[image credit: National Survey of Student Engagement]

Transcription

1 Thanks for inviting me. In the CSU I work on student engagement, especially as it relates to graduation rates, transfer and articulation, high-impact practices, and STEM. Those different parts of my work are often at odds, as the structures that facilitate transfer don t always engage students or drive completion. In a few minutes I ll explain what I mean and what we re doing about it in the CSU, but first let s look at the regulatory and procedural context around transfer and articulation. 1 [image credit: National Survey of Student Engagement] At the national level, policy is typically indirect, following eligibility for federal financial aid. The aid follows the student, but only into institutions that qualify. That s determined by the [click] regional accreditors, and one condition of participating in that system and qualifying for the student vouchers that follow it is [click] recognizing academic credit from other participating institutions. Now, there s recognition and then there s recognition. The simplest kind of course articulation is [click] oneto-one, that is, your first-year physics course counts the same as mine. But in practice, a significant number of courses don t have a clear counterpart on both the sending and receiving side, so we also organize transfer credit around [click] degree requirements, easiest to discuss in three categories. Some courses are required for your [click] major, others are [click] required no matter which major you choose, and the rest may just [click] interest you, counting toward your overall total but nothing else. Of these three kinds of credit, elective is the easiest for a transfer student to get, and the least desirable. If you come in with too much of it, then you may use up all your financial eligibility before you earn a degree. This concern about making sure courses count beyond the mere elective category required by accreditors and the feds influences a lot of transfer policy at the -- 2

2 -- state level. Some state support follows students, like federal money, but some also goes straight to institutions like mine, as reimbursement for the cost of instruction. So state legislators want to make sure we aren t making students take unnecessary or duplicative courses. This can put them at odds with faculty at the receiving institutions, who have a certain pride of authorship in what they teach, and claim more expertise to decide what s redundant and what isn t. Mediating that [click] tension is one job of system offices like mine. It s also at the heart of our efforts to improve STEM degree production, since most students transfer. We want them to get our very best stuff, but we have to be careful how we require it. A few favorite remedies of [click] states: they like [click] common course numbering, which can take judgment calls about applicability and redundancy out of the hands of receiving institutions. In the same way, [click] credit for things like Advanced Placement tests and the College Level Examination Program ( CLEP ) can look attractive, as can other kinds of [click] prior learning assessment, for example for employment in the case of returning adult students. All of these can save money, and they can all rankle faculty. Personally I think they re a mixed blessing. It s always good to give credit where it s due the students stuck taking courses about things they already know are bored, boring, wasting tax money, and likelier to drop out. The ones who get transfer credit beyond the electives toward actual degree requirements are likelier to take advanced courses in the same subject, do well in them, and then graduate. You can see studies on this at the web site of the College Board. But here s the downside. If you think about that list, the operating assumption is that everything is delivered via traditional courses, interchangeably, and that learning happens three credit hours at a time. This is truest in the world of general education and lower-division major preparation, where you see the most transfer credit. To explain this I need to take you back about forty years ago. A key feature of California s GE articulation is that it authorizes community colleges to [click] certify a student as having completed GE before transfer. After that, the CSU can t make the student take any further GE in the lower division. We pull the trick off by [click] dividing GE into familiar areas of course content and skills, and assigning an alphanumeric code to each. Any community college student can go on-line to a web site called [click] ASSIST, look up the [click] college, and then see [click] how its courses count toward those same GE areas. The system is kind of a marvel, and the envy of many other states. This has been our answer to common course numbering, giving us many of the advantages while preserving some flexibility. I think just as impressive as its transparency is the way a certification can be -- 4

3 -- assembled, from a variety of sources. Some upper-division GE, after transfer, is [click] taught at the institution granting the degree. Before that, the [click] sending institution cobbles together 39 units of lower-division GE across these areas, that because [click] of a practice called pass-along can include many other [click] sources of prior learning. This is a win for access and portability, especially for the students we most need to reach those who can t clear the decks for four whole years of their lives, but instead need to fit us into the cracks between family, jobs, and other commitments. But it also contributes to the sense of alienation and disconnectedness that are killing student persistence, especially in the first two years, and especially in STEM. This isn t just me talking. I m going to guess most of you are familiar with the President s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, or PCAST. In this report from a couple of years ago, they looked at [click] declines in associate and bachelor s degree production in STEM, and figured the U.S. is falling short by about a [click] million degrees. Now in light of what I ve been saying about transfer and articulation, and counting by courses, think about how this report -- 6

4 begins. [Click three times, let people read.] Well of course they re ineffective and uninspiring. We ve effectively told our institutions to make everything interchangeable, offering a least-common-denominator education until the junior year. You know, to whoever s left by then. So the challenge we face is to make things more engaging, in the first two years, without sacrificing access, affordability, and the subject of this session portability. This is about more than working within regulatory constraints. We want our degrees to work for transfer students. The problem is that they aren t doing it, because people quit in the first two years. And reductive articulation policies make reform harder, not easier. How do we get out of this bind? By focusing on how students really learn. Much of what they learn comes from outside of the classroom, on their own. Or [click] in their interactions with the community in service learning experiences, or [click] from each other, via peer mentoring, or in [click] internships, or first-year experiences and learning communities, by collaborating with faculty on their [click] research. These are the settings the AAC&U calls [click] high-impact practices, and you have probably heard of these. In these activities, the only way a student gets through is by teamwork, by pulling toward a shared goal, by solving problems on the fly. These are what prepare students for their own lives as adults, and the students know it. You put them into this kind of education, and the grad rates rise, and the gaps shrink. No kidding. This is from -- 8

5 -- research at CSUN, looking at six-year graduation rates. For our Northridge campus the key ethnic distinction is between Latino and not, so we ll [click] look at that. The rates are [click] not good, with a 17-point gap. What their IR director did from there is interesting. Controlling for other predictors of student success, like eligibility for financial aid, parents educational attainment, and high school academic records, she looked at the change in graduation rates for those who reported on the NSSE that they d participated in one high-impact practice. And what she found is that [click] the rates went up, noticeably. The gap is even starting to close, to 14 points. Here s what she found when students reported participating in [click] two. For one students that might be a learning community and an internship; for another it might be undergraduate research and firstyear experience. And the gap is down to three points. We re corroborating her research now on other campuses around the CSU, but so far it s holding up, and I have to say, that s looking more to me like where we want to work. The challenge, as we saw, is getting the good stuff to work in a context of high student mobility, getting it into the transfer curriculum. For that, I work with a committee that several years ago rewrote our policy document on GE and transfer. Most of it was a reordering of existing material, but for the first time it added something to premises, the [click] LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes of the AAC&U. Here s how the Executive Order [click] paraphrases them. What we want is for sending institutions to stop thinking about individual, modular courses, and instead focus their incoming students on this, the learning that matters. Get them there however you want. Today that same committee s 10

6 -- web page lists [click] the pilot projects it s authorizing, to focus transfer curriculum on outcomes and embed high-impact practices. Our standout case is at [click] Santa Barbara City College, and you can read more here. I d like you to think for a moment about what such a pilot would look like for the STEM majors when they first come in, the ones we know are at risk, whether they start at a community college or one of our universities. We know already, today, what works. It s experiences that [click] hook students before fall of the freshman year, acting as both a welcome mat and a [click] bridge to college life, where they can first see themselves as engineers, scholars, scientists. It s -- 12

7 -- structures that push the summer immersion through the entire freshman year, continuing to build a community around engaged learning and [click] intellectual inquiry. And it s a new kind of intro course, that gets people out of their chairs and puts them straight into the fun of figuring stuff out together. We can do this. We ve [click] been doing this. But I d like you to notice a couple of things about this list of what works. First, this is the stuff that we cut when budgets get lean. We believe they work, but we re don t have enough evidence to persuade a legislator, or a CFO. And second, they don t count for transfer. To fix this, to build these practices into the machinery as part of a new status quo, we need better data like the Northridge study, showing educational impact and cost effectiveness. Then we can require these for degrees, and by extension, for transfer. The most promising tool in the CSU for doing that is our -- 14

8 -- Student Success Dashboard. Still in prototype, it will eventually be available on the Graduation Initiative web site on your handout. It displays persistence data from around the CSU system, disaggregated by student academic program and demographics, so we can see where the successes and problems are. And critically, it will display information about these interventions, and give decision makers a [click] what-if tool to predict the impact of supporting or cutting back any of these [click] programs. We think we re on the right track to consolidate and systematize decades of grass-roots wisdom about student learning and persistence in STEM. Once we do so, we ll be in a better position to build that into degree requirements, [click] institutional spending and faculty work, and the brass ring [click] articulation and transfer, where the same regulatory and business structures we have in place today can be harnessed for the -- 16

9 -- benefit of all our students. Thank you for your attention, and please [click] stay in touch. 17