HD11 - The Continuum of Education
Executive Summary: In response to House Joint Resolution No. 211 (Delegate Cooper), Appropriations Act Item 151, and House Joint Resolution No. 142 (Delegate Harris), the Council of Higher Education has prepared a combined report on the obstacles that students encounter as they move from high school through college and what colleges and universities might do to facilitate that movement. Part I Part I of the report responds to House Joint Resolution No. 211, which asks the Council to study the transition between high school and college. Virginia has a commitment to make that transition as smooth as possible. The major programs that do this are the "tech prep" initiatives, just now being developed, and various programs in which students receive both high school and college credit for courses offered by high schools or colleges: Advanced Placement (AP), the VCCS Dual-Enrollment Program, the International Baccalaureate (IB), and dual-credit courses offered by four-year institutions. After describing and comparing the various dual-credit options, the report makes the following recommendations: Recommendations • As many as possible of the various forms of college-credit work should be made available to all high-school students in Virginia. • Colleges and universities that require a grade higher than three on any AP examination should reexamine that requirement. • Institutions that do not grant college credit for the successful completion of IB coursework or the IB diploma should reconsider that policy. • Virginia's community colleges should reexamine the admissions requirements and faculty credential requirements and evaluation processes in their Dual-Enrollment programs to ensure that they correspond to the VCCS guidelines. • Two- and four-year institutions offering dual-credit courses to high-school students should assess the learning of those students to ensure that it is equivalent to that of matriculated students. Those results should be reported separately in each institution's biennial assessment report. The VCCS should assess the effectiveness of the program system wide. Two- and four-year colleges should cooperate in offering college credit courses to high-school students when both are interested in doing so in the same area, with the community colleges as the primary but not necessarily the sale provider and overall coordinator of the higher-education effort. Part II Appropriations Act Item 151 asks the Council to examine the feasibility of a three-year college degree. The Council concludes that it is now possible for a student to complete virtually any 120-credit college degree program in three years by taking advantage of the programs described in Part I that grant both high-school and college credits for courses taken in high school. Part III House Joint Resolution No. 142 addresses the barriers to graduation that college students might encounter. The report describes the elements of student background that can slow students down or stop them altogether, choices that they often make, and non-academic pressures on them, as well as the role of decreasing institutional resources in reducing the capacities of colleges and universities to respond to student need. It then makes the following recommendations to public institutions of higher education in Virginia: Recommendations • All institutions that have not done so should survey students who have stopped or dropped out to determine if they have attained their goals and, if not, what has prevented them from doing so. • All institutions that have not done so should determine which students are most at risk for dropping out on their campuses and provide support services, including on-going academic advising, to them. • Four-year institutions that have not already done so should develop admissions requirements that ensure that students who matriculate are capable of doing college-level work. Successful completion of the Advanced Studies diploma, a 23-unit program, or its equivalent should be the basic standard for admission, possibly augmented by standards for grade-point average and Scholastic Aptitude Test scores that have been validated as predicting success at each institution. • Most remediation should be done in the community colleges. Two- and four-year colleges in the same area can develop policies whereby they jointly admit students who, once they have successfully completed any necessary remediation at the two-year college, would then be able to enter the four-year institution. Students whose skill levels are so. low as to make it very unlikely that they have the ability to benefit from a college education should not be admitted even by two-year institutions. • Institutions should review their curricula in general education and the majors in order to determine whether all requirements are designed to help students reach the learning goals established by the faculty. Where they do, top priority should be given to offering sufficient numbers of those courses. Full-time faculty should take major responsibility for offering courses that introduce students to the problems and methods of inquiry of their disciplines. • Four-year institutions are encouraged to review all baccalaureate programs that require more than 120 student credit hours for graduation to determine whether the extra hours are needed to accomplish the learning objectives of the program. Programs that do not have strong justification for the extra hours should not continue to require them. Two-year institutions should do a similar review of associate degrees that exceed 60 hours. When a program exceeds the 120- or 60-credit limit, the institution should publish in its catalogue the expected time it will take a full-time student to earn the degree and why the extra time is educationally necessary. • Institutions should survey students to determine whether course scheduling is a significant problem and adjust their offerings if necessary. • Institutions should expand their summer offerings, until the summer is viewed by students and faculty as a third term. • Institutions should use technology to lend flexibility to the curriculum, as well as acknowledge in their faculty evaluation and reward systems the contributions of faculty who develop and use such technology. • In redefining the faculty reward structures, institutions should explicitly identify academic advising as a faculty responsibility and evaluate and reward faculty on the quantity and quality of their advising activities. • All four-year institutions should implement the approved transfer policy and continue to develop cooperative arrangements with community colleges to ease the difficulties of transfer. |
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