Category: Interstate Passport Briefing

Meet Beverly Meinzer is an instructor at the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville (UACCB). Since 2003, her main responsibilities have included teaching courses in chemistry and physical science, as well as serving as a faculty advisor to about 70 students. In addition, she is a member of Curriculum Committee and was committee chair for the past five years. Meinzer led the campus effort to become a member of the Interstate Passport Network by convening faculty to review and identify congruence with the Passport Learning Outcomes and to develop UACCB’s Passport Block. Since UACCB joined the Network in the Spring of 2017, Meinzer has served as the UACCB Institutional Liaison. In that capacity, she has identified the core members of the UACCB institutional team who have been key in developing internal processes at UACCB to ensure the successful implementation of Interstate Passport on their campus.  

Meinzer is also a member of Interstate Passport’s Institutional Liaison Advisory Committee which focuses on the implementation of Interstate Passport at the institutional level and provides recommendations to the Passport Review Board. Meinzer has further supported Interstate Passport by recently co-presenting Interstate Passport: An Outcomes-Based Framework for General Education Transfer at the League for Innovation’s Community College Innovations Conference. Meinzer says that “Interstate Passport is a fantastic way for students to keep the credits they’ve worked so hard to earn even when life takes them miles from their college starting point. Incoming Passport students can know that their credits will be accepted. This takes the “guess work” out of schedule making. Interstate Passport is one more way that UACCB adheres to its mission of being community centered and student focused.”  

by Jane Sherman, Passport State Coordinator

Interstate Passport is specifically designed to save students time and money and to encourage them to transfer to complete a bachelor’s degree by certifying that they have achieved transfer-ready learning.

This combination of characteristics – economy and encouragement – is the core of Interstate Passport and embodies its entire purpose.  And while economy and encouragement are important to all students, they can be especially critical for the success of low-income and first-generation students, who are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and Native American.

The Community College Research Center at Columbia University highlights the importance of making transfer more effective for underserved groups with following statistics:

“An analysis of Education Longitudinal Study (ELS: 2002-06) data shows that 44 percent of low-income students (those with family incomes of less than $25,000 per year) attend community colleges as their first college after high school, compared with only 15 percent of high-income students. Similarly, 38 percent of students whose parents did not graduate from college choose community colleges as their first institution, compared with 20 percent of students whose parents graduated from college.

Among college students who first enrolled in fall 2010, 48.5 percent of Black students and 50.8 percent of Hispanic students started at a two-year public college, compared with 35.6 percent of White students and 37.8 percent of Asian students (Shapiro et al., 2017).”

“In fall 2014, 56 percent of Hispanic undergraduates were enrolled at community colleges, while 44 percent of Black students and 39 percent of White students were at community colleges. (College Board, Trends in Community Colleges, 2016).”

“Just under 15 percent of students who started at community colleges in 2011 completed a degree at a four-year institution within six years. More than half . . .degree earners (52 percent) did not obtain a two-year degree before transferring (Shapiro et al., 2017). Asian and White students . . . earned bachelor’s degrees at higher rates than the overall average (24.2 percent and 20 percent respectively). Hispanic (12.7 percent) and Black students (8.6 percent) earned bachelor’s degrees at rates lower than the average (Shapiro et al., 2017).”

Not only does participation in the Interstate Passport Network assist students to transfer and progress toward a degree, but the Interstate Passport’s tracking function with the National Student Clearinghouse provides important data from the receiving institution back to the sending institution about the progress of its students after transfer. 

For at least two terms after transfer, the sending institution learns about the enrollment status and GPA of all Passport students it has sent to each receiving institution by gender, age, race-ethnicity, low income, veteran, first-generation, and pre-transfer credits and GPA.  Such extensive information, which in most cases will not be available elsewhere, can be invaluable in equity improvement efforts.

Interstate Passport is working to make a significant contribution to higher education’s equity agenda by scaling up the number of participating institutions both within states and across state lines.  Its goals are that all students will have access to the Passport benefits of economy and encouragement and that institutional equity efforts will benefit from the feedback data it provides.

The Interstate Passport Review Board will hold its annual meeting in Boulder, Colorado, January 31, 2019 – February 1, 2019. The Board consists of the Passport State Facilitator from each member state — Arkansas, California, Idaho, Hawaii, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming — as well as transfer, learning outcomes, institutional research, evaluation, and state policy experts.

Topics for presentations include:  the analysis of the data on the 2017-2018 Passports awarded; the findings from project research and evaluation being conducted by the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University; a review of marketing and communications efforts by Education Marketing Group; and a critique of the Annual Report AY 2017-18. 

The Board is co-chaired by Peter Quigley, associate vice president, academic affairs at the University of Hawaii System, and Paul Turman, system vice president for academic affairs at the South Dakota Board of Regents.

Kristi Swainston is a Programmer Analyst for the Utah State University Registrar’s Office. Her main responsibilities in her position include querying student information from the Banner database and building reports from this information. In addition, Swainston is one of the multitude of personnel behind the scenes at member institutions who are ensuring Interstate Passport is working by compiling and submitting data to the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC). She submits data for three Interstate Passport services provided by NSC including Passport Completion, PassportVerify and Academic Progress Tracking. In turn, NSC provides reports back to Network members identifying students who have earned Passports, on the number of Passports awarded by institutions, and the academic progress of students for two terms following transfer within the Network. Swainston is also a member of Interstate Passport’s Registrar and Institutional Researcher Advisory Committee which focuses on the technical aspects of data submission and provides recommendations to the Passport Review Board. Swainston has recently provided technical support to colleagues in the Network with preparing their student information systems for data submission to NSC and she co-presented an Interstate Passport webinar: Using Banner to Collect and Submit Interstate Passport Student Datawhich has been very useful for current and potential member institutions.

By Roland Squire, WICHE Consultant Registrar Expert

Reverse Transfer using the technology provided by the National Student Clearinghouse (https://reversetransfer.org/) allows students who transfer without earning an Associate degree to be awarded that degree after transfer to a four-year institution. Receiving that credential may encourage the student to continue on to complete a Bachelor’s degree or to gain better employment if required to stop-out for a time.

More than half of all students who move from a two-year institution to a four-year institution do so prior to achieving an Associate degree. One reason that students transfer “early” is the need to take specific courses for a chosen major during the first two years. Other students transfer as soon as they have acquired the resources to do so, or when they have been admitted to their chosen institution or degree program. Some students do not achieve an Associate degree before transfer because they have avoided specific general education requirements – often math or science – and these students are also less likely than others to reach the Baccalaureate. Whatever the reasons for not completing the AA degree, the two-year institution is a great place to complete the lower-division general education requirements before transferring.

Interstate Passport recognizes the work done by students who complete their lower-division general education requirements. Once those requirements are met, the participating institution awards a Passport and reports that information to the National Student Clearinghouse, so that record can be verified in the same way that degrees are verified through NSC’s DegreeVerify service. That Passport is then recognized by all institutions participating in the Interstate Passport Network. When a student transfers with the Passport, the receiving institution recognizes that Passport and its degree audit system shows all lower-division general education requirements as met. (http://interstatepassport.wiche.testing.brossgroup.com/)

Two initiatives working together. The reverse transfer process can recognize which students have not yet been awarded an Associate degree and when those students have achieved enough credits to earn that degree. The four-year institution can then let the two-year institution know who these students are. The two-year institution then must articulate the courses and review the degree audit to determine if and when the students are eligible candidates for the degree.

But knowing that a student has the Interstate Passport, the two-year Network member institution knows that its general education requirements have been met and it need only focus on whether the student has the required number of credits (plus any other graduation requirements – e.g., some two-year institutions require a health/wellness course or a community service activity for graduation.)

The bottom line is that these two initiatives can help transfer students and can also simplify the work by institutions to identify eligible Associate degree candidates.

This past month Interstate Passport had a strong presence at the National Association of Veteran Program Administrators (NAVPA) Annual Conference held in Orlando, FL. During the week-long conference, staff manned the Interstate Passport table and was able to meet with conference attendees, explain the benefits of students earning a Passport, and the requirements for membership in the Interstate Passport Network.  Many conference attendees saw the value of how earning a Passport could benefit the highly mobile student population of active military, veterans, and their families. In addition, Interstate Passport military and veteran affairs representatives, Tony Flores, Utah State University, Charlie Chandler, Weber State University, and Steven Roberts, Dixie State University were all in attendance at the NAVPA Conference. Both Flores and Chandler serve on the NAVPA Executive Board as Region IV Representatives and were able to speak directly to colleagues in their breakout meetings and at various sessions about Interstate Passport.