progress and the ways their class policies and practices contribute to or remove barriers to transfer. Research Design: Stemming from a larger mixed methods project, this qualitative study drew on individual, semistructured interviews with 22 students and seven educators from one large Midwestern community college. This article centers on five students who discussed the role of race in relation to their classroom experiences as they prepared for transfer and on three faculty members who taught high-enrollment courses. Interviews with students addressed their academic progress toward transfer, including classroom and racialized experiences. Faculty interviews focused on their teaching practices and perceptions of their role in supporting students’ transfer progress. I used the strategic racial equity framework to draw attention to hidden contributors to transfer inequities for students of color while also harnessing students’ strengths and faculty members’ efforts to support transfer progress within and beyond the classroom. Conclusions: The findings reveal that classrooms are racialized and racializing spaces that mediate transfer through students’ experiences with exclusionary pedagogical practices, racial microaggressions, and other racialized interactions. These experiences took emotional and academic tolls on students that at times disrupted their transfer trajectories. Faculty who sought to support students of color through equity-centered practices and policies lacked the institutional resources and time needed to sustain the level of deep equity-centered work they desired. The findings affirm that advancing equitable transfer requires a commitment to embedding racial equity throughout the college, with renewed attention to the classroom. This includes preparing and supporting educators to better serve students of color along their transfer trajectories, strengthening racial bias reporting systems and institutional accountability, and supporting colleges in redefining and working toward equitable transfer and student success through classroom-centered and structural changes.