Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 36

Cracking the code: Seven years ago, Melissa Curry was an unemployed single mom on the edge of crisis.
Now she has a bachelor's degree-and a job at Microsoft.

ESCAPING THE
TRANSFER TRAP
Want more students to get bachelor's degrees?
Let community colleges award them.

S

itting in her office at Microsoft headquarters, just
outside Seattle, Melissa Curry still can't believe her
luck. Seven years ago, her life seemed to be headed for
disaster. First, she was laid off from a good-paying job as a
dealer at Great American Casino. Next, the state suspended
her gaming license over outstanding speeding tickets. Suddenly, she was unemployed and barred from working in another casino. In her early thirties, raising a son on her own,
and with no college degree, Curry knew she was in grave danger of falling into poverty.
Like many adults seeking a path to a new career, Curry
enrolled in a nearby community college, Green River College.
Still, as a Native American woman whose parents didn't go to
college, the odds appeared to be against her. Fewer than 10
percent of bachelor's degrees in computer science are awarded to women of color, and fewer than 15 percent of students
who enroll in community college go on to complete a bach36

September/October 2019

elor's degree within six years. And yet, four years later, Curry
graduated from Green River with a bachelor's in software development and a job lined up at Microsoft, where she is now
a program manager.
Curry worked hard to get where she is. But she also had
the good fortune of living in one of only two states that make
it easy to get a bachelor's degree-a prerequisite to a good-paying job in the tech sector-from community college. A consistent finding in higher education research is that students are
more likely to complete a bachelor's degree when they can do
it all at one institution. But for the vast majority of people who
start at community college, that's not an option; the only way
to complete a bachelor's is by transferring to a four-year university. And it's the transfer process that leaves many students
behind. According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse, less than a third of community college students who
enrolled in 2010 transferred to a four-year institution, and

Green River College

By Mary Alice McCarthy and Debra Bragg



Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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