If you’re cash-strapped, here’s a well-trodden path toward a bachelor’s degree: Start at community college, which is cheaper and more flexible; get a bunch of credits there; then transfer to a four-year college to finish.
It’s estimated that about a quarter of community college students make this leap within five years. Most — about 64 percent — transfer before getting an associate’s degree first.
Within six years, about 60 percent of students who transfer from community college get a bachelor’s degree, according to a report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. But in that same timeframe, 26 percent drop out. What happens to them? Many end up with nothing, no degree at all.
It’s a bureaucracy thing. Students who took a shot at a BA and missed might not even know that they at least have enough credits to get an AA. Higher education systems aren’t really set up to help students in that limbo between community college and a bachelor’s degree. There’s not that much communication between schools.
If this seems inefficient, a bunch of nonprofits, including the Gates Foundation, agree. For the past couple of years, they have been funding efforts to identify former community college students who’ve done the work for an associate’s degree but never got one because they left community college to pursue a bachelor’s.
Recently, one of the largest community college districts in the nationsigned on to the experiment. Arizona’s Maricopa community colleges, which enroll more than 265,000 students a year, have received a half-million-dollar grant to track students who’ve moved on, and to automatically give them an associate’s degree if they’ve completed enough coursework.
"We want to ensure that students who have earned an associate’s degree get credit for that even if they move on to a four-year college," said Braulio Colón, who oversees this grant work for the Helios Education Foundation. "We view this as something that’s essential for college completion."
Read more at The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/02/10/attention-college-students-you-may-have-earned-a-degree-without-knowing-it/