From 2016-2023, College Futures Foundation supported several California State University (CSU) campuses to partner with California community colleges in their regions to increase the number of students transferring from community colleges and completing bachelor's degrees at the CSU. In an effort to learn more about this work, College Futures…

Tuning is a bottom-up, faculty-led process which leads to the creation of a discipline-specific learning outcome document along with a degree profile that is used to communicate the value of a particular degree to a variety of audiences including students, employers, policy makers, and the general public. Tuning, introduced in the United States in…

James Madison University (JMU) and Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) teamed up in April 2014 to build a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between their respective four-year and two-year honors programs. This MOU is the basis for the continued work between these two institutions to collaborate and find research to assist other interested…

"The Talent Blind Spot," which is divided into two reports, demonstrates that, each year, more than 50,000 high-achieving, low- and moderate-income community college students do not transfer to a four-year institution. Approximately 15,000 of these students have a 3.7 GPA or higher, which suggests they could succeed at even the most…

Equity in Excellence is a two-year project launched in 2013 to support the implementation of Colorado's higher education reform agenda. With a focus on the metropolitan Denver area, the project intends to align the state's higher education policies with concrete, equity-focused actions at its public community colleges and four-year institutions.…

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) launched Quality Collaboratives (QC): Assessing and Reporting Degree Qualifications Profile Competencies in the Context of Transfer in 2011 as a three-year project that engaged educational, assessment, and policy leaders in student learning outcomes assessment and transfer pathways.…

Washington's community and technical colleges set a national example for innovative policies, practices and research for student success. Washington's community and technical college system ranks 12th in the nation for graduation rates, and 7th for certificates and degrees produced. Olympic College and Renton Technical College in March 2015 were…

The previous six chapters have focused on particular aspects of the processes involved in implementing transfer associate degrees in various states. In this chapter, the authors synthesize that information by presenting an ideal state-level organizational model for implementing these degrees and describing the various constituencies involved in…

Transfer education centering on the liberal arts declined relatively beginning in the late 1960s with the expansion of vocational education. But the distinctions blurred as courses that matched university programs in business and health fields grew. By the 1970s more than half all associate degrees awarded were to students from occupational…

Educational reform in the United States is perpetually evolving. Much of the recent reforms have concentrated on high-stakes testing and assessment, but a parallel effort has been emerging in the field of vocational and career education. Prompted partly by federal legislation--most recently by the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act…

An interpretative philosophical framework was applied to a case study to document the particular experiences and perspectives of ten women engineering transfer students who once attended a community college and are currently enrolled in one of two university professional engineering programs. This study is important because women still do not earn…

State actions to increase college completion are growing, with 23 states (though not California) signed on to Complete College America, and other foundation-led initiatives involving still more states and college systems. These initiatives are helping states use data to understand how students, and which students, make, or fail to make, progress…

This paper reports on the results of an analysis of program articulation between the college and university sectors in Canada. The Canadian post-secondary system is best described as a binary system with discrete university and non-university sectors. While there are complex sectoral differences between the two institutional types in terms of…