AACC | Tracking Degree Eligibility Boosts Graduation Rate

Community colleges can increase the number of degrees they award as easily as looking around their campuses, according to three presenters at the 2002 American Association of Community Colleges annual convention in Seattle in April.

San Diego Miramar College in California did exactly that and found a 19 percent increase in degrees and a 24 percent increase in certificates awarded in the 2000-01 school year, said Robert Garber, vice president of student services at Miramar.

The reasons to do so are simple, said Mary Spangler, president of Los Angeles City College. Community colleges are still judged by the number of degrees they award. Legislators “want us to prove to them how much we do” in order to get funding, Spangler said.

That is not likely to change anytime soon if Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman’s speech announcing a higher education reform bill is anything indication. In an April speech, Lieberman said that to encourage better results during and after college “those of us in Washington should start by changing the goal of all our federal higher education policies from enrollment to graduation.”

Lieberman’s press secretary, Adam Kovacevich, said that the senator is trying to address gaps in graduation rates among income levels and minorities.

“We need to talk about the fact that you have more students going to college, but there’s a persistent gap in enrollment and graduation,” he said. “When it comes to community colleges we could look at things like certificate completion. We just want to make sure students are finishing their programs.”

Garber said that Miramar found that students often transfer to four-year colleges with almost all of the requirements needed for an associate degree; the missing classes are generally in health and physical education.

In order to award and count degrees for transfer students, Miramar developed a transfer studies degree based on university transfer requirements that eliminates the need for such classes while still fulfilling state requirements.

The college also increased outreach to students to let them know that they were eligible to receive a degree. Now college staff members review the records of currently-enrolled students who have more than 36 credit hours to see if they are degree eligible. If so, they complete a graduation petition for the students and mail it to them along with an opportunity to decline.

Most, he said, are happy to get the degree, but some reject it for financial aid and personal reasons, he said. Others simply may not know the requirements for a degree or certificate and never meet with a counselor to develop an educational plan.

Miramar plans to simplify how students update educational goals and majors, provide student access to Web-enabled educational plans and mail or e-mail to students educational plan summaries.

Regardless, it’s problematic in terms of accountability, Garber said. “It’s a partial step because no matter what we do, I’m still only increasing my degrees by a small percentage.”

Clifford Adelman, senior research analyst with the U.S. Department of Education said that his department is in the middle of a longitudinal research project (1988-2000) that shows that many eligible students never get degrees.

“You begin to ask why people don’t have degrees,” Adelman said. What he has found is that there are many reasons: students attending multiple institutions, non-continuous enrollment or reverse transfer from a four- to a two-year college. And in many cases, “Stuff that has nothing to do with academics can get in the way of awarding a degree.” That could include a $15 library fine or a volleyball or swimming class, he said.

Adelman said the data from the study can be compiled as early as September and estimates that nationwide community colleges can increase their degree awards by 14 percent by transferring the burden of graduation eligibility off of the student. “That is not an insignificant number, and it’s something that the legislature understands,” he said.

Adelman’s study includes examining transcript evaluation for transfer students. He looks at transcripts of one student who has attended several colleges but has not received a degree. This is something community colleges often do not do because they do not have the resources to do so or because students simply have not submitted them, he said. Miramar, for example, evaluates transcripts only when students request it or apply for graduation. Garber hesitates to estimate how many students might be degree-eligible if the college had the resources to evaluate transcripts for every transfer student.

“The volume is so large; we might get 400 transcripts a day,” Garber said. “This is the kind of thing that should be handled with software.”

There are some programs that address some of these needs. “We do have the ability for institutions to run degree audits,” said Adriana Farella director of product planning for PeopleSoft Learning Solutions, an e-business application software company.

PeopleSoft and Datatel, a higher education information management company, offer some fairly sophisticated degree audit programs that will track how many requirements of a certain degree that a student has met. And they have Web-based applications that allow a student to check-in as they go along to see if one class fits a criterion of a degree or certificate program.

However, Graham Tracey, production manager of academic and student services for Datatel, said that the process of comparing every student class with every degree option, as Miramar is doing, has too many nuances to be feasible for a software program right now. “The processing time on that alone would be amazing.”

Both companies have programs that can evaluate transfer transcripts for equivalent classes. However, the programs are labor-intensive for colleges on the front end because colleges have to build databases with their classes and equivalencies with classes from other colleges.

The labor involved in creating those equivalencies has some payoff. “In some cases it’s kind of pay me now or pay me later,” Farella said. “Looking at every transcript manually can’t be any more difficult than inputting the information into a system.”

In the meantime, Miramar has hired two staff members to do the job because, as Adelman said, “I believe it is an ethical responsibility to bring the degree to the students when their work warrants it.”