Content area
Full Text
A key: giving students confidence they can use their credits and move on to bachelor's degrees
CHARLOTTE DICKERSON enrolled at Miami-Dade Community College in 1994 intending only to study for an associate's degree. She knew it would help her gain a promotion to a supervisor's position and a $3-an-hour raise at the community-action organization where she worked in Miami Beach.
A year and a half later, she left Miami, her home of 15 years, and headed to Massachusetts to pursue an undergraduate degree at Smith College.
She is now finishing her second of three years at Smith and hopes to move on to a graduate program in law or public policy after winning her bachelor's.
Ms. Dickerson's initiative-and that of a handful of other Miami-Dade graduates who in the last four years have ventured north to Smith-has led both colleges to consider ways to smooth the road. They have signed a formal "articulation" agreement that should eliminate some of the guesswork when Miami-Dade students try to determine which of their credits will be accepted by the elite, four-year, women's institution. (Articulation agreements specify the community-college courses for which a four-year college will grant transfer credit.)
Such agreements are common among community colleges and public, four-year institutions in their states. But now some community colleges are setting up partnerships with private institutions and, in a few cases, are looking beyond state lines.
VISITING CLASSES
Miami-Dade is only the second community college with which Smith has established an articulation agreement. The first was with Santa Monica College in 1993. Officials at Santa Monica contacted Smith after noticing that more and more students were transferring there.
"Looking over our records, we realized that something was going on that neither of us was aware of," says Brenda Johnson, assistant dean of transfer at Santa Monica.
The community college invited officials from Smith to visit classes and meet with administrators to determine whether the Massachusetts college could accept blocks of credit from students transferring from Santa Monica. The visitors were impressed with the academic programs at Santa Monica, says B. Ann Wright, Smith's dean of enrollment management, and also saw...