A plan to guarantee community college transfer to California’s public universities died. Now it’s back

CalMatters

Mikhail Zinshteyn

September 12, 2023

It’s rare for a California bill to come back to life after enduring a quiet legislative death, but a shelved effort to help more community college students transfer to the University of California suddenly has new legs.

Spearheading this last-minute revival is bill author Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, a Democrat from Sacramento, who told CalMatters in an interview that his office spent weeks crafting the legislation with representatives from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.

McCarty said the proposed law, Assembly Bill 1291, has input from the Senate and Assembly legislative leaders as well. It must pass the Legislature by Sept. 14.

“This is a game changer for higher education access and for expanding enrollment through the community college transfer process,” McCarty said in an interview. “While not perfect, this simplifies more than anything we’ve ever seen.”

He said the bill sets in motion a pathway to achieve a holy grail for higher-education advocates: A common admissions guarantee for community college students to get into a UC or California State University campus. Currently, community college students earning an associate degree for transfer, a specialized associate degree, are guaranteed admission to a Cal State campus — but not one of their choice. No such systemwide guarantee exists for the UC, though select campuses have their own transfer pathways, and the system is working on its own transfer guarantee.

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