UCLA

Community colleges serve as critical gateways to higher education, especially for racially minoritized, first-generation, and low-income students seeking to transfer to 4-year universities. Yet transfer remains uneven and difficult to navigate, with Black and Latinx students continuing to experience inequitable outcomes. While existing research has examined student experiences, transfer policy, advising, and institutional barriers, less attention has been paid to articulation officers (AOs), the professionals who maintain course agreements, interpret transfer requirements, and help determine how community college coursework applies across institutions. This qualitative, focused ethnographic study examines how 14 California community college AOs made sense of transfer, equity, and policy implementation within the California Community Colleges system. Guided by Ching’s (2023) equity sensemaking framework and Felix and Nienhusser’s (2023) equity-centered implementation framework, the study draws on semi-structured interviews, observations of statewide and regional articulation-related professional spaces, articulation- and transfer-policy documents, field notes, and analytic memos. Findings show that AOs understood transfer equity to be embedded in the hidden infrastructure students are expected to navigate, including course applicability, catalog rights, articulation agreements, general education certification, and student-facing transfer information. Participants also described working through a changing policy environment shaped by Cal-GETC, Common Course Numbering, ADTs, C-ID, ethnic studies requirements, and intersegmental differences. Across these conditions, AOs reduced transfer risk by making coursework count, translating policy into local guidance, and protecting students from unnecessary units, repeated coursework, and delayed progress. This dissertation argues that articulation work should be understood as transfer equity work: technical, often invisible labor that shapes whether transfer policies reduce complexity or reproduce it.