Going to Scale: Seeking Lessons from Colleges and Universities That Successfully Serve Large Numbers of Community College Transfer Students
James McCarthy
Provost and Senior Vice President
for Academic Affairs
Baruch College of The City University of New York
Alexandra W. Logue
Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost
The City University of New York
We read Richard Kahlenberg’s article entitled “A Welcome Mat for Community-College Transfer Students” with great interest. Nationally, about one-third of college students will transfer at some point. At The City University of New York, the scale of transfer is even greater. Large numbers of our more than 200,000 matriculated undergraduates transfer not only among the 18 schools and colleges offering undergraduate degrees at the University, but also from other colleges and universities into CUNY. For example, in 2009-2010, 62% percent of the 18,101 CUNY students who received bachelor’s degrees transferred at least once before receiving their degrees. Many of these students transferred from community colleges to senior colleges. In the Fall Semester 2009 alone, 6,403 students transferred from community colleges into baccalaureate programs at CUNY, with approximately three-quarters of these students coming from CUNY community colleges and one-quarter from community colleges outside the CUNY system.
As a result of the magnitude of student transfers into and within CUNY, the dynamics of student transfers between and among its schools and colleges is of vital interest to the University. Within our overall goal of providing the best possible education for the hundreds of thousands of undergraduates enrolled in CUNY each year, the establishment of efficient and effective pathways for transfer students is among the highest priorities for the University’s academic leadership. The University is determined to ensure pathways that move students in a timely and financially responsible way to a meaningful undergraduate degree. Over the last year, the University launched the “Pathways to Degree Completion” initiative to examine, and determine how to remove, University policy barriers to efficient and effective transfer. The University’s Pathways webpage contains a wealth of background information, data, and analyses on transfer experiences at CUNY, as well as a copy of a far-reaching “Resolution on Creating an Efficient Transfer System,” approved by the Board of Trustees on June 27, 2011. This webpage, much like the report referenced in Kahlenberg’s article, can be a valuable resource for colleges and universities committed to being more effective either in sending transfer students to other institutions, or in receiving transfer students.
The College Board Report on “Improving Student Transfer from Community Colleges to Four-Year Institutions” (referenced by Kahlenberg; see here) begins with a powerful set of answers to the questions “Why transfers? Why now?” Community college students, present and future, constitute a collection of human resources that we as a nation would be ill-advised to squander. In fact, if the United States is to achieve President Obama’s goal of reclaiming our position as the world’s leader in providing effective higher education for its population, we will be hard pressed to succeed in that goal without effectively engaging students who begin their higher education careers at community colleges and who seek to continue to institutions that grant bachelors degrees.
There is a variety of perspectives provided in the College Board report by leaders of institutions granting bachelors degrees. Some of these perspectives are familiar to those of us at CUNY who share what the report identifies as an “authentic commitment” to transfer students; others provide considerable food for thought. We take to heart the suggestions of the report’s author that those interested in advancing the situations of transfer students at their institution consult not only the leaders interviewed in the project on which the report was based, but also the leaders of any of the institutions included in the U.S.News & World Report “Most Transfer Students” list (which included several CUNY colleges).
We believe that such consultation is critical because of a variable that was not included either in Kahlenberg’s article or the College Board report – the variable of scale. As the chief academic officer of one of the largest public systems of higher education in the country (Logue), and the chief academic officer of one of that system’s largest and most selective senior colleges (McCarthy), a college whose undergraduate student body is composed of approximately two-thirds transfer students, the scale variable is one that affects all aspects of our transfer students’ success. In fact, as we have grappled with how best to implement – as a University and as one of its Senior Colleges – our “authentic commitment” to the smoothest possible transfer pathways for CUNY’s students, there have been times when we have been convinced that scale is the single most important and vexing variable in a very large, very complex equation.
For one of us (McCarthy) the combination of the suggestions presented in the College Board report and the challenges faced at Baruch and at CUNY, brings to mind a lesson learned from working on international health while a faculty member at Columbia University. A colleague, Professor Deborah Maine (now at Boston University), directed a global program focused on reducing maternal mortality. In conversation with UNICEF’s India office about working in that very large and very complex country, UNICEF’s Country Director, Dr. Monica Sharma, set certain fundamental conditions for the work. One was essentially “Don’t tell me about anything you want to do in a single village. At the scale of a village, anyone can make anything work.” Dr. Sharma set a population of 500,000 people as the smallest scale at which we could work.
From our own experience, scale has been a fundamental challenge to our efforts to create smooth transfer pathways at CUNY, a system that is certainly not village-sized and that, counting both matriculated and non-matriculated students, approximates the 500,000-person minimum that Dr. Sharma established for work In India. Scale of this size inevitably results in a variety of situations and views that complicate effective decision and policy making. Faculty and academic leaders throughout CUNY and its community colleges and senior colleges easily share an authentic commitment to the Pathways Project concept, but discussions about specific elements of the overall process, and specific proposals for changes in policies have generated a variety of views on the best possible way to achieve the overall goal of smoother transfers, and on which steps to take first. Some of these views have varied from others in relatively minor ways that could easily be resolved; others, however, have represented rather considerable differences in strategies, tactics, and temporal priorities. It has not been possible to resolve these more considerable differences, even in the presence of a very widely shared, authentic commitment to enhancing the transfer experience, and even after extensive discussions, many of which are recorded on CUNY’s “Pathways” website. But the seriousness of the challenge has required that the process move ahead before there has been absolute unanimity. Decisions have been taken and the process is now moving forward, with the active and direct involvement of dozens of faculty, towards the implementation of fundamental and far-reaching changes in the structure and content of undergraduate curricula throughout the University.
It remains the University’s goal to add to the widely held authentic commitment to the ideal of smooth transfer an equally widely held authentic commitment to the specific mechanisms that will be used to achieve the overall goal. We are confident that our diverse and complex experience as we move through this challenging transition will provide valuable lessons for those at other institutions addressing transfer challenges. We therefore commit to continuing to share, in various forums, the lessons we learn, as we have already been doing on the Pathways website.
However, we would also like to recommend a more formal, and more quantitative analysis of the experiences of institutions working to improve pathways for transfer from community colleges to senior colleges. For example, we found the recent report by the Education Trust – albeit on a somewhat different topic – to be helpful and possibly applicable to the issue at hand. This report examined data on the proportion of low-income students among the student bodies of colleges and universities, on the net cost of education at these institutions for low-income students, and on the graduation rates among students at these institutions. Education Trust’s analysis of these simple, but fundamental, variables was very revealing indeed. In fact their analysis suggested that only a handful of institutions served large numbers of poor students at costs these students could afford, and also promised these students a reasonable chance for graduation.
A critical element in the Education Trust report is its focus on those institutions with large proportions and large numbers of low-income students. We would welcome a similar, equally detailed, quantitative analysis of the experiences of institutions with large proportions and numbers of transfer students—an analysis that would identify, among those institutions, those that are most successful in serving transfer students. The Education Trust report indicates that successful institutions benefit from “favorable state and system policies [that] play a major role in helping these public institutions keep costs more manageable for low-income students” (page 6). In a similar vein, we would expect that the most successful institutions serving transfer students would also share some key policies and practices. It is quite likely, as was the case with the Education Trust report on the education of poor students in US colleges and universities, that the greatest success stories will cluster in a small number of colleges, universities, and systems. The experiences of these solid success stories will provide extensive guidance to all individuals and institutions committed to smoother transfer pathways.
The improvement of the experience of transfer students in US colleges and universities is critical to the success of higher education in the United States. It is therefore imperative that the efforts of colleges, universities, and systems of higher education be based on rigorous analyses grounded in solid empirical data encompassing large numbers of transfer student in a large number of situations. We at CUNY would be eager participants in such an analysis.