Action Steps for Advancing Transfer Student Success

Book excerpt: The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) launched Quality Collaboratives (QC): Assessing and Reporting Degree Qualifications Profile Competencies in the Context of Transfer in 2011 as a three-year project that engaged educational, assessment, and policy leaders in student learning outcomes assessment and transfer pathways. With funding from Lumina Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the QC project was organized through AAC&U's current signature initiative, Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP), which champions a twenty-first-century liberal education for all college students. During the project, two- and four-year transfer partner institutions within nine states--each already engaged, prior to the start of the project, in learning outcomes assessment work--beta tested different ways to assess proficiencies articulated in Lumina Foundation's Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP). The DQP, now in its second version, benchmarks "what degree recipients should know and be able to do" at the associate's, bachelor's, and master's degree levels, and offers scaffolded learning expectations to guide paths between and among transfer partners. This publication features campus work from twenty institutions involved in QC--campuses with collaborative relationships that worked together as two- and four-year "QC dyads." The ten participating campus dyads hailed from California, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Utah, Wisconsin, and Virginia (two other states--North Dakota and Oregon--participated in the project at the state system level). This publication is anchored by a flowchart that reflects lessons learned from the campus-based work in which the QC dyads engaged. The flowchart is meant to serve as a guide for campus practitioners seeking to initiate transfer-based change efforts on their campuses. Key action steps taken by the various QC campus partners to implement assessment in the transfer context. Each action step (eleven in total) correlates with a case study presented herein. Written by QC dyad leaders, who are listed as contacts in this publication, these case studies represent campus change efforts that unfolded over the course of the three-year project.