Imagine you’re a transfer student grinding away on a tough physics assignment, and an email pops up informing you that, between your community-college and university courses, you’ve earned enough credits to be awarded an associate degree. It’s been a tough transition to Big State U., so you react by:
- A. Eagerly accepting the degree, which will motivate you to complete your baccalaureate.
- B. Breathing a sigh of relief because, with a degree in hand, you won’t feel so guilty if you throw in the towel on the blasted B.A.
- C. Panicking because your private scholarship ends when you receive your first degree, and you want the money to keep flowing for two more years.
Those are just a few of the scenarios that college officials from 28 states pondered as they gathered in Orlando, Fla., over the weekend for a national conference on “reverse transfer,” sponsored by the National Student Clearinghouse and the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida.
Reverse transfer happens when a four-year college sends a student’s records back to the two-year institution where he or she started. If the student has earned enough credits, the community college awards a degree.
It’s typically a win-win for students, who receive a credential that will increase their earning power, spur them on, and provide them with something to fall back on if they drop out and to build on if they return.
For community colleges, long the whipping boys of lawmakers focused on completion rates, it’s a way to get credit for the thousands of students who successfully advance from their institutions with nothing to show for it. As many as two million students who attended college for two or more years from 2003 to 2013 without earning a degree could be awarded associate degrees through an automated data-collection program the clearinghouse is now working on with states, officials at the clearinghouse say.
But giving credit where credit is due is harder than it seems, as a dozen states discovered when they participated in a pilot study supported by several philanthropies, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation. Here are some of the challenges they faced:
First, you have to track down the students.
Once they leave, it’s hard to know where they end up, especially when 40 percent of those who transfer move to another state, according to the clearinghouse.
“That was the final straw that convinced us that we needed to be involved,” said W. David Pelham, vice president for higher-education development and client relations at the clearinghouse. “Even if you have a really good state-level database, it’s not going to capture that 40 percent.”
Mr. Pelham, a former community-college president, said three of the colleges he served in were within 50 miles of a state border. Once students crossed over, they vanished from his radar screen. “It looked like I had the lowest completion and persistence numbers,” Mr. Pelham said. “I knew it wasn’t true, but I couldn’t document it.”
The clearinghouse system will help colleges follow students wherever they head, whether to another two-year college, a four-year one, public or private, in state or out.
Once you find the students who qualify, they may not want an associate degree.
Some students whose hearts are set on bachelor’s degrees never intended to pick up an associate degree first and don’t see a need to. But for others, a two-year degree could actually set them back. Some private scholarships continue until students earn their first degree. The last thing those students want is someone chasing them down to offer an interim degree that will stop the money flow before they can earn their bachelor’s degree.
In fact, that’s one reason many worry about running afoul of U.S. Department of Education privacy rules if the policy assumes that students are willing to participate in a reverse-transfer program unless they check a box opting out. That’s the approach some colleges have taken, while others say department officials have indicated that they need explicit, affirmative permission from students before their records can be transferred.
Getting students to check a box opting in isn’t easy when students are deluged with paperwork demanding their attention, and colleges look forward to more guidance from department officials, said Debra D. Bragg, director of the Office of Community College Research and Leadership and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Education.
Over the weekend, she and Jason L. Taylor, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Utah, presented a paper, “Optimizing Reverse-Transfer Policies and Processes: Lessons From Twelve CWID [Credit When It’s Due] States,” that summarizes the experiences of the dozen pilot states. They encountered lots of potential roadblocks.
If students accept the A.A., they might bail on their B.A.
“That’s something we’re studying,” Ms. Bragg said. By the time the students were tracked down in the pilot projects, “many of them were quite far along in the bachelor’s degree, and it’s unlikely someone is going to say, ‘Oh heck—I don’t need to finish,’” she said.
But as colleges get faster at tracking down students as soon as they’ve earned the 60 credit hours they need for an associate degree, “for some students, that might be a disincentive for them to continue,” Ms. Bragg said.
More likely, she said, the degree will motivate students to push on, not give them an excuse to bail out.
Here’s where advisers can come into play, reminding students of the advantages of completing a two-year degree before tackling a B.A. Students who earn an associate degree or certificate at a two-year college before transferring to a four-year college are far more likely to earn baccalaureate degrees, according to a 2013 report by the clearinghouse’s research center.
But typically, less than a quarter of transfer students pick up a credential first, so going after them retroactively makes sense, researchers say. They can use all the help they can get. Eight out of 10 students entering community college say they plan to earn a B.A., but only 15 percent end up doing so within six years, according to the clearinghouse.
Students’ records come in a dizzying array of formats.
Some students’ records still are on paper and need to be scanned into electronic form, while others come in a variety of electronic formats, creating headaches for college staff members trying to compile the data. To help simplify and standardize the process of transferring records, the clearinghouse will have a depository where a four-year college can send a student’s academic information. A two-year college can then download it and, when a student reaches the magic number of credits, award him or her an associate degree.
And some people question whether the degrees colleges are awarding are legitimate.
It’s no secret that, in an era of performance-based funding, community colleges are seeking ways to award more degrees. Some skeptics suggest that retroactively awarding them to students who’ve moved on may border on cooking the books. But reverse-transfer advocates say that, when done properly, the degree requirements are just as rigorous and the students just as deserving as those who follow a straighter path to a degree.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.