Imagine you’re a transfer student grinding away on a tough physics assignment, and an email pops up informing you that, between your community-college and university courses, you’ve earned enough credits to be awarded an associate degree. It’s been a tough transition to Big State U., so you react by:
A. Eagerly accepting the degree, which will motivate you to complete your baccalaureate.
B. Breathing a sigh of relief because, with a degree in hand, you won’t feel so guilty if you throw in the towel on the blasted B.A.
C. Panicking because your private scholarship ends when you receive your first degree, and you want the money to keep flowing for two more years.
Those are just a few of the scenarios that college officials from 28 states pondered as they gathered in Orlando, Fla., over the weekend for a national conference on "reverse transfer," sponsored by the National Student Clearinghouse and the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida.
Reverse transfer happens when a four-year college sends a student’s records back to the two-year institution where he or she started. If the student has earned enough credits, the community college awards a degree.
It’s typically a win-win for students, who receive a credential that will increase their earning power, spur them on, and provide them with something to fall back on if they drop out and to build on if they return.
For community colleges, long the whipping boys of lawmakers focused on completion rates, it’s a way to get credit for the thousands of students who successfully advance from their institutions with nothing to show for it. As many as two million students who attended college for two or more years from 2003 to 2013 without earning a degree could be awarded associate degrees through an automated data-collection program the clearinghouse is now working on with states, officials at the clearinghouse say.
But giving credit where credit is due is harder than it seems, as a dozen states discovered when they participated in a pilot study supported by several philanthropies, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Giving-Credit-Where-Credit-Is/151385