New England Board of Higher Education » transfer students

In Mass., Public Higher Education Is Engine for Opportunity

Shoshana Akins — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:00:35 +0000

NEJHE presents exclusive articles by New England's governors on higher education in their states ...

Thanks to our dedicated teachers and committed students, Massachusetts leads the nation in student achievement and classroom innovation. We’ve made education our top priority because it’s the path to a more fulfilling life, a more rewarding career and a richer society. I have personally experienced the transformative power of education and have a deep understanding of what a good teacher and a good school can mean to a young person.

We’ve supported public education by investing in our schools at the highest levels in the history of our state, even when the bottom was falling out of the rest of the budget. And we’ve added new reforms that raise teacher accountability and encourage more innovation in the classroom to reach the children stuck in the achievement gap. These investments in money and time are working; our students rank first in the nation in student achievement and have for each of the past five years. We rank in the top five internationally in math and science. And we were the top scorer in the national Race to the Top competition.

The targeted investments we’ve made and the results we’ve seen don’t stop at K-12. We are mirroring these gains at the level of higher education. Before I was elected governor, I spent most of my professional life in the private sector and did business all over the world. I can tell you from experience that education is our international calling card. We are known the world-over for our highly skilled workforce and world-class education system. Massachusetts is blessed with an unusually high concentration of great public and private universities that have spawned a vast array of research institutions, teaching hospitals and tech hubs.

Our 29 outstanding public higher education institutions are at the heart of this mix and essential to the health of our workforce. They host the skilled innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders that will graduate prepared to compete in the global economy and choose to enrich our Commonwealth by residing here. Continuing to support this excellence is and will remain a challenge in the budget environment we are facing. But by prioritizing education as part of an overall growth strategy, we will continue our investments in educational innovation and promote Massachusetts public higher education on the national and world stages.

That starts by finally building up our campuses again. We’re delivering on a $2 billion higher education capital improvement plan to modernize our campuses and provide students and faculty with access to cutting-edge facilities and technology. That means new buildings, more access to the technology they’ll need to use in their future workplaces and more support for students at every stage of their educational career.

We are sharpening and refocusing the resources we already have in place. Under the leadership of Commissioner of Higher Education Richard Freeland, we have launched the Vision Project, which consists of a series of strategies to unite the public higher education system and promote efficiency, benchmark and track progress, increase transparency and accountability and raise the profile and recognition of the campuses.

We’re doing some exciting work connecting the dots between different areas of public education that didn’t necessarily collaborate before. Pathways Early College Innovation School located at Mount Wachusett Community College is a great example. Parents and teachers in the school district there came together and created an Innovation School, an in-district charter school we enabled through last year’s Education Reform Bill. In partnership with Mount Wachusett Community College, they created a program for 11^th grade students at risk of dropping out to take advantage of the resources offered by the community college in an environment that supported their ambitions and focused their studies.

We’re working to ensure a smoother transition from high school to college and between our community colleges and state universities. I have prioritized dual-enrollment programs, which allow high school students to take courses on college campuses for credit that counts toward their diploma and toward a college degree. The program provides access to advanced subject matter and also exposes high school students to life on campus to build their confidence so they are better prepared when they transition to higher education. We instituted the MassTransfer program, which allows students to fluidly transfer across our 29 public campuses. And the University of Massachusetts Amherst just launched the Community College Connection Program, which gives preference to admissions, housing and financial aid to talented community college students seeking to continue their studies at our flagship public campus.

Finally, we’re scaling up efforts to match higher education with local employers to ensure students are fully prepared to enter the workforce upon graduation. I have tasked a group of economic development and education officials to work on improving our system’s ability to respond to industry and employer needs, especially through our community colleges. Members of my team are taking a close look at how we can better orient our higher education programs to meet the needs of a dynamic, evolving workforce, and I look forward to implementing their recommendations.

These targeted investments along with our reforms and the focus we’ve placed on connecting our students with opportunities for success, are working. A world-class, accessible system of public higher education is an important component of our growth strategy and our commitment to competing in the global economy. Massachusetts already hosts the brightest graduates and strongest institutions in the country. But best in the world is where we’re heading.

Deval Patrick is serving his second term as Massachusetts governor.

The Good Business of Transfer

NEBHE Admin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:09:47 +0000

Why improving college transfer pathways makes good sense for New England

CHARI A. LEADER

FROM THE NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION, WINTER 2010

It’s rare for policymakers to think of higher education pathways beyond their own experiences as traditional students. Many went to college directly after high school, stayed in dorms and graduated ready for careers. But the world today must depend upon learners (young and older) who may not be able to choose this path to career success.

Rather, our diverse and highly mobile world now has academic and career entry and exit points that span a lifetime of the “swirling, dropping in, dropping out, and moving on” behaviors of today’s learners. Today’s learners often do not have the luxury of focusing 100% of their efforts on college as their top priority. Many are working. Many are parents. And many simply cannot afford to think of anything beyond meeting today’s challenges. The matter of transfer comes into the picture when these learners present credits from different colleges and other sources such as military and corporate training programs and specialized examinations as they make their way toward degree completion.

Transfer coordinators at community colleges have large caseloads with few resources to reach out to students. The confluence of courses “out of sequence” and lack of academic advising, particularly for first-generation college students, can result in credits presented not being applicable to degree requirements or not part of a “program of study.” Imagine the extraordinary work and hope associated with presenting earned credits only to find out that they will not count toward a degree. Moreover, credits earned “in and out” of college, “in and out” of the military, and over time can be lost if adult students are discouraged from re-entering college to pull it all together in completing a degree that is the magic ticket to retaining a job or qualifying for a new one.

The U.S. Department of Education reports that 20% of students at New England public two-year colleges earn associate degrees within three years of enrolling. One can surmise that many two-year college students who have earned credit (whether degree-seeking at the time or not) may be presenting it to another college or university later. In fact, part-time students at New England colleges and universities numbered 285,185 in 2007. These students are accumulating credit slowly toward the end goal of degree completion. Another important statistic is the number of students who drop out of four-year college programs before they become sophomores—now averaging between 25% and 30% annually in New England. These students may also be presenting credits down the road to other colleges and universities.

Students follow many different paths and trajectories through the years. The pathways are further complicated by the mobility of today’s workforce, the proliferation of online courses from hundreds of providers, and the necessity for workforce training and development programs. It is easy to see how complex the issue of transfer becomes for receiving institutions as well as the learners themselves.

It is estimated that in New England, nearly $536 million is lost in one year alone when receiving colleges and universities do not accept coursework applicable to their degree requirements. This figure has come to be known as the Transfer Tax, because it represents costs to taxpayers, students, state and federal governments. Nationally, the Transfer Tax is now estimated at $10 billion per year. The calculation is based upon 11 important variables including numbers of students in public and private institutions, cost of attendance, state higher education budgets and subsidies.

California, Maryland and Florida have tried to conquer the complexity of transfer with state articulation systems that describe how credits from one college will be recognized toward a degree at another college. Created more than 10 years ago, these systems are most helpful to academic advisors and admissions counselors. Today’s new technology has taken these concepts and streamlined the information in a way that serves advisors, faculty and, most importantly, the students. Pennsylvania’s new transfer portal enables students to evaluate how their courses will be recognized at other Pennsylvania institutions, easily accommodating today’s trends of transfer, reverse transfer and the various permutations between two- and four-year colleges. The Pennsylvania portal at www.patrac.org displays courses from all of its state supported schools as well as private institutions that choose to display their course equivalencies voluntarily. South Carolina is in the process of building its portal.

Bringing information out into the open, as these portals do, is a terrific way to demystify transfer. It is also makes it more difficult (due to transparency) for some institutions to deny credit transfer without a valid rationale. It enables community colleges to finally get their due, because course-equivalency decisions are made based upon academic outcomes. Envisioning the future, technology exists today that can make this information available in a national network, available to anyone, anytime, for free.

The technology is ready. And New England is ready.

Perhaps more than their counterparts in other regions, New Englanders recognize that collaborating, sharing resources and innovating are important for addressing one of the region’s biggest challenges: attracting new industry despite an aging population. An educated workforce is vital to attracting higher paying jobs for economic development. If high school graduating classes are shrinking, an excellent economic development strategy is to improve degree production of adults who have significant work experience and some college credits. Besides the moral obligation of ensuring that those who are working so hard have the opportunity to earn their credentials, there are important social and economic development reasons to make re-entry to college easier to navigate.

Until now, we have counted on individual colleges and universities to track articulation. Sometimes, systems even attempt to improve transfer. But now, instead of keeping self-imposed boundaries around academia, I suggest we open borders “in the clouds” as technology experts say, so that information is more readily available, easier to maintain and is developed using common standards that are inclusive.

Collaborating, bringing about transparency and sharing resources (perhaps through a single state, regional or national portal) will enable greater participation in our knowledge economy. Now, education leaders must leverage this existing technology as the mechanism to include all of our mobile citizens who aspire to at last complete their postsecondary degrees. As this happens, New England businesses will tap fresh ideas, new knowledge workers and skills that will build the region’s economy and strengthen its social fabric as its citizenry stays in New England to have families and develop new small businesses.

Addressing transfer student needs does make good business sense for New England.

Chari A. Leader is a higher education consultant specializing in national issues of access, transfer and learner mobility, who is based in West Palm Beach, Fla. Leader began her college education at age 27 at a Nebraska community college, then went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Bellevue University, a master’s from the University of Oklahoma and a doctorate from Walden University. Email: charileader@gmail.com.