With the help of services here on campus including counselors, students are not only graduating, some are even going straight into the workforce as well.

“Most students that come to a community college either are here to get vocational skills to get a job; they want to learn auto mechanics or they want to learn refrigeration and air-conditioning or they want to learn about the computer or they want to take the courses here so they can transfer to Long Beach State or UCLA or USC,” Don Ferguson, counselor, said.

There are a small number of students that go to community college with the goal in mind to get an A.A. degree. The degree, alone, is pretty much useless; you don’t see newspaper want ads looking for a prerequisite of an A.A. degree, Ferguson said.

“We don’t have the numbers [as far as who is getting an A.A.], we do eventually get the numbers together; how many people apply, how many were approved and how many were denied but we don’t have that yet because the evaluations aren’t finished yet, the evaluators are still working on it,” Esperanza Nieto, Assistant Director of Administration and Records, said.

One student working here on campus, had to take a ton of classes; put in three years of hard work, though he thinks its going to be worth it and pay off because now he can transfer, Pedro Reyes, 21, art, said.

A majority of community college students attend more then one community college; there are a number of students that bring us one or two transcripts from different colleges so we just take the transcript and evaluate it to see if they qualify [for graduation], Nieto said.

Counselors don’t evaluate whether a student can graduate, we just help the student by pointing them in the right direction necessary for them to graduate, Ferguson said.

“As counselors our goal is to have students achieve their goal, wanting to transfer and get a degree, and we help get the correct classes and get the kind of grades they need to achieve those goals,” Nieto said.

A majority of the time the advice counselors give is to take a hard class and a lot of times students are not to anxious to do that, Ferguson said.

“I just talked to a student earlier today who was about to graduate from Long Beach State and he can’t graduate because he has a deficiency from a class that he didn’t take here, you know that a counselor here told him to take that but about half the students follow the counseling advice and about half do something else,” Ferguson said.

Another student here on campus said that she met with counselors at least twice every semester and now she is successfully graduating in June of this year; she plans to attend Cal-State Northridge in fall after taking the summer off, Shana Rastegar-Parah, 20, psychology, said

The number of students graduating and those walking in the ceremony is not for certain yet, until the actual day, Nieto said.