Westchester Community College pushes for transfer agreements with area colleges
Westchester Community College has partnered with Manhattanville College and The College of New Rochelle in an attempt to ease the process of transferring from its two-year programs to four-year degrees. That brings the school”™s total partnerships to eight.
In its 2014-19 strategic plan, WCC specifically noted a goal to both increase the number of students transferring after graduation and the “transfer pathways” for students to follow.
Referred to as an articulation agreement, the partnership between a community college and four-year university usually means fewer unused credits and an increased likelihood of finishing a bachelor”™s degree within two years.
Peggy Bradford, interim vice president and dean of academic affairs at WCC, said the biggest hurdle for students looking to transfer is finding a school they know will accept their current program of study and allow them to carry over the credits they earned.
“You could be transferring with 60 credits in some cases and only be able to use 30 of them,” Bradford said. “Here, you can be sure that when you transfer from Westchester those credits will be accepted.”
WCC has eight active articulation agreements, including the recently announced ones with The College of New Rochelle and Manhattanville College. It has worked out agreements multiple Westchester institutions, including Pace University and Mercy College.
The agreements guarantee that a student transferring with an associate in science or associate in arts degree will enter their new four-year institution with junior status.
The agreements accommodate students who, for reasons financial or personal, start out close to home in community college rather than the traditional route of four years at a college or university.
Nearly 50 percent of the students who completed a degree at four-year institutions in the 2013-14 academic year had enrolled at a two-year institution at some point, according to a May 2015 report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
A survey WCC did of its own 2014 graduates, completed by 460 of the 1,508 graduates, found 52.4 percent had transferred to a four-year institution. That was a slight decrease from the 56 percent who said the same in the previous year”™s survey. However, the 2015 survey found about 19 percent more students reported attending that four-year college full-time compared with the year before.
Kevin Cavanagh, vice president for enrollment management at The College of New Rochelle, said that since the Great Recession, people have started to take the costs associated with a four-year degree into much stronger consideration.
“Students are really weighing the economics of the decision,” Cavanagh said. “And for some students, community college makes great sense. It allows them to save some money and explore.”
President Barack Obama has stressed the role of community colleges as well. While Obama”™s recent education policy mostly grabbed headlines for its push to make community college free, he has also pushed for more educational partnerships between two-year and four-year schools.
In a statement announcing its new agreement with WCC, The College of New Rochelle said it was addressing a “national call by President Obama” to broaden access to higher education.
The agreement, announced on March 30, guarantees junior status for students transferring to the college”™s School of the Arts and Sciences. It also provides transferring students who have completed either an associate in science or associate in arts degree with a $10,000 annual scholarship, provided they have a grade point average of 2.5 or better. Cavanagh said the scholarship money has been allotted in the school”™s budget and through grants, and there is no cap on the number of students who can receive the scholarship.
One student each year will be eligible for a full-tuition scholarship. The student must have finished a two-year degree with a GPA of 3.5 or better and enroll in the School of the Arts and Sciences. The college announced in December that its School of the Arts, which was female-only for decades, would become co-educational in fall 2016.
More than 120 WCC students have enrolled at The College of New Rochelle in the last three years, according to the school.
Cavanagh said the school is anticipating increased interest from transfer students to its arts and sciences school programs, and is still exploring partnerships with other institutions. The articulation agreement could eventually include nursing and health care programs as well.
For Manhattanville College, this latest agreement is a reworking of a previous one between the schools. Both WCC and Manhattanville recently changed part of their core curricula, requiring a reconfiguration of the previous agreement.
Similar to New Rochelle”™s articulation agreement, students can transfer to any program in Manhattanville”™s School of the Arts and Science. If the student has a 2.5 or better grade point average and has graduated with an associate in arts or science, he or she will automatically be granted junior status.
Lisa Krissoff Boehm, dean of the School of the Arts and Science, described the process for students as “seamless.”
“As long as they have that strong GPA of 2.5 of better, basically they are in,” Krissoff Boehm said. “So the worry is out of it.”
The school has about 50 students from WCC, Krissoff Boehm said. Manhattanville College will also be offering scholarships to students coming in through the new articulation agreement, including three half-tuition scholarships.
Bradford said WCC started actively pursuing new or renewed articulation agreements in November. As of April, they have increased the number of individual programs a student can use an articulation agreements to transfer through from 85 to 195 across different institutions.
“We know that students who come to our institution, many of them plan to graduate and transfer,” Bradford said. “So we have to find that pathway for them and make sure they are not lost in the system.”