Public 2-year colleges were designed to serve students coming primarily from their local communities, hence explaining their "community college" title. This study focuses on an understudied factor capable of altering the local workforce impact of community colleges while also potentially strengthening their 4-year steppingstone function:…

This article presents an instrumental case study of how community college faculty engages in academic planning in the wake of curricular policy reform, and tensions between the perspectives of faculty from 2- and 4-year institutions. Implications of these dynamics are discussed with a focus on advice for those leading curricular change projects in…

This chapter reports on a major college-wide effort to smooth students' paths as they enter the college, choose a program, and progress to a credential. Leadership, inclusiveness, and communication have been central to the success of the effort.

The acceptance of community college applied and workforce baccalaureates (AWB) degrees by university graduate level programs has not been adequately vetted by academics and policymakers. Over the past decade and a half, the primary motivation for offering community college baccalaureate degrees was to fulfill unmet needs in the local workforce and…

"Surprise" is a word and concept seldom associated with higher education policy or with one of its most demanding projects, the development of a statewide articulation and transfer program. Legislators who mandate articulation enterprises and officials who care for these behemoths present themselves as thoughtful managers who cherish…

This chapter provides an annotated bibliography of articles about the effects of transfer associate degrees and related statewide transfer and articulation policies. It also provides links to transfer degree legislation in several states.

In recent years, a convergence of several forces--increased legislative involvement in higher education, governmental and philanthropic pressure to increase postsecondary degree and certificate production, demands for a highly trained workforce, and fiscal belt-tightening at colleges and universities across America--has resulted in efforts to…

This chapter discusses the "tangled knot" of articulating associate degrees in applied fields and reviews sample programs from applied associate (A.A.S.) to baccalaureate degrees using three distinct pathways, comparing the resulting A.A.S. to baccalaureate degree pathways to similar B.A. or B.S. programs. It focuses predominantly on curricular…

For more than two decades, the vision of a statewide system of student mobility has driven Ohio's articulation and transfer initiatives, which guarantee that specific courses will be applied to degrees and certificates at public two- and four-year postsecondary institutions. This chapter outlines how Ohio developed a comprehensive, guaranteed…

Community colleges have a storied history of successfully providing pathways and access to credentials and degrees through various models of delivery and in diverse programs of study. Until recently, the highest degree offered by community colleges was the associate degree. During the past decade, major changes have occurred in the landscape of…

This article reports the reactions of twenty-seven professors now teaching in community college leadership programs who responded to the question, "What issues do you emphasize in your courses and what issues most concern your students/practitioners?" It also draws on a separate survey of forty-seven state directors and on the writings of four…

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…

In 2010, California's then-governor Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 1440, called the "Student Transfer Achievement Reform Act" (Padilla, 2010), into law. This bill mandated that the state's 112 community colleges (CCCs) develop a new type of associate degree, an "associate degree for transfer," that specifically prepares a…

The State of Florida has been challenged to keep up with the demand for baccalaureate degree production for more than half a century. Fueled first by veterans of World War II and the Korean Conflict, and later by significant and sustained population growth over many decades, Florida's postsecondary infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with…

Student success in transfer from a community college to a university is dependent on several key characteristics of any articulation and transfer system: structure, policies and processes, and the accessibility of the system design. The public institutions of higher education in Arizona have designed and implemented a transfer and articulation…