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Facilitating Community-College Transfers

June 3, 2011, 1:29 am

Once upon a time, community colleges, originally known as junior colleges, were meant as places where many students would attend for two years, earn an associate’s degree, and then transfer to a four-year college. Leaders in traditional four-year institutions championed the idea of junior colleges because professors at B.A.-granting institutions didn’t want to be bothered with teaching general survey classes common in the freshman and sophomore years of college. The movement from two-year to four-year institutions was meant to be seamless.

But today, only 10% of students who enter a community college eventually earn a bachelor’s degree. There are many reasons for this low transfer and completion rate—including inadequate financial aid and growing economic and racial segregation between the two- and four-year sectors—but one important impediment is the difficulty in transferring credits from one institution to another.

This morning, I attended a terrific discussion at the Center for American Progress highlighting programs in several states to make the transfer of credits easier. Improving “articulation agreements” between institutions doesn’t command the attention of people the way, say, Congressman Anthony Weiner’s latest Twitter photo does. But the small audience at CAP was treated to an important discussion of programs that are boosting social mobility and college completion.

According to an issue brief written by CAP’s Louis Soares and others, community-college students who transfer to four-year institutions end up wasting a lot of time and duplicating efforts because credits at two-year institutions aren’t always counted. “The average community college student,” Soares and colleagues note, “is forced to amass 140 credits while pursuing a bachelor’s degree even though only 120 credits are typically necessary. Those 20 extra credits represent individual time, effort and money,” as well as wasted public investment. According to Frank Chang, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Community Colleges at the U.S. Department of Education, the inability to transfer credits also represents a “consumer protection” issue.

According to the panel, leaders in addressing the issue include institutions in Ohio, Indiana, and Texas.

* Ohio: Paula Compton, associate vice chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents, outlined the state’s longstanding efforts to work to ensure that community-college credits transfer to four-year institutions. While some four-year faculty were resistant, she said, they worked with community colleges to beef up the rigor of courses to make them more equivalent in quality. Statewide articulation policies make transfers fluid, she said.

* Indiana: According to Amy Sherman of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and Ivy Tech Community College have a strong articulation agreement and enjoy other forms of cooperation. These ventures have increased transfers between the institutions from 240 in 1993 to 2,800 in 2009, Sherman said.

* Texas: Richard Rhodes, the president o f El Paso Community College, discussed the strong relationship between EPCC and the University of Texas at El Paso. Students not only easily transfer from EPCC to UTEP, they also can take courses in both institutions simultaneously.

Breaking down the barriers between two- and four-year institutions is critical for two reasons.

First, most directly, we are not now tapping into the full potential of community-college students because some substantial portion of the 90% who fail to eventually earn a bachelor’s degree should in fact be doing so. Research finds that students who begin at two-year institutions are much less likely to receive a bachelor’s degree than equally qualified students from similar demographic groups who begin at four-year institutions. Weaknesses in the community-college sector are partly responsible, but so is the difficulty in transferring credits between institutions.

Second, easing the transfer between two- and four-year colleges would make community colleges more attractive to middle- and upper-middle-class students—who would, in turn, bring social and political capital that would benefit everyone in the two-year college sector.

There are many strategies for making transfer more common. But the evidence from Ohio, Indiana, and Texas suggests that good articulation agreements represent an important first step to restoring one of the original missions of community colleges: providing many students with the ability to ultimately earn a full bachelor’s degree.

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jffoster

Actually, “community college” is not historically simply a new word for ‘junior college’. A number of junior colleges were private, and some public ones were really ‘normal schools’ or technical training schools. The ‘community college’ as I recall got its main impetus in the 60s, were public, and often an extension of one or more school districts.
theatheist

1. I agree there is a problem. But that 10% number is a bit of a strawman. A large proportion of CC students are in technical programs that lead to a “terminal” AS or AAS in fields like culinary arts and cosmetology. Of course they don’t go on to earn a Bachelors degree. (If by 10%, the author refers to students who specifically enter transfer programs, the article should have made that clear. But I do not believe this to be the case.)

2. As for students who do wish to transfer:

2a. One reason many students attend a CC is poor preparation. They end up taking remedial classes in math, reading, and writing, none of which count toward completion of a Bachelors degree. The bigger the CC, in fact, the more likely it is to require a whole series of remedial classes, starting with pre-algebra and basic grammar. Odds are excellent that a student requiring remediation in one area needs it in other areas. It’s quite easy to rack up 10-20 hours in non-transferable remedial credit. Students with second-language deficits are a growing population in CCs. Look for these numbers to go up before they come down.

2b. Another reason many attend a CC is that they have little to no idea what they want to major in. As a result, they often take classes that transfer as elective credit only, or niche classes that don’t transfer at all. To complete a major, they end up needing more credits than they had anticipated. Call it a problem of personal responsibility, bad advising, or no problem at all. Some kids really do need to explore for a while.

2c. Often, the courses that do not transfer are high-interest niche classes that may be unique to a given CC (e.g., Food in Literature, The Science of Star Trek, etc.). Such courses exist because without them, some students might not elect to enroll in college at all. They’re part of a reversed bait-and-switch game, in which students are promised fluff and end up getting educated instead. OK, it costs a few hours. Maybe it’s worth it.

Bottom line: If you want to solve a problem, please describe it accurately, or your opponents will use the inaccuracy to distract the conversation. 10-20 hours beyond the required 120 is no reason to panic. It’s the extra hours beyond those that warrant attention.
gavin_moodie

Is transfer of credits the primary problem, or transfer of students? It seems to me that the first challenge is to get highly selective colleges to admit reasonable numbers of community college transfer students. Getting full credit for their community college studies is an important but secondary issue.
bdbailey

The North Carolina Community College System changed from quarters to semesters in the 1990′s. This was done to facilitate synchronizing courses for transfer with the university system. Courses now have common numbers and descriptions across the system, and the state university system accepts these courses for transfer without review.

Getting community college students admitted for transfer may be the bigger challenge.
wagamama

This brief article raises a useful topic but does not go into enough detail. At my institution individual departments have considerable autonomy over what transfer credit they will accept from community colleges and whether it will fulfill degree requirements. As you might guess there are a fair number of faculty who take the attitude that a course not taken from them at our university can’t possibly be worth anything, and is certainly not an equivalent for a university requirement. My department takes quite a different attitude–we try and accept as much transfer credit as possible, on the theory that it increases the number of majors in our program. I like to think that the enrollment in our department is more diverse as a result, at an institution that can certainly use more diversity.
jackieking

Please look a bit further and note that Illinois has had very comprehensive articulation agreements for more than 10 years. Yes the old argument about the AAS degree being a terminal degree and technically non transferable is still around, but if one looks at the programs in AAS one sees that many of those courses do in fact transfer, check out the associate degree nursing situation and you will see how that works.
jamesgpeck

If you want an exercise in frustration, try to transfer course work earned at a four year institution to a community college. The experience will make the nit-picky course transfer procedures of four year collleges look quite generous.
11236504

A number of state activities could have been included in this article – Wisconsin with agreements from UWC into any of the state 4 year institutions, or Florida with UCF and it is Direct Connect with 5 community colleges, etc. These programs are plentiful, alive and well. And students who spend all 4 years at a BA institution may very well graduate with more than the specified number of credits required; 20 over and above is not a cause for alarm. Consequently it seems from the comments, etc. that the real question is how to assist and support students to complete at community colleges and transfer appropriately to a BA awarding environment? I think the Direct Connect in FL works well due to advisors for the BA university being housed and available on the community college campus… the students need someone readily available to say, yes, this is possible; yes, you can do it; here is the info you need based on our conversations; etc. The bridge between the two institutions is incomplete or missing completely.
janetcraven

The national community college honor society, PTK, has started a community college completion campaign. The organization has evidence that students who actually complete an Associate’s degree at a community college are much more likely to eventually graduate with a bachelor’s degree. Advisors need to help students stay on track and if a student intends to transfer they need to complete an Associate of Arts degree that includes college level math, humanities, social sciences, etc.–courses that will be required at the four-year college. States that employ a seamless AA block transfer to universities probably have higher bachelor completion rates among community college students. Another obstacle is that many community college students are “location-bound.” They do not want to uproot their children from school. More variety and affordability in online and distance learning options are needed.
smstauff

Illinois could also have been included with its Illinois Articulation Initiative model and other collaborative efforts between Illinois community colleges and senior institutions.
11274135

Disappointing article, in that it has no news in it. The representatives of the schools featured provide almost no information about what they are doing. And these are all states that are arriving late to the challenge of developing decent statewide articulation agreements. As mentioned in one of the comments, the greatest transfer challenge that remains in most states is the AAS (associate of applied science) degree, which, in some states is the most common degree delivered by the community college systems. The AAS is an occupational degree whose curricular demands are often negotiated between the colleges and the businesses or industries that hire their graduates.The challenge of transferring the AAS is that the two year curriculum tends to be very light on general education and very heavy on highly specific applied courses that have no even rough equivalents at most four year institutions. Thus students who attempt to transfer with AAS degrees often find that fewer than half of the 60+ semester credit hours of the degree will count toward completion of the bachelors degree.

At my university, we succeeded in solving this problem by eschewing course-by-course transfer and opting for “degree” transfer instead. That is, if a student had an AAS degree awarded by a regionally accredited college, the university would award 60 credit hours for the degree, and the student could earn a Bachelor of Applied Sciences (BAS)degree in a nice variety of concentrations by completing another 60 hours at the university. No exceptions, no hidden requirements. We did not try to interfere with the AAS curriculum. Instead we focused on what we needed to do to graduate a student of whom we could be proud. The BAS curriculum had a general studies component that, combined with the typical general studies requirements we found in an extensive national review of AAS curricula, would roughly satisfy our university requirement. It also had some special requirements in management, communication, quantitative analysis or computing, and great big chunk of courses in some area of concentration that might complement the focus of the AAS or allow the student to move in a new direction. (We reserved 6 hours of the 60 for student who needed extra help in math and science. Students who didn’t need help had six hours of electives.) Students in the BAS take exactly the same courses that students in our BA and BS programs take (with two exceptions–a “rust removal” math course and a “science in technology” course).

Rather than debate endlessly about whether a student had this or that course or met this or that requirement exactly, we gambled that a student who had completed an AAS degree, regardless of content, had developed the mature habits and qualities of mind and behavior necessary to be successful in our program. That’s about half the battle. And we were right. The completion rate for BAS students was very high, and, on the average, they outperformed BA and BS students in the same courses. Their GPAs were slightly above the university average. And a significant number have gone on to earn masters degrees, and a few have completed PhD programs. As this program developed, very productive dialog opened up between the university and the community colleges, and we have been able to strengthen both the AAS and the BAS curriculum as a result.

There is a lesson in this experiment for addressing the overall challenge of transfer articulation. Keep in mind that this involved one of the largest universities in the US and one of the largest community colleges, along with 11 additional community college systems in the state. Obviously we can also admit out of state students because of the basic simplicity of the key articulation principle.
raza_khan

Hi Richard

Few issues that are pointed here in this article.

1. The notion that only 10% of students at CC gets Bachelors degree. Well, this is a large number of students at CC who only come for one course, workforce development or just for an AA degree. A big group of students come in for nursing degree. In fact, very few are looking to transfer.

2. Most states already have articulation at place so the process should be smooth for the students provided they are set to go from the time they transfer to the time they get their Bachelors…. well, that does not happen as students still change major after transferring.

Raza
______________________
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http://www.facebook.com/malaika.adero Malaika Adero

A great round up of indie presses
http://www.facebook.com/whoelscher Wolf Hoelscher

I, too, attended both AWP and BEA this year as the owner of an online submissions tool called Pubmission. One of the things that struck me about BEA was the large number of indie presses that were still accepting submissions from writers. In contrast, the corporate publishers for the most part accepted only agented materials.

I’m sure that agents provide these big houses with quality work, but as a former acquisitions editor, I would have never considered closing my doors to submissions. Even if you publish only one book out of a thousand from the slush pile, maintaining a direct connection to writers is vital to any publishing house. Not only do you establish good will with a community of writers (who might actually buy or review your books), you can also spot trends in the industry.

So I was encouraged that so many indie presses still valued this connection to writers, and I think it will be a key factor in their transcendence to the top of the industry.

Great post. Thank you, Elise.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Raymond-King/100001617465318 Raymond King

technology is changing and ebooks is giving humanity more to do with their minds. I it weren’t for independent presses like CREATESPACE, authors like RAYMOND STURGIS wouldn’t be able to show the world their wonderful talent.
unusedusername

I think that a 4-year community college: one with open access, rigorous courses leading to a BS or BA, and a faculty priority on teaching rather than research, would be a fantastic idea. Such institutions would still definitely have a different culture than research universities do.
11274135

The argument that mission creep among community colleges will eventually create the need to reinvent community colleges has been around for a long time. Now, it seems reasonable to me that some well established community colleges can reasonably be bumped up to four year colleges if there is a demonstrable need, but they should not pretend that they are still community colleges just because they have only “a few” degrees, most of which are narrowly occupational. Rest assured, history, psychology, education, communication, etc. majors will emerge once the dam has burst. That kind of incrementalism does not serve statewide academic planning very well. In many cases, students and the state are better served by community college/university partnerships which keep the institutional missions more or less intact but offer students greater access, better transfer options, and lower total cost for the baccalaureate.
liveyourlife

Before two year institutions go down the road of “bigger is better” and striving to become like other institutions they should think hard about if they can look their current students in the eye and tell them that a few years from now you wouldn’t be good enough for us.
dpmccain

I would like to see community colleges revisit the model of the early 70′s. I attended a local community college for a year, and was able to transfer to a university as a second quarter sophomore because I wasn’t saddled with having to take Gen-Ed classes at out of state tuition

A friend of mine teaches for a community college, and her classes are overloaded by any standard.

It’s much like many of the for-profit colleges that require the students go complete Gen-Ed classes are are not needed. The students would be better served with certification classes. I think I have mentioned this in another blog….but it continues to concern me.
robjenkins

All true, yellow. Thanks for the clarity.

As a community college lifer, I find these aspirations to four-year status slightly disturbing–as if being “just” a two-year school is no longer good enough. And yet I can’t honestly say I’m upset that we’re going to be offering bachelor’s degrees at GPC. It just seems to put us in a much better position politically–and funding is ALL about politics. Is this merely a short-term gain that will be offset by some long-term damage to our mission or identity? I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking the question of others who may have past experience dealing with this trend. I hope not.

Rob
connie_matthew

I know of at least one in the state of Alabama, Athens State University. They are in the same system as the community colleges, so they have the same funding structure and I believe are an undergraduate serving institution with no graduate courses.
lightningstrike

On the flip side of this discussion, let us not forget the 4-year colleges/universities that are hell-bent on “community engagement,” a movement that amounts to duplication of many parts of the community college mission. Why do they do it? For market share. If there is a buck (grants, etc) to be made or great PR to be had, they (“they” meaning 2-year and/or 4-year) will expand services beyond their original mission. But on the community college front, I think there is one more issue, the white elephant. I’m sure that every CC college student/faculty/administrator has done this at least one time in their academic life: drop the word “community” in front of “college” (or just mumble it) when telling their peers where they work or go to school. Formally dropping the “community” in the official title of the college spares the CC college student/faculty/administrator from the guilt of dropping “community” in their informal interactions with their friends and peers.
falashas

Great article! The Community Colleges of today have to expand their mission to become more relevant in the global economy.
apelaj

Although I do believe that some of the factors you have mentioned does add to the low percentage in tranfer students, there are several other reasons that need to be address. The number one factor at my university that we believe contributed to low percentage of tranfer students is training of the advisors both at the CC and our university. The advisors may not even be aware that an articulation agreement was in place with either a private univeristy or not for profits. Another contributing factor is the programs have been changed. We find this to be true amongst state-approved certification progress that get changed in the middle of an agreement being made.

To resolve these issues I do believe a training should be apart of the process and having state-wide articulation agreements does help.
zwakausu

I agree with Claudia. Cloud services will drastically ease the challenges of power and infrastructure that many HEIs in Africa now face. The downside is that some fear their positions may become redundant and they may lose their jobs. Some have also expressed concerns about control, although I feel that institutions can still maintain some measure of control over their content and data.