Laura Pappano

They often are treated as places where workers retrain, add technical skills and earn job certifications. But they also have a quieter role, helping students earn two-year degrees that prepare them to transfer to a four-year college.

In our status-conscious higher education hierarchy, however, the firepower of those campuses and their students is often overlooked.

“I hate saying ‘community college,’” said Andrew Lee, 19, a student at the Community College of Rhode Island, when he’s asked which school he attends by patrons at the restaurant in Narragansett where he waits tables. “They think I really screwed up.”

Yet when Lee graduated from nearby Coventry High School in 2018, his state made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: Free community college.

He was planning to attend Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, but reconsidered. Now he will take his 4.0 grade-point average and new maturity (“I don’t like to procrastinate anymore”) to a private college to finish his bachelor’s degree. It will be pricey, he said, “but I’m getting it half off.”

There have long been gritty students whose ambition and academic power made their starting point irrelevant, as well as those who took longer to find their way.

But now, amid worry about affordability and a tone around college admissions that feels more about branding than learning, students like Lee are feeding a counternarrative to the privileged, overanxious jostle for prestige. And it is compelling.

Who doesn’t love students who bet on their own drive? Who have worked as landscapers and cashiers, care for parents or children, study in their cars between shifts and feel grateful for — rather than entitled to — the education they get?

That is one reason these students are being courted by private colleges, even elite ones.

Williams College, a private liberal arts school in Massachusetts, enrolled eight transfer students from community colleges this year (up from two last year), including Lara and Jason Meintjes, who earned two associate degrees each at Long Beach City College in California while working multiple jobs. They moved to Massachusetts with their daughter, a sophomore now enrolled at Mount Greylock Regional High School.

“There has been a shift in how we think of really talented students from different backgrounds,” said Maud Mandel, the president of Williams. Such students, she said, “represent a different kind of diversity on campus.”

She said groups like the American Talent Initiative, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Phi Theta Kappa, an honor society for two-year college students with grade-point averages of 3.5 or higher, have identified academically strong candidates that her college otherwise might not see. Lara Meintjes, for instance, is a Cooke Transfer Scholar.

The family lends an element of arty undergraduate domesticity — she is a painter, he is a photographer — to campus housing on a street where seniors socialize.

“It is more that I fit in everywhere than I fit in nowhere,” said Lara Meintjes, 35, as she tore kale for a lunch salad between classes. Jason Meintjes, 37, a one-time rock musician, darted out the back door of the kitchen to attend a math colloquium.

“He wants to take advantage of every possible resource,” she explained. Later, Lara Meintjes participated in a seminar on Romantic culture. James Fenimore Cooper, she offered, is “sort of meandering through different ideas and spaces. He is trying to be lost, to disappear.”

That is something she and her husband cannot do at this small college in the Berkshires. But that is also the point. And why, even as she embraces her youthful classmates, Lara Meintjes also organizes gatherings for fellow transfers. “Most of us,” she said, “have lived a life before coming to college.”

That different energy appeals to elite campuses.

Community college transfers “are not your typical Ivy League student,” said Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, who is in discussions with the Community College of Rhode Island “about formalizing a pathway to Brown.”

But there are other reasons that private colleges are interested in community college students.

Robert Springall, vice president for enrollment management at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a leafy campus with fire engine red architectural accents, said his school faces rising competition for first-year students. So, administrators asked, “What other populations can Muhlenberg tap into to find talented and diverse students?” he said.

Students sometimes found their way from local community colleges, but last year, Muhlenberg began courting them. The college offered quicker reading of transcripts and counselors to help navigate. It announced a $15,000 annual scholarship for Phi Theta Kappa members. It also prioritized some spots for transfers, admitting them on March 1, rather than waiting for first-year students to commit on May 1.

Last year, two community college transfers enrolled; this year, 12 did. And a survey of admitted students last spring revealed an interesting data point: Twelve percent had thought about attending a community college instead.

“We realized that more students that we would consider well-prepared were considering community college,” Springall said.

In fact, a 2019 study by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation found that students transferring from community college to a selective four-year institution go on to graduate at higher rates than those coming from four-year colleges — 73% versus 61%.

Private campuses like such students — and are working harder to get them.

The New England Board of Higher Education will convene 60 community and private colleges this fall to build within-state transfer pipelines; California community colleges just did the same with 36 in-state private colleges. Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, signed an agreement in July inviting students at Gateway and Housatonic community colleges to take three classes for free, get a Quinnipiac ID while doing so and join campus activities.

“We have to create more different pathways,” said Judy Olian, the president of Quinnipiac. “There are whole segments of society that can’t just pick up for four years and head off to this great environment.”

And there are some who think it unwise.

Rising college costs have capable middle-class students rethinking how to structure their educations. It’s shaking up how a “normal” college experience is defined, said Meghan Hughes, the president of the Community College of Rhode Island.

Given federal data showing that nearly half of the students who earn a bachelor’s degree started at a community college, Hughes said, “We are now the mainstream.” She objects to the “nontraditional” label for those studying at community colleges.

“They are just ‘college students,’” she said. But they are college students who “make it work with duct tape,” she added. Such students are also challenging what college is for, particularly the part where you go in order to grow up.

“The whole college experience is an overrated paradigm,” said Elijah Sommer, 22, a senior at Muhlenberg majoring in biochemistry who plans to go to medical school. The focus on “having X number of friends and going to X numbers of parties is such a fleeting thing.”

Ten days before heading to college in California after high school, alarmed at a sibling’s $80,000 college debt, Sommer stopped himself “from getting sucked into the flow of everybody else.” He enrolled at Lehigh Carbon Community College in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania. Three years ago, he transferred to Muhlenberg.

Sommer lives at home and commutes to school. Jobs he has held — from buffing school floors to demonstrating the Ninja blender at Wegmans supermarket — make him treat school “like the greatest, though not necessarily the easiest, full-time job I will ever have.”

Such gratitude and drive surface repeatedly in conversations with students transferring from community colleges. It is what Charles Richter, director of theater at Muhlenberg, has noticed in more than a decade as a transfer student adviser.

Many transfers come from other four-year colleges, he said, because they “had this terrible experience somewhere else.” It’s often social, not academic, he said. But community college transfers come “because they have accomplished something. They want to move ahead.”

Charlie Alguera, 21, a junior who transferred from the primarily two-year Palm Beach State College in Florida, quickly landed a role in a campus production. Given all he went through to end up at Muhlenberg, he said, “I honestly walk around campus and just appreciate it.”

Lesia Bilynsky, 22, a transfer from Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey, is delighted that “my days are less chaotic.” No driving to work, driving to community college, running to the grocery store. She even joined a campus jewelry-making club.

Living alongside peers who came straight from high school, Bilynsky and Alguera said, highlights their differences. Both would rather sleep than party and can’t imagine skipping class. Or assignments. They are also less stressed by small things.

“We have had time to do more adulting,” Alguera said. “The kids here are kids. They haven’t experienced certain things. It’s like, ‘Breathe, it’s not the end of the world, everything will not come crashing down.’”

This article originally appeared in

Where 4-Year Schools Find a Pool of Applicants: 2-Year Schools

Community colleges are the workhorses of higher education. They don’t charge a lot and they take everybody. It’s why nearly a third of college students in the United States attend one.

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Laura Pappano

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Where 4-Year Schools Find a Pool of Applicants: 2-Year Schools