Generously Supported by the Teagle Foundation

President of North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities Hope Williams and former president of the North Carolina Community College System Thomas Stith sign the articulation agreement in psychology and sociology in April 2021.

Two-year colleges are a gateway to higher education. Serving their local communities and offering flexible learning opportunities at low to no cost, these institutions draw a highly diverse student body. While many of these students aspire to transfer to a four-year institution and earn a baccalaureate degree, a large number struggle to achieve this goal. The complex transfer process places barriers in students’ paths at both the sending institutions (community colleges) and the receiving institutions (four-year colleges and universities), so the promise of transfer is seldom fulfilled.

The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities (NCICU) have long aimed to repair this broken promise. Serving independent, predominantly nondoctoral colleges and universities, our two organizations see great mutual benefit in supporting community college transfer into our institutions to increase enrollments, support local communities, and provide students with a transformative liberal arts education that culminates in a timely baccalaureate degree. With generous funding from the Teagle Foundation, CIC and NCICU set out in 2019 to increase transparency in the transfer process and build a framework for student support, beginning with enrollment at a community college through graduation from a four-year institution, with a focus on two degree pathways in sociology and psychology.

The Independent Transfer Pathways in North Carolina Project served as a catalyst in forging a culture of cooperation between community colleges and independent colleges and universities in North Carolina by creating a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between the two systems. The project focused on developing discipline-specific articulation agreements, exploring financial aid options, and identifying best practices for advising. By bringing together senior leaders, deans, faculty, and staff from many different departments and institutions, this innovative partnership project provided opportunities to enhance efforts to build new relationships and remove obstacles that reduce historical effectiveness with the transfer student population. The partner campuses worked together to create a “culture of transfer” to ensure that students receive the most comprehensive information and are carefully advised from their first year at a two-year college until graduation with a bachelor’s degree and to provide transfer students additional opportunities to seamlessly pursue higher education at a small to mid-sized independent college or university.

For many undergraduate students, the path to a baccalaureate degree begins at a community college. Community college students account for nearly 40 percent of all U.S. undergraduates and 35 percent of first-time first-year students1 Despite their best efforts, many of these students will not achieve this goal; among entering, degree-seeking community college students, only 31 percent will transfer to a four-year institution and fewer than 15 percent will complete a bachelor’s degree.2 The failed promise of community college transfer is particularly of concern for students from underrepresented groups in higher education. In 2020, over half (52 percent) of all Native American undergraduate students and nearly half of all Hispanic students (48 percent) were enrolled at community colleges. Similarly, 39 percent of Black or African American undergraduates were community college students. However, studies have shown that white community college students are twice as likely to transfer as Black or Hispanic students.3

NCICU’s independent colleges have a history since the 1960s of collaborating with NCCCS and local community colleges to strengthen transfer access to the liberal arts and to provide transfer programs in locations across the state. In the mid-1990s, NCICU signed a statewide articulation agreement with NCCCS that commits its 30 signatory institutions to accept the general education credits completed by students from any of the 58 community colleges in the state as fulfilling their own general education requirements.

The Independent Transfer Pathways in North Carolina Project between NCICU, NCCCS, and CIC builds on that first step toward better alignment by launching statewide transfer pathways in sociology and psychology, two high-enrollment liberal arts disciplines, that enable transfer students to enter independent colleges with junior status.

Transfer is an important part of the fabric of North Carolina’s higher education system and attainment goal. In 2019, the state of North Carolina adopted one of the most ambitious goals in the nation to close the educational attainment gap in the state—to ensure that two million North Carolinians aged 25–44 have an industry-valued credential or postsecondary degree by 2030.

Faculty members and administrators at participating institutions identified several specific near-term outcomes that will result in long-term benefits to students and faculty at individual campuses and across their systems. At the heart of the project was the creation of two new transfer pathways in psychology and sociology, which will continue to serve students in years to come. However, these agreements are only a small part of the project’s achievements to create a “culture of transfer” that will continue to develop and support students from enrollment in a community college to graduation from an independent four-year college or university. Institutions enriched their advising frameworks to provide more tailored support for transfer students and more resources to shed light on the transfer process, while also creating more dedicated financial aid support for this group of students. They also strengthened relationships both with their partner institutions and with peers on their own campuses, creating opportunities for community college students to engage with the four-year experience before transfer. Through these outcomes, institutions created a foundation to strengthen transfer across their entire institutions as well as paving the way to more and more transfer agreements between community colleges and four-year institutions.