What do transfer students want?

What do transfer students want?  Matt Reed answers a question from a university staffer who wants to help transfers earn a four-year degree.

First, transfers want to get credit for their credits.

Nothing grinds a student’s gears more than being told she has to re-take a class she has already passed — and paid for — elsewhere.  Articulation agreements and transfer blocs are supposed to prevent that, and they help, but the devil is in the details.  Frequently a college will proclaim loudly that it takes all credits, but then relegate a bunch of them to “free elective” status.  “Free elective” status is where credits go to die.  Since very few four-year programs have many “free electives” in them, students wind up having to take (and pay for) far more than they should.

Transfers also want access to scholarships, Reed writes.

Many would appreciate support services to help them handle the transition.

Ten tips for transferring from community college include: Transfer with an associate degree, not just a handful of credits.

Lumina’s 2012 snapshot report shows much higher graduation rates for transfers with an associate degree.

Colleges collaborate on remedial ed

Colleges with many minority students are restructuring remedial education as part of Lumina Foundation’s Models of Success program, reports Rethinking Remedial Education. Minority-serving institutions are collaborating to improve instruction, revamping placement systems and improving student services.

California State University, Monterey Bay partnered with Cabrillo College and Hartnell College to create the Collaborative Alliance for Postsecondary Success (CAPS). CAPS has brought together about 10 faculty representatives from each campus to regularly exchange best practices and collectively develop innovative courses for students enrolled in remedial math and writing.

. . . Montana’s Salish Kootenai College (SKC) partnered with fellow Tribal College and University, Fort Peck Community College, to . . . identify the factors that contribute to the retention and success of American Indian postsecondary students who required remedial coursework in mathematics and English.

The Lumina MSI-Models of Success program focuses on improving  first-generation students, low-income students and students of color.

Competency credentials ‘blow up’ the credit hour

Southern New Hampshire University plans a $5,000 online, competency-based associate degree that would “blow up the credit hour — the connection between college credit and the time students spend learning,” reports Inside Higher Ed. A regional accreditor has approved the university’s “direct assessment” method. The university will apply for federal approval to qualify students for federal aid.

In competency-based models, students demonstrate their learning through assessments, notes Inside Higher Ed. “If the tests lack rigor and a link to real competencies, this approach starts looking like cash for credits.”

Southern New Hampshire’s “College for America” will start with an associate degree in general studies and add competency-based bachelor’s degree programs.

The university will assess 120 competencies for the associate degree. Lumina’s Degree Qualifications Profile, which attempts to define what degree holders should know and be able to do, served as the basis for defining those competencies, along with the university’s general education goals. Other sources were used as well, like the U.S. Department of Labor’s competency pyramids.

Competencies are broken into 20 distinct “task families,” which are then divided into three task levels. For example, the “using business tools” family includes tasks like “can write a business memo,” “can use a spreadsheet to perform a variety of calculations” and “can use logic, reasoning and analysis to address a business problem.”

When students pass tests on the competencies within a family, “they will be deemed to have the knowledge and skills necessary to pass a 100- or 200- level, three-credit course,” according to the university.

The university is partnering with large employers, including ConAgra Foods and the City of Memphis, which will steer workers to the university’s College for America.

Twenty other colleges and universities are working with Western Governors University — also online and competency-based — on degree programs that will let students earn relatively low-cost degrees at their own pace and in their own homes.  Competency-based programs are expanding, according to a Lumina report.

‘College for all’ spurs backlash

How many college-educated janitors do we need? It’s not clear that a college education is “an economic imperative,” as President Obama puts it, argues economist Walter Williams.

A good part of our higher education problem, explaining its spiraling cost, is that a large percentage of college students are incapable of doing real college work. They shouldn’t be wasting their own resources and those of their families and taxpayers.

We now have janitors, waiters and taxi drivers with college degrees, writes Williams, citing Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Meanwhile, colleges are lowering standards to create “comfortable environments for the educationally incompetent.”

The backlash against “college for all” is growing, writes Paul Fain on Inside Higher Ed. Yet President Obama and other higher education advocates never wanted all students to enroll in liberal arts colleges to earn bachelor’s degrees, Fain points out.  Obama’s goal is at least one year of postsecondary education, which for many will mean job training that lasts a few months or a few years.

“College for all is a false premise. It’s not an argument anyone is making,” says Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation.

The completion push is really about “postsecondary education and training for all,” says Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. But “that doesn’t fit on anybody’s bumper sticker.”

Vocational and technical education often gets short shrift during debates on college completion, says Mark Milliron, president of Western Governors University Texas, and a former official with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Instead of focusing on a “family of credentials that provide that earning and learning potential,” like certificate programs that cater to working adults, Milliron says the discussion gravitates toward bachelor’s degrees. And that conflation is a problem, because “it plays into anti-elitism.”

While earning a college degree has paid off in the past, Vedder warns it may not do so in the future, as less-capable students try college. “The law of diminishing returns is starting to rear its ugly head,” Vedder says.

Tuning for transfer

“Tuning” college courses will help students set a course for graduation and transfer credits from community colleges to four-year institutions, writes Michelle Kalina, director of the Institute for Evidence-Based Change‘s Tuning USA initiative.

Faculty at colleges in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, and Utah are working to clarify what students should “know, understand, and accomplish” in specific courses.

Through tuning . . . students know what it takes to stay on track toward graduation and how to make choices that will make them more employable-an increasingly important concern given the rising cost of college. Students and their families have a better sense of what can be done with a degree, and employers understand what they can expect from new graduates they hire.

Texas’ higher education system has tuned four engineering disciplines and will add two additional engineering fields, two science majors, mathematics, business and computer and information science.

Because two-thirds of high school graduates in Texas who pursue higher education start at one of the state’s community colleges, Texas also convened representatives from more than 50 institutions to improve the transfer process. Community-college students who want to pursue a baccalaureate degree in civil engineering receive detailed guidance on choosing courses and applying to transfer. Students are informed about the knowledge and skills they will acquire in each course and are provided information about career opportunities ranging from construction and aerospace to manufacturing and public works projects.

In Kentucky, two- and four-year public and private colleges are tuning programs in biology, business, elementary education, nursing and social work.

History is next. The Lumina Foundation will work with the American Historical Association to determine what students should learn in history courses and be able to do when they complete a degree.

Performance Funding 2.0 takes off

Performance Funding 2.0 — linking higher education dollars to student success, not just enrollment — is taking off in many states, I write on the U.S. News site.

Instead of offering a bonus to colleges that improve outcomes, Tennessee, Ohio and Indiana are writing performance measures into base funding for higher education. Community colleges may be rewarded for the number of students who complete remediation, pass gateway courses and accumulate credits en route to a credential.

Looking at PF 1.0, a Community College Research Center study found ”no firm evidence that performance funding significantly increases rates of remedial completion, retention, and graduation.”  PF 2.0 is too new to generate any data.

“I’m not sure prior experiments put enough resources on the table” to make a difference, says Jamie Merisotis, CEO of the Lumina Foundation, which is funding research and development of PF 2.0. ”The idea that we can’t measure learning outcomes is increasingly incorrect,” he says. “Higher education will be measured by outcomes for students—learning outcomes, critical thinking, can they get a job and make a living wage?”

Tuning up higher ed

“Tuning”  – clarifying what students should know and be able to do to earn a degree in a discipline  – will help students succeed, writes Michelle Kalina on GOOD.  Colleges in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas and Utah are participating in the Lumina Foundation‘s Tuning USA initiative, which is led by the Institute for Evidence-Based Change.

Texas has tuned four engineering disciplines and plans to tune additional engineering fields,  two science majors, mathematics, business, and computer and information science.

Because two-thirds of high school graduates in Texas who pursue higher education start at one of the state’s community colleges, Texas also convened representatives from more than 50 institutions to improve the transfer process. Community-college students who want to pursue a baccalaureate degree in civil engineering receive detailed guidance on choosing courses and applying to transfer. Students are informed about the knowledge and skills they will acquire in each course and are provided information about career opportunities ranging from construction and aerospace to manufacturing and public works projects.

Similarly, in Kentucky, two- and four-year public and private colleges are working together to tune high-demand programs in biology, business, elementary education, nursing, and social work. In the state’s nursing programs, courses are being tuned to help pave the way for students to transfer from one program or college to another.

Tuning is based on Europe’s Bologna Process, which is “creating a great deal more transparency with respect to what, exactly, students who have earned credits from a given program or university have actually learned,” writes Education Sector’s Kevin Carey.

Technology will help — but not yet

Technology will help improve student success rates — in the future, said James Applegate, a Lumina Foundation vice president, at the Higher Ed Tech Summit in Las Vegas.

Executives agreed that technology won’t change teaching and learning immediately, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“We’re beginning to get lots of data on things like time of task, but we don’t have the outcomes yet to say what leads to a true learning moment. I think we are three to five years away from being about to do that,” said Troy Williams, vice president and general manager of Macmillan New Ventures, which makes the classroom polling system called I-clicker.

“These are really early days,” agreed Matthew Pittinsky, who runs a digital transcript company called Parchment and was one of the founders of Blackboard.

Technology can provide a great deal of information to students or instructors, but it’s not clear they’ll know how to use it.

Technology companies will have to work with colleges to link “learning analytics” tools to teaching and learning outcomes, Applegate said.

Obama puts college costs on agenda

Rising college costs was on the agenda this week, when President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan met with college leaders at the White House. Most were chancellors of large state university systems, but Thomas Snyder of Ivy Tech Community College was invited along with the presidents of the three nonprofits, the all-online Western Governors University, Carnegie Mellon and Berea College.

New financial aid policies to encourage completion were discussed, said Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, who also testified before Rep. Virginia Foxx’s committee on streamlining college costs.

. . . there seemed to be some consensus at the White House meeting that the federal government should develop policies on financial aid, its biggest tool, to spur a higher graduation rates, whether by limiting the number of semesters for which students could receive aid, requiring them to attend full-time, or doling out aid bit by bit to discourage students from dropping out mid-semester, or other approaches.

Requiring full-time attendance to qualify for Pell Grants would have a huge impact on community college students.

College leaders also talked about the importance of linking colleges with K-12 education and the potential for technology to cut costs.

“If we’re going to address the 37 million adults with some college and no degree, we can’t just tweak the existing model,” said Robert W. Mendenhall of Western Governors University, an online nonprofit university. “Mostly in higher education, technology is an add-on cost that doesn’t change the model at all. We need to fundamentally change the faculty role, and use technology to do the teaching.”

Larry D. Shinn, the president of Berea College, did not disagree. “We’re structured in a 19th-century model, but I think we all know now that blended learning, combining technology and classroom learning, can let us educate for less cost,” he said. “The question is how we get there from here.”

“Technology can help us educate more students faster and better.”said Jared L. Cohon, the president of Carnegie Mellon, which has developed online classes used at other universities.

No for-profit colleges made the guest list.

Open-access universities and community colleges have the most experience in controlling costs, writes Jonathan Gibralter, president of Frostburg State in Maryland.

President Obama plans to continue to talk about the problem of college affordability, which was spotlighted by the Occupy protests.

AFT: Completion means ‘cranking out’ workers

Corporate interests are pushing the “completion agenda” and turning  community colleges into “job training factories,” charges a letter from the American Federation of Teachers to instructors in two California community college districts, Grossmont-Cuyamaca and San Diego. The instructors are represented by the union, reports the LaMesa Patch.

California community colleges’ Student Success Task Force report calls for “a dumbed-down, totally instrumental view of our mission that focuses nearly exclusively on making community colleges more efficient machines cranking out workers for business,” charges the letter, written by Jim Miller, who teaches at San Diego City College, and Jonathan McLeod, who teaches at San Diego Mesa College.

Students are allowed to “wander” though the curriculum, according to the report, which calls for tracking students’ progress.

If only we do a better job of tracking and push our lax, waste-filled system with more accountability measures, all will improve despite a historic budget crisis the largest gap between the rich and the poor in modern history, and the legacy of systemic racism.

While the task force did not endorse linking state funding to student outcomes, its original charge, Miller and McLeod suspect that will be next.

The Lumina Foundation, which strongly supports the completion agenda, and other “corporate-funded ‘external partners’,” assisted the task force, notes the AFT letter. Lumina collaborates with ALEC, which the letter excoriates for many paragraphs.

So when Lumina joins forces with ALEC it means more than just a move toward influencing legislative policy; it means they are part of a larger network of monied interests pushing our country further toward plutocracy and corporate domination.

. . . Corporate interests collaborating to impose the business model in public higher education want efficient workers trained to follow top-down orders, not critical thinkers who might question their agenda or buck up against the slow creep toward “outcomes based funding” that would serve as a Trojan horse for privatization.

The task force recommends encouraging students to “declare a program of study upon admission” and requiring declaration by the end of their second term.

Students who declare a program of study are much more likely to complete a certificate or degree, according to a Community College Research Center study. But the real motive is to squelch intellectual exploration, the letter asserts.

Undeclared students should lose enrollment priority after their third term, the report recommends. So would students who don’t follow their education plan.

That would help new students who often can’t get into the courses they need because continuing students — including those enrolled for years without completing a degree — have priority. But it would make it harder for students to take courses that don’t lead to a credential.

In addition, the report recommends that students pay the full cost of courses outside their education plan.

Woe to the career tech student who might venture to take a course in geography, philosophy, or fine arts!  What is the utility of radiation technology or mathematics students enrolling in political science to learn about legislative processes or the impact of free-trade agreements on the national economy and labor force demand?

Students will be able to “wander” for two terms before they decide on a plan, if the task force recommendations are adopted. How many years should they spend taking classes that don’t help them reach their goals?

Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott and Constance Carroll, chancellor of the San Diego Community College District and a member of the Student Success Task Force, defended the success plan in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The “old guard within the community college establishment” opposes the task force recommendations “because they claim they are prescriptive, limit faculty control and deviate from the historic mission of serving all students regardless of their intentions, writes Gary Hart, a former state education secretary, in the San Jose Mercury News. But the system isn’t serving students now: Only 30 percent complete a credential or transfer within six years.