Since 2022, the A2B (Associate’s to Bachelor’s) group has published about 25 posts in Inside Higher Ed’s “Beyond Transfer” blog. E.g., “How can AI help transfer? Let us count the ways.” For a complete list see https://bit.ly/3J5Zlci .
Please see our new post in the Ithaka S+R blog about new features added to our online tool that helps students transfer their credits. (Posted with permission of Ithaka S+R)
This blog post summarizes all of our transfer projects’ publications and presentations as of September 2022. We are very grateful to the CUNY University Faculty Senate for inviting us to do this blog post and for facilitating its publication. There is a similar list on the A2B (Associate’s to Bachelor’s) website.
Please see our miniseries in the IHE blog “Beyond Transfer”:
By Alison Kothe (Reposted by permission from the University of Texas at Austin Charles A. Dana Center Blog)
“College students are college students. They deserve to be treated as such from the moment they arrive on campus.”
Daniel Douglas, Trinity College, is clear about his view of postsecondary developmental education. As lead author of the newly released brief Community College Students Assessed as Needing Mathematics Remediation: Seven-Year Impacts of Corequisite Remediation with Statistics, which follows two prior published studies, Douglas knows that traditional remediation is not helping college students succeed. The seven-year analysis shows that students in a college-level statistics course with corequisite supports fared better than their peers in every measure.
The analysis focused on students taking a traditional remedial mathematics course (elementary algebra), those taking a traditional remedial math course with corequisite supports, and those taking a college-level statistics course with corequisite supports. The students in the college-level statistics course with corequisite supports attained their associate’s degree and bachelor’s degrees sooner and earned higher wages than their peers.
“Corequisites were very new when we first began this study in fall 2013,” said co-author Alexandra W. Logue, The City University of New York (CUNY). “But what we’ve been finding over the last seven years—along with others—is clear. Students taking a college-level mathematics course coupled with corequisite supports succeed in earning their associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in higher proportions than those in other developmental course options.”
Importantly, these findings were not measurably different based on a student’s race, gender, or if they were a Pell grant recipient.
“Given that we’ve found no differences due to race, ethnicity, or economic status in our findings,” continued Logue, “implementing this change in community colleges and other institutions of higher education would have a dramatic effect on decreasing common performance gaps.”
This study looked at three outcomes for students: the proportion of each group who earned an associate’s degree, the proportion who earned a bachelor’s degree, and wage earnings in New York.
“Often studies like this only focus on degree attainment, but we thought it was important to look at wages, at the end payoff for students,” said Douglas. “In looking at the data, students in the college-level statistics course with corequisite supports are earning higher wages on average than the other students. Looking closer, we found that this was because those students—who were in a college-level course from the beginning—were able to attain their degrees earlier than other students. They were able to enter the workforce sooner, get the yield of their degree sooner, and therefore able to move up in salary sooner.”
Time to degree is an important factor for students. In the CUNY system where this study was conducted, most students graduate debt-free. In other institutions, more time spent taking classes traditionally corresponds to more money spent and more debt taken on by the students.
The last year of the study was 2020. The pandemic did impact the data, and earnings went down in both groups during that last year. But earnings went down less for the group who had taken the college-level statistics course with corequisite supports.
“Likely the fact that those students had already earned degrees, earned them faster, and been in the workforce longer left them more ‘recession-proof’ than the other students,” Douglas said. 2020 was the only year that income went down.
The simple takeaway is that students who took the college-level course with corequisite supports earned more degrees, earned them faster, and in the end made more money.
Since this study began, corequisites have almost become a national movement based on the work of organizations like the Dana Center, Strong Start to Finish, Complete College America, Carnegie Math Pathways, and others.
“This study has been vital in our understanding of corequisites because it addresses questions about what happens to students after they leave the corequisite courses,” said Amy Getz, Dana Center interim director of K–12 education. “Thousands of students are benefitting from corequisites every year, but many more are still being held back by outdated models.”
“The simple takeaway is that students who took the college-level course with corequisite supports earned more degrees, earned them faster, and in the end made more money,” said Douglas.
Developing and implementing corequisite supports is an important next step for two- and four-year institutions.
“This study makes the case that corequisite supports work better than prerequisites,” said co-author Mari Watanabe-Rose, CUNY. “Institutions no longer need to wonder if investing in corequisites will lead to improvements. We now know that they will, and changing the structure of developmental education from remedial course sequences to college-level courses with just-in-time corequisite supports will help students succeed and attain a degree.”
As more institutions adopt corequisites as normative practice, transfer and applicability policies and advising practices will also need to be adjusted.
“If you think someone doesn’t know something, it can seem cruel to put them in a course that they would struggle in,” said Logue. “It seems kinder to put that student in a lower level or remedial course. One of my biggest takeaways from this work is that we’ve found that it is not a kindness. Students are less likely to succeed in remedial courses. If we let students take the college-level courses, giving them corequisite supports, we see in the data that these students will do better, that they will achieve more.”
Douglas agreed. “When we think of our students from a deficit-model—that they aren’t ready, they can’t do this work—we unintentionally feed in to a student’s negative view of themselves. It can be a form of subconscious bias and racism. When college students are treated like college students, with interventions like corequisite supports, they can succeed.”
Citation Information for the Full Brief:
Douglas, D., Logue, A. W., & Watanabe-Rose, M. (2021, October). Community college students assessed as needing mathematics remediation: Seven-year impacts of corequisite remediation with statistics. Dana Center Mathematics Pathways Resource Site. http://dcmathpathways.org/resources/community-college-students-assessed-needing-mathematics-remediation-seven-year-impacts
by Martin Kurzweil, Cindy Le, Alexandra W. Logue
(Reposted with permission from the Ithaka S+R blog: https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/ithaka-sr-to-expand-transfer-improvement-efforts-with-cuny/)
When students transfer from one college to another they frequently are unable to count their previously earned credits toward degree requirements at their new institutions, jeopardizing these students’ ability to earn their degrees. Nationally, 43 percent of credits are wasted during transfer, and students who lose that many credits are far less likely to graduate than students who are able to transfer most of their credits. While other categories of enrollment have declined during the COVID-19 crisis, the number of students transferring from community colleges to four-year colleges has increased. Failing to facilitate the acceptance of credit will mean that these students will waste credits when they can least afford to do so.
Since June 2019, Ithaka S+R has been working with The City University of New York to improve transfer data and advising through the Articulation of Credit Transfer (ACT) project. Our ultimate goal is to enable students to count all previously earned credits toward their degree programs when they transfer between CUNY institutions, greatly increasing their likelihood of graduating and making their education more affordable. Innovations developed through this project include the online tool Transfer Explorer, which for the first time allows anyone to see how courses at one CUNY college are treated at any other CUNY college after transfer. Since its launch in May 2020, 8,000 users have accessed Transfer Explorer more than 13,000 times.
Generous funding from the Heckscher Foundation for Children has allowed us to focus these efforts, to date, on the three CUNY institutions in the Bronx: Bronx Community College, Hostos Community College, and Lehman College.
We are now pleased to announce a new grant from the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation that will expand the project to four additional CUNY campuses: Brooklyn College, Guttman Community College, Queens College, and Queensborough Community College. Beginning in January 2021, ACT will be working to improve student transfer at seven of CUNY’s 20 undergraduate campuses, in four of five boroughs.
All of ACT’s partners will be focused on several key workstreams:
ACT’s progress to date suggests these efforts will have a major impact on student transfer success. For example, in Spring 2020, reports generated from the archived degree audit data allowed Lehman and Hostos staff to identify and contact more than 220 transfer applicants to share preliminary transfer credit information for their intended majors, to facilitate optimal course decisions when they transfer, and to ensure ongoing support throughout their transfer process. For about five percent of these students, the resulting increase in registered credits counting toward their degrees made them eligible to receive New York State Tuition Assistance that they otherwise would not have received.
ACT’s accumulation of student-level improvements has put more transfer students on track to graduate. Just during ACT’s first year, the share of Hostos-to-Lehman transfer students who had any transfer credits that did not count toward their degree declined from 42 percent in Fall 2019 to 39 percent in Fall 2020. Among those students with credits that did not count, the average share of credits that did not count declined from 18 percent to 15 percent.
Improving students’ transfer experience matters more now than ever before. The data analysis, transparency, process, and advising efforts of ACT have borne fruit in the Bronx. Thanks to the Petrie Foundation, we look forward to working with a new set of partners at Brooklyn College, Guttman Community College, Queens College, and Queensborough Community College to support their transfer students.
by Martin Kurzweil, Cindy Le, and Alexandra W. Logue
Reposted with permission from the Ithaka S+R blog: https://bit.ly/2OkAu8e .
Approximately one-third of college students begin their postsecondary education in community colleges, yet over 80 percent of these students aspire to earn at least a bachelor’s degree. In order to achieve their goals, these students will need to transfer from their community colleges (which mostly offer associate’s degrees) to colleges that offer bachelor’s degrees. Yet, only 13 percent of students successfully transfer and earn a bachelor’s degree within six years of entering community college. Black and Hispanic students and lower-income students are the most likely to face obstacles in their transfer journey to a bachelor’s degree.
When students transfer from one college to another, one challenge that jeopardizes their ability to earn degrees is that they frequently are unable to count their previously earned credits toward degree requirements at their new institutions. Nationally, it is estimated that 43 percent of credits are wasted during transfer. This credit loss and the need to repeat courses they have already passed costs students time and is deeply discouraging; it also wastes their money, contributes to increased debt, and puts financial aid eligibility at risk. It is no wonder that students who lose half their transfer credits are far less likely to graduate than students who are able to transfer most of their credits.
The COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate this problem. Due to closed campuses, concerns about affordability and contagion within dormitories, and restrictions on travel, we should expect both more students to change colleges and more students to choose local, affordable community colleges over bachelor’s-degree colleges, at least temporarily. For these reasons, even more students will need to transfer their credits in order to obtain their desired degrees. Failing to streamline the acceptance of credit will mean that these students will waste credits when they can least afford to do so.
Since June 2019, a team of researchers and administrators from Ithaka S+R, the CUNY Graduate Center, Hostos Community College, Lehman College, the CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (OIRA), and the University of California, Berkeley has been engaged in a multi-faceted effort to improve the transfer process for students at CUNY. This project, which we’ve taken to calling, “Articulation of Credit Transfer,” or ACT, is focused on streamlining and enhancing credit information, advising, and transcript evaluation for CUNY transfer students.
At CUNY, 58 percent of students are Black or Hispanic, 61 percent are Pell Grant recipients, 61 percent will be the first in their families to graduate college, and 82 percent graduated from a New York City public high school, with all of these percentages being higher in the CUNY community colleges than in the CUNY bachelor’s-degree-granting colleges. Facilitating transfer at CUNY is an important higher education equity issue.
Based on promising early results in the first year of work, we are pleased to announce that our original funder, the Heckscher Foundation for Children, has awarded Ithaka S+R and its collaborators a new grant to further develop the tools created through the project, to fully implement the interventions at Hostos and Lehman, and to include in the project the third CUNY college in the Bronx, Bronx Community College (BCC).
Over half of Hostos and BCC students who transfer to a CUNY bachelor’s-degree-granting college transfer to Lehman, and almost two-thirds of Lehman’s transfer students who come from within CUNY come from Hostos or BCC. Thus, facilitating transfer among BCC, Hostos, and Lehman has the potential to benefit the majority of CUNY students in the Bronx who aspire to a bachelor’s degree. Through this work, our aim is to create a transfer ecosystem in the Bronx that is a model for CUNY and beyond.
In just the first 12 months of this effort, the ACT team has made significant progress in interpreting CUNY’s course transfer data, developing processes and applications to support students and advisors, and directly intervening to improve students’ transfer outcomes. Activities completed and underway include:
These efforts seem to be paying off. While it is not an apples-to-apples comparison, the Spring 2020 students with any transfer credits that did not count toward their degree had an average of 15 percent of their credits not count, compared to 18 percent for Fall 2019 students.
In the next phase of the project, we will continue to improve these tools and processes, and we will fully implement them at Hostos, Lehman, and BCC. Planned activities include:
With these additional efforts, CUNY students transferring among the campuses in the Bronx—and across CUNY more generally—will have more and clearer information, more targeted advice, and more rapid and streamlined service than ever before. When students, advisers, and faculty have more information earlier in the process, the students will not only have a better experience, but will be empowered to earn their degree on a faster timeline.
We thank the Heckscher Foundation for Children for funding this work.
June 5, 2020
Reposted from the blog of Ithaka S+R with permission.
Martin Kurzweil, Cindy Le, Alexandra W. Logue
When students transfer from one college to another they frequently are unable to count their previously earned credits toward degree requirements at their new institution, jeopardizing these students’ ability to earn degrees at their new institutions. Nationally, 43 percent of credits are wasted during transfer, and students who lose that many credits are far less likely to graduate than students who are able to transfer most of their credits.
The COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate this problem. Due to closed campuses, concerns about affordability and contagion within dormitories, and restrictions on travel, we should expect both more students to change colleges, and more students to choose local, affordable community colleges over bachelor’s-degree colleges, at least temporarily. For these reasons there will be even more students who will need to transfer their credits in order to obtain their desired degrees. Failing to streamline the acceptance of credit will mean that these students will waste credits when they can least afford to do so.
Since June 2019, with support from the Heckscher Foundation for Children, Ithaka S+R has partnered with the CUNY Graduate Center, Hostos Community College, Lehman College, the CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (OIRA), and the University of California, Berkeley to improve the articulation of transfer credit for students at CUNY. A foundational principle behind this work is that complete transparency regarding how credits transfer will help students make optimal course and college choices, and will help colleges facilitate those choices.
We are pleased to announce the public launch of one of the products of this multifaceted project: Transfer Explorer, hosted by Lehman College, offers organized, searchable, user-friendly information on how every course in the CUNY catalog transfers across any number of undergraduate institutions in CUNY. Transfer Explorer draws current data directly from CUNY’s student information system, is accessible to the public, and is completely free to use—the first time such information has been so widely available. Transfer Explorer’s features include:
Transfer Explorer is a work in progress. In addition to a number of smaller enhancements, planned longer-term improvements include adding non-CUNY course equivalencies and the applicability of courses to degree program requirements. As we expand and continue to add features to the site, user feedback is essential to improving the tool. We encourage anyone with an interest in transfer to explore Transfer Explorer and provide feedback through the Transfer Explorer site or directly to us or to [email protected].
We want to be sure to recognize the outstanding contributions of Chris Buonocore and Elkin Urrea of Lehman College, and Chris Vickery of Queens College, in making Transfer Explorer a reality.
Reposted from the blog of Ithaka S+R by permission.
Dr. Alexandra W. Logue is a Research Professor in CASE (the Center for Advanced Study in Education) of the Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY), with particular responsibility for research and scholarship concerning college student success. Dr. Logue is a leading expert on remediation and transfer, and her most recent book, Pathways to Reform: Credits and Conflict at The City University of New York (Princeton University Press), is a case study regarding the difficulty of making change in higher education. She is also a member of the ITHAKA Board of Trustees. Ithaka S+R graciously thanks Dr. Logue for sharing her thoughts regarding using policy to create opportunities for the new majority of students.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. As noted in our accompanying policy brief, we define the “new majority” of students as those outside the traditional conceptualization of 18-22 year old students attending four-year residential colleges on a full-time basis.
My opinion on this is shaped by seeing that anything that involves changes in what faculty teach is very difficult to happen from the bottom up even if there is a lot of evidence that changes should happen. I’m not talking about the style of teaching in the classroom, but more structural aspects of curriculum. For example, whether or not there should be standalone prerequisite remedial courses or if courses should transfer from one college to another, because both of these affect what courses faculty may teach. Many people think that anything that has to do with curriculum should be the province of faculty alone, and that changes should originate from them. But when you look across the country, you may see a couple colleges make large-scale changes that way, but most do not when the changes are bottom-up.
So I believe there should be some state intervention that isn’t totally based on bottom-up processes. Texas and California have been leaders in making such changes, particularly in terms of evidence-based remedial reform. In both those states there were well-intentioned people who tried the bottom-up approach without the changes being implemented for years, thus harming students. Now both states have intervened with legislation in order to ensure that the changes happen. This underscores the importance of policymakers for implementing change.
Both faculty and administrators, although well intentioned, may impede reforms. Many faculty believe that whatever they are doing is the best for students, and any change would be worse. And we want faculty to believe that what they are doing is the best because when they believe that, they will be more successful teachers. But then when there is evidence that is in conflict with these faculty’s beliefs, their beliefs can make change difficult. Moreover, these types of changes may be against faculty’s self-interest because these changes can impact the faculty’s workload and environment.
On the other hand, administrators should be actively trying to improve opportunities for students, and it is their responsibility to remain up to date on current research and innovative practices. However, administrators who do not understand or communicate the evidence undercut the institution’s ability to work with faculty on changing course structures. Additionally, administrators may be incentivized not to push faculty toward reform. If an administrator develops a reputation of having trouble working with faculty it may impact their future professional opportunities.
Policymakers are in a unique position to bypass these obstacles. By legislatures mandating reforms, cover can be given to administrators trying to avoid conflict with faculty, and at the same time faculty change can be accelerated. The actual implementation should certainly rely on faculty’s disciplinary expertise and administrators’ ability to facilitate institutional change. However, policy mandates can be the catalysts for change. In addition, it should be stressed that legislative action should not be undertaken lightly. Ideally, higher education is in the best position, with the most relevant knowledge, to manage its own business. However, when evidence-based change is happening slowly, so that students are being harmed, it can be time for the legislature (or a university system central office) to step in—carefully. Legislators should recognize that they need to work closely with higher education faculty and administrators in order to craft effective, productive, higher education legislation.
This will be context specific and depend on what types of changes are being made and the history surrounding them. Hopefully, policymakers can find a group of informed faculty so that together they can co-develop policies that make sense. Staff members can also aid in this process. For example, with transfer, staff can be helpful in writing policies that reflect the logistical aspects of transfer. Ideally, you want to have good evidence that is presented to everyone so people have the opportunity to have a common understanding. Administrators don’t necessarily know what’s happening within the classroom, and faculty don’t necessarily know the logistical issues associated with events outside of their departments, such as transfer. You want to build a coalition that involves varied perspectives and thus write a strong policy.
Policymakers should be keeping up with the research. However, that is easy to say but sometimes difficult in practice. Policy briefs from independent researchers, such as Ithaka S+R, are good sources for policymakers to obtain summaries of important topics. Campus members certainly have an intimate knowledge of what is happening at a particular college, but also may have incentives to describe the status quo as more positive than it truly is. State leaders therefore need to rely on strong data, but the availability of such data will depend on how the state is organized and if it has a strong data system.
I’m an advocate for co-requisite remediation in math. There is now a great deal of evidence supporting the increase in student success that accompanies corequisite, as opposed to traditional, prerequisite, remedial math. We’ve seen time and again that, in a college that isn’t offering co-requisite remediation, the faculty may say they want to do a pilot course before offering corequisite remediation at scale. But small-scale pilots may not work because students may not take an optional course and advisors may not want to put a student in a pilot program and have that student be what the advisors conceive of as a guinea pig. This can delay reforms. If pilot programs can be done quickly and effectively, they are helpful. Pilots can be good for building evidence, but once we know what works well, pilot programs may just delay full-scale reform. By ensuring they are up to date on current research, policymakers can balance the need for pilot testing and action. For example, despite many years of effort, in California there was substantial co-requisite remediation at only a handful of community colleges. Based on the substantial evidence on corequisite remediation, the legislature therefore moved to make co-requisite remediation essentially universal via AB 705. Not waiting for pilots deemed successful at each individual college or department allowed the state to avoid wasting years and thus harming large numbers of students by placing them in traditional remediation.
Both remediation and transfer must be addressed. Students from underrepresented groups and poor families are more likely to go to community colleges and enroll in associate-, as opposed to bachelor’s-degree programs, than are other students. Differences in the quality of K-12 preparation for students from different groups, as well as social and economic factors, are largely responsible for these differential attendance rates. The problem is, at community colleges students are more likely to be assigned to traditional remediation. Given that these courses have lower success rates, students are less likely to complete these courses and eventually graduate. We also know that most of the students want bachelor’s degrees, but the issues associated with transfer can be a roadblock and make it more difficult to obtain a bachelor’s degree. What this means is that challenges associated with remediation and transfer essentially discriminate against historically underserved students, and unless we fix these problems, we are complicit in that discrimination.
I have a lot of admiration for California’s policies concerning remediation. There are three systems: the University of California (UC), the California State University (CSU), and the California Community Colleges (CCC) systems. Remediation is not a significant issue in the UC system, but steps have been taken to address remediation in the CSU and CCC systems. In the case of the CCC, the state legislature passed AB 705 to essentially mandate co-requisite remediation. At CSU, the Chancellor issued an executive order essentially banning standalone pre-requisite remedial courses. The initial results from these changes appear to be showing significant success.
Here is my brief (2.5-minute) podcast, produced by NPR’s The Academic Minute, on the student success advantages of corequisite as compared to traditional remediation, as illustrated by my research with Dan Douglas and Mari Watanabe-Rose: http://bit.ly/2L2h7QC