Clarify the Paths
- Detailed information on target career and transfer outcomes
Materials
The Transfer Playbook: Essential Practices for Two- and Four-Year Colleges (posted 4/5/2018)
The playbook is a practical guide to designing and implementing a key set of practices to improve transfer outcomes. It is based on the practices of six sets of community colleges and universities that together serve transfer students well. (Aspen Institute College Excellence Program and Community College Research Center)
The Transfer Playbook: Tool for Assessing Progress toward Adoption of Essential Transfer Practices for Community Colleges (posted 4/5/2018)
This tool helps community colleges assess the alignment of their transfer practices with those described in The Transfer Playbook. (Aspen Institute College Excellence Program and Community College Research Center)
Template for Measuring Your College’s Effectiveness in Serving Transfer Students (posted 4/5/2018)
This template explains how to use National Student Clearinghouse data to measure college effectiveness in serving transfer students. (Aspen Institute College Excellence Program and Community College Research Center)
Improving Labor Market Outcomes (posted 4/5/2018)
This learning module explores how college leaders can improve students’ labor market outcomes by working internally (with the campus faculty and staff) and externally (in partnership with employers). (Aspen Institute College Excellence Program)
Improving Transfer at Scale (posted 4/5/2018)
This learning module defines the transfer problem, explains how to analyze institutional transfer data, introduces strategies and practices from The Transfer Playbook, and helps participants anticipate potential roadblocks for implementation. Readings and activities focus on the president’s role in improving transfer and baccalaureate completion. (Aspen Institute College Excellence Program)
Tracking Transfer: New Measures of Institutional and State Effectiveness in Helping Community College Students Attain Bachelor’s Degrees (posted 4/5/2018)
This report helps institutional leaders and policymakers better understand current transfer outcomes and gives them metrics for benchmarking transfer performance. (Aspen Institute College Excellence Program and Community College Research Center)
Good Jobs That Pay without a BA: A State-by-State Analysis (posted 4/5/2018)
Good jobs continue to grow, but they are changing from traditional blue-collar industries to skilled-services industries. This report shows that a gain of 4 million good jobs in skilled-services industries, such as financial services and health services, more than offsets the 2.8 million good jobs lost in manufacturing. (Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce)
Top Five Growing Industries for Those without a Bachelor’s Degree (posted 4/5/2018)
In this blog post, Anthony Carnevale discusses the findings of Good Jobs That Pay without a BA. (Anthony Carnevale)
PRACTITIONER, PRESIDENT, AND PARTNER PERSPECTIVES
Kate Thirolf, Vice President for Instruction, Jackson College, Pathways College (posted 4/5/2018)
We brought together our psychology faculty alongside our university transfer coordinator and other student support reps to think about what a four-year transfer map would look like or maps, plural, would look like in psychology. So before pathways we would have connections that faculty might have with other institutions and build sort of agreements that way to say, yeah, this should transfer and that should work good for students, without really thinking about a team approach around making sure that the courses that students are taking in sequence leads exactly where they need to be. The other way that this has supported that effort is thinking about data. And again, this is where our student services team has just been so helpful to say, “We know for sure now kind of where our students have transferred most in the past. And so we can be targeted in what transfer maps make the most sense for our students.”
Jeff Rafn, President, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Pathways College (posted 4/5/2018)
Each of our programs has an advisory committee that is made up of people from the industry that hire the kinds of students that we have. We do a follow-up survey for all of our graduates at the end of the first six months to find out where they are working, what kind of jobs they have, which we then feed into our system. And then we also do an analysis every year in terms of where the job openings have been.
Pamela Welmon, Vice President, Applied Science and Technology, Indian River State College, Pathways College; Walt Posten, Welding Instructor, Industrial Education Department, Indian River State College, Pathways College (posted 4/5/2018)
(1) All of our program areas in the career and technology education programs particularly have industry members that make up our advisory committees.
(2) Twice a year, we meet with industry, and we show them our maps and the structure of the coursework to make sure that everything’s gonna fit with where the industry’s headed. They can give us feedback to make sure we stay ahead of the game, hopefully.
(3) The advisory committees review all of the curriculum, have input into the curriculum, just to assure that the curriculum is relevant to jobs that they have available for graduates. That is definitely shared regularly with our employer community.
Flossie Jackson, Director, Career and Transfer Services, Indian River State College, Pathways College (posted 4/5/2018)
With the program maps at the universities, we also have partnerships with the advisors. So once students have identified the university — that we’ve identified three universities that they’re interested in — they can actually work with our academic advisors as well as the university advisors. So they have that joint advising session. We have the universities to visit our campus monthly, and they are at all of the campuses. So students are meeting with them on a regular basis from the point they’ve completed three semesters in. Then they’re able to be assigned an advisor at the university.
In addition to the university mapping, we have our own because we have the baccalaureate program, so we have our own AA to bachelor’s degree maps that’s available for our students so they can go in and look and see, once they’ve completed their associate’s degree, what will be needed for that baccalaureate level so they have the full view from day one. Also, another thing we’ve done as far as transfer is that students are able, from our home page, to click one button, and they’re into our transfer services on our website. So we’ve made it convenient for students so they’re no longer searching to see where the transfer maps are and our transfer services.
STUDENT VOICES
(posted 9/27/2018)
What I did when I met with my advisors was we talked about what my career goals were, so what were jobs that I would like to see myself in, what were jobs that maybe I didn’t know about going into it. So like, for example, I didn’t know about diversity and inclusion as a work field, especially in higher education. So we had talked about it a little bit and as a kind of I guess an alternative for my other career goals, as a fall-back. That was something that I was kind of aiming for, so degree-wise I’m going to work towards that. They were talking to me about so HR, do you want to do supply chain and what does that really entail, so HR is going to be more of working with your employee law and things like that so is that something that interests you, entrepreneurship they have in our business program, so they asked me, “Would you open your own business?” And I said, “Yes.” But as well as possibly wanting to go finish out my four-year degree, and then telling them again what I want to do long term, like “Okay, what I recommend for you is to do the general business management, because it sounds like you could really just do all of them if we let you, if we had like somehow just a way to do all of them, you would do them. So we’re going to put you in the general business management, you’ll take a little bit of everything, then when you go to your four-year, you can pick an emphasis accordingly. So let’s say your career path changes, you kind of wanted to do HR, but you like some of the stuff that goes on in supply chain management, instead of putting you in one of the other and kind of making you pick, since it is a two-year school, and you do plan to go to a four-year school, how about if we just do general and you can pick your emphasis later.” And then because I ended up switching up things a little bit and trying to get into the diversity field, they met with me again and they’re like, “We’re going to keep you in general, but when you go to your four-year, you should pick HR because that’s usually an HR position within a company or a college. That’s where you would find your diversity team. So stick with HR, you’ll learn a lot, also you’ll learn about a lot of the laws and stuff like that,” which is a big part of diversity and inclusion, as well as they kind of set me up for, they talked about my master’s, they kind of really take into consideration what my long-term goals are and not just what I’m doing here. So that’s kind of how they help you pick it.
(posted 9/27/2018)
One of the nice things is that our school partners with a lot of the universities in the state to make sure that when you transfer — you do a two plus two program, or something similar. That every course that you take towards that, every gen ed, and all the basic course material before you go to the bachelor’s, they try to make sure that every credit that you take transfers fully for that particular program.
(posted 9/27/2018)
The student navigator makes it really easy for you to find the classes that you need to be in to either transfer or to just get further in your degree.
(posted 9/27/2018)
The school is really helpful. Actually, I came in from high school, right outta high school, and I thought I was gonna go into the law enforcement. I thought that was my career because I’ve always been wanting to help people, but once I met with one of the career advisors here, my whole career path changed a lot. I am a DACA recipient, which means that I couldn’t join the law enforcement program. So it was a long process because they had to help me guide, like what are the other alternatives for helping people? So I guess my career path changed a lot, and it was really nice that this school has a lot of different programs that are within helping people, so that kinda gave me an idea of where to go and what I wanted to do. I actually switched my program twice in this college. So I started off with the human services, but then, I took one semester of that, and I realized that it wasn’t quite what I wanted to do. She guided me, and she told me, “You know what? I see a lotta leadership in you, and I feel like that’s kinda what you really wanna do. You’re a leader, but you also wanna help people,” so that’s what made me be in the leadership development.
COLLEGE EXAMPLES
Hawai'i Industry Sectors Website (posted 4/5/2018)
The University of Hawai’i System developed this website that links detailed career information — employment requirements, availability of positions, and median pay for those positions — with academic programs at the system’s postsecondary institutions. (University of Hawai’i System)