Community college leaders have complained for years that a student who transfers to a university without finishing an associates degree, but goes on to complete all the basic courses required for the degree, doesn't count as a success under currently sanctioned national metrics.
The controversy stems from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which registers only "first-time, full-time students who finish a degree at the institution at which they began in one and a half times the duration it would normally take to complete the degree (i.e., three years for a two-year associate degree, and six years for a four-year bachelor's)."
This complicated issue is captured concisely in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) by Donna Ekal, associate provost for undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, and Paula M. Krebs, ACE Fellow at the University of Massachusetts president's office, and a professor of English at Wheaton College. Their schools have pioneered, with the help of grants, a methodology and data system to link up with the principal community college in their vicinity. In El Paso it's El Paso Community College, for instance. It's all about finding a way to track these students so they can be counted, and rewarded, properly.
The concept is known as "reverse transfer."
With such a move toward improved quantification, a better case can be made to policy makers that reported low success rates for two-year college students don't tell the whole story.
From the Chronicle piece:
So a student who transfers from a community college to a four-year institution and completes a bachelor's degree counts as a failure, in graduation-rate terms, for both the community college and the four-year institution. Until the government changes its data gathering to account in a positive way for such transfer students, thousands of students who complete their college degrees will continue unrecorded in government reporting. Furthermore, many such students will overlook the full value of the community-college experience that started them on their degree paths.
Help is coming from an unexpected quarter, however: the four-year institutions to which such students transfer. Our institutions, the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Massachusetts at Boston, along with others across the country, have established systems to ensure that transfer students with significant credits from two-year colleges are awarded associate degrees once they have completed the necessary coursework at their new institutions.
The University of Texas at El Paso, in a pioneering arrangement with El Paso Community College, has developed a fully automated reverse-transfer system that allows transfer students to earn their final credits at the university, then have those credits sent back to the community college. A Title V Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program grant from the Department of Education enabled the two institutions to create the EPCC-UTEP Transfer Program, a seamless electronic environment of shared student services. The new data-sharing agreements, along with the student-information system's degree-audit program, allows the university to track down students who have completed a minimum of 25 percent of their degree at community college, as required by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Those students can fulfill the balance of the associate-degree requirements at the university, then receive their degrees from El Paso Community College, complete with a festive graduation celebration. Up go the graduation rates at the community college, up goes the self-esteem of the newly credentialed student, and up goes the retention rate at the university: It's the ultimate win-win situation.
Comments