Greater Expectations for Student Transfer
Project Description
Greater Expectations for Student Transfer was an important
part of the Greater Expectations vision to define and
provide leadership for undergraduate education in the new
century. AAC&U has been actively engaged in projects to address
transfer of credit among institutions. Our work, rather than
focusing on the mechanics of transfer, has been based on educational
purposes of an undergraduate degree. We are responding to
a widely perceived need to align statewide undergraduate degree
requirements and the teaching of courses that meet the requirements
with those purposes.
The work proceeds from the evidence that more than half
of baccalaureate degree recipients from public colleges and
universities began undergraduate study at another institution.
The courses students bring with them to the degree-awarding
institution, often earned from multiple institutions and online
providers, have in many cases been taught to quite different
ends than the parallel courses at the receiving institutions.
Thus carefully designed general education programs at the
degree-awarding institution may well be subverted by the legitimate
need to make transfer as seamless as possible. Students often
have little sense of the purposes of the specific requirements
or of the degree program as a whole. In the case of statewide
minimum requirements, students frequently experience them
as a set of meaningless requirements whose intentions are
vague, or undefined. Students' sense of purpose and focus
are further undermined by the growing tendency of students
to do some of their degree work on-line, earning individual
course credits from a wide range of institutions that provide
no sense of the structure of a degree.
Through a one-year pilot grant and a three-year grant
from FIPSE, AAC&U worked with three state systems -- Georgia, Maryland and Utah
-- on defining the educational purposes of their statewide
requirements, making those purposes clear to the faculty who
teach courses that meet those requirements on their several
campuses, and creating advising structures and assessments
that help students understand those purposes. Our goal, briefly
stated, was to provide an adequate answer to students' age-old
question, "Why do I have to take this course?"
The three states worked articulate the learning
outcomes implicit in their pre-existing statewide requirements.
Moving beyond this stage, they developed assessment
strategies to determine whether these intentions are being
realized and began work on means to make those intentions
clear to both faculty and students. Thus they hoped to bring
program purposes, teaching and learning into alignment, with
the goal of creating a more coherent and clearly intentional
baccalaureate program for students as they move among institutions.
In addition, through work with the SHEEOs, we involved other states in discussion of these issues. The chief
executive officers of the higher education coordinating boards in
all 50 states were invited to send representatives to a conference
in Atlanta in February 2001 for preliminary discussion of the issues
of a purposeful and coherent program of statewide requirements.
Sixteen states in fact sent representatives and subsequent
meetings of this group included representatives of a total
of 23 states.
In connection with these efforts, there was also held a series of regional
conversations between state legislators and higher education representatives
designed to facilitate and model ways of conducting conversations
about non-budget issues between these two groups. This work was
led by the Center for Policy Alternatives and included in planning
and participation the Kellogg Forum on Higher Education and the
Public Good and the American Council on Education in addition to
AAC&U.
Greater Expectations
AAC&U's transfer activities are connected to Greater Expectations,
our major effort to define and provide leadership
for a clear definition of purposes and identification of good
practices for 21st century undergraduate education. These
efforts reflect AAC&U's sense of the need to move beyond
lowest-common-denominator statewide transfer agreements, which
are based simply on the general subject matter categories
of general education courses. Our focus is state-level understandings
of intentions and goals shared among institutions and some
broad understandings at the national level of the purposes
of the baccalaureate degree. Only if such understandings are
in place and reflected in practice will increasingly mobile
students experience a college education worthy of a degree.
This project is sponsored in part by the Fund for the Improvement
of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), U.S.
Department of Education.
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