Students at San Diego City College face the challenge of transferring to San Diego State University (SDSU). Although SDSU is an impacted school, City College transfer students were not given priority for the fall 2009 semester.

Many of the students at City are members of the Transfer Admission Guarantee (TAG) program, which gives students who have completed more than 50 percent of units at City College and have met the minimum grade point average and major preparation requirements guaranteed admission to SDSU.

TAG students were ready to transfer in the spring this year, but SDSU closed its admission cycle until the following semester. Ultimately, these students with “guaranteed” admission were denied.

56,000 applications were received for “a very limited number of undergraduate enrollment slots” and only 2,877 of these slots were allocated for transfer enrollees, according to SDSU Director of Admissions Beverly Arata.

This means 53,123 students were denied admission for fall 2009 enrollment at state.

The Transfer Center at City College, however, was not going to tolerate it this time. City gathered thousands of Letters of Appeal and the official transcripts of all the applicants who were denied. City then presented this material to the Appeals Committee at SDSU.

“It sucks right now because everyone’s getting denied. I already got denied, but I’m going to try and appeal it,” said Dairrick Hodges, City student.

Officials from City’s transfer center also expressed their frustration. They have worked one-on-one with many of these students so they would be more than prepared to transfer.

In addition, SDSU has added a Supplemental Application to the admission process. This application checks all general education classes completed by transfer students. However, the Supplemental Application takes into consideration SDSU’s general education requirements of SDSU, and not those of the community colleges. This leads to much confusion, resulting in many transfer denials due to mistakes on the application.

Initially, SDSU released a statement that no appeals would be accepted and that “every enrollment slot has already been allocated.” Only a small number of spots were given to incoming transfer students and this was blamed on the new California budget that does not allow any growth for the 2009-2010 school year.

SDSU over-estimated the number of freshmen that would actually accept its offer of admission. After City College presented its case to the Appeals Committee, many were admitted into SDSU’s fall 2009 semester. However, SDSU was still only able to accept a certain number of transfer students.