Meet Estevan, featured by Texas A&M College–Corpus Christi as a Switch Scholar Success Story. Estevan benefited from a excessive diploma of customized help—together with advising on track choice and monetary help planning—that helped him establish a transparent path to switch in his main of alternative. Such customized help helped Estevan thrive and make the dean’s record after transferring.
Estevan’s story is among the many inspiring success tales about switch college students we hear daily, even when the percentages appear stacked towards them. For instance, we all know that 80 % of group faculty college students nationwide intend to finish a bachelor’s diploma, but solely 31 % switch to a four-year establishment inside six years of entry. Once they reach transferring, switch college students usually outperform their friends who begin and keep on the identical establishment. And but, we don’t make switch straightforward. For one, learners face a complicated set of ever-changing guidelines that varies throughout establishments, making it tough to know which programs are transferable and relevant to their supposed program of research.
Added to that, we all know life is unpredictable and even a learner’s best-laid plans might be derailed by one misplaced job, one sick member of the family or one sudden change in monetary help. When the unpredictable occurs, can establishments higher flex to satisfy learners the place they’re?
The indicators level to sure—for those who take a look at the examples of unimaginable institutional flexibility in response to the current rise in institutional closures and mergers. As reported by Inside Larger Ed, almost 100 establishments closed within the final tutorial yr alone resulting from declining enrollments and monetary pressures. When establishments shut, accreditors and their member establishments step as much as help college students by a course of known as teach-out. Train-out insurance policies, whereas they differ by accreditor, are usually designed to assist different establishments flexibly settle for and apply college students’ coursework to a level or credential with the intention to assist affected college students full their research in a well timed style. In such preparations, the expressed objective is to use the principles in ways in which assist carry college students in and flex these guidelines that will successfully go away college students out.
Train-out insurance policies are precisely the kind of considerate steerage that must be in place to help college students. However as we’ve described, institutional closure shouldn’t be the one motive college students switch, and it’s not the one disaster college students face. So this leads us to ask, if establishments might be versatile when confronted with one sort of scholar switch, can they be equally versatile in different switch situations as properly?
We’re excited to share that we had the chance to ask that query of the members of the Center States Fee on Larger Schooling (for which one of many authors, Heather Perfetti, serves as president). In fall of 2024, MSCHE, WASC Senior School and College Fee, and the Southern Affiliation of Schools and Faculties Fee on Schools partnered with the Past Switch Coverage Advisory Board and Sova to design and discipline the Survey on Switch and Studying Mobility to their institutional members. The survey sought to find out members’ views on scholar switch and studying mobility and to discern the position of accreditors in these processes by the institutional lens.
In some of the hanging survey outcomes, half of MSCHE’s responding establishments stated they imagine that establishments ought to apply related flexibility for college students who switch and/or have earlier studying as they do for college students in teach-out conditions (138 establishments responded to the survey, with a 30 % response price). Members of the PAB shared this discovering at MSCHE’s Annual Assembly in December 2024, and a MSCHE member voiced the next highly effective reflection: “We flex that manner on a regular basis for our personal self-interest after we need to shut considered one of our personal applications.”
We share these findings to not throw open the doorways on tutorial rigor and high quality, however moderately to ask the sector to pause and replicate on why credit score switch insurance policies are stringent, understanding the boundaries they might pose for college students. We acknowledge the claims that strict credit score switch insurance policies defend scholar preparation and program cohesion. If that’s true, what information are used to show that college students will not be properly ready in the event that they don’t take programs in a linear sequence? What proof is used to know and management for program cohesion? And if it’s not true, what are the true causes, and may we focus on them brazenly in order that we will higher serve college students? We will’t establish actual options if we’re not trustworthy concerning the precise issues.
From MSCHE’s perspective, this survey discovering seems like a name to pause, replicate and encourage us into motion. MSCHE is pleased with its current switch insurance policies, that are crafted to help college students and the mobility of their studying. However MSCHE can be keen to revisit its insurance policies and accreditation actions by the lens of how ideas associated to teach-out throughout crises, like closures, can inform switch extra usually.
Via the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions, in collaboration with WSCUC and SACSCOC, we’ll speak to our peer accreditation companies as properly about key questions for accreditors and the way accreditors can and may:
- Interact governing boards and member establishments concerning the significance of switch and studying mobility;
- Leverage self-study as a second for establishments to evaluation and revise insurance policies which might be boundaries to switch;
- Have fun with establishments the methods they’re supporting stronger switch insurance policies and the awarding of credit score;
- Remind constituents that accreditors need to see and help institutional innovation to raised serve college students;
- Promote what accreditation insurance policies really require, and bust myths round statements equivalent to “the accreditor received’t let me do this” (as a result of, fairly frankly, these statements are hardly ever true);
- Elevate how the accreditor grievance and third-party remark course of can be utilized by college students to carry institutional switch insurance policies, procedures and choices to accreditor consideration; and
- Fairly merely: Be scholar centered, on a regular basis.
We hope this publish provides you meals for thought. Via our partnership and aligned efforts such because the Studying Analysis and Recognition for the Subsequent Era Fee (led by Sova and the American Affiliation of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers and on which MSCHE, WSCUC and SACSCOC all sit), we might be seeking to help the sector with extra eager about sturdy ideas for student-centered credit score analysis and switch. Within the meantime, we’ll go away you with this query: How do you flex for college students?