Transfer Virginia (Part 2)

In this episode we continue the conversation about Transfer Virginia and what it hoped for the future.  

Host:

Loida González Utley
Director of Recruitment and Enrollment Services
Texas A&M University- Central Texas
loida.gonzalez@tamuct.edu

Guests:

Dr. Micol Hutchinson
Interim Vice Chancellor for Policy and Instructional Support Services
Virginia’s Community College System

Patricia Parker
Former Director of Transfer Virginia
Principal of P.M. Parker Consulting, LLC

Transfer Virgnia: https://www.transfervirginia.org/

FMI: www.aacrao.org

Email Transfer Tea at transfertea@aacaro.org

Transcript

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Hi, you are listening to Transfer T A podcast for the Acro community sponsored by ACRO, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and admissions officers. I am your host, Loya and get ready for part two of Transfer, Virginia. Hello, transfer T listeners. Welcome back. Um We had so much fun and unfinished business um in our recent conversation about transfer Virginia that we just absolutely had to have a second episode. And so with me again, is Patricia Parker, former Director of Transfer Virginia. Um who now is the principal of PM Parker, consulting LLC and Doctor Nicole Hutchinson, interim assistant Vice Chancellor for policy and instructional support. Ladies. Thank you all again for coming back. You must have had a great first experience. Yeah, it was awesome. I'm glad to be back. I'm glad to be here and I definitely did and our conversation got really, really big that we just had to do a second part and finish off where, where um finish off what we started and the conversations that, that we had began just a little bit of a recap. We talked about um what transfer Virginia was and how it came to be and we hope that in this second part, we can talk about what it is now what it means to the different um transfer populations and maybe forward thinking what it could mean for um transferring credit mobility in the future. That's another big topic. Um So let's get started. What is transfer Virginia? Now, what does it look like? You started with a, a big question there? Um So transfer Virginia is all of the things that I think we touched on in the previous episode. Um But just to recap, we've worked through transfer Virginia on creating what we call common curricula in different disciplines. So that means that I think we could think of them as majors on the community college side or prema pathways on the community college side. So that a student who is studying, say business will follow the same curriculum no matter which community college in Virginia they're studying at and that curriculum that they follow will lead to a two plus two pathway to a Bachelor's degree at all of our public and most of our private four year colleges. So that's one part of transfer Virginia is those common curricula. Another part is the transfer guides and the transfer guides are um the document that shows students that pathway through the common curriculum to the bachelor's degree, that two plus two pathway. Um We've done those common curricula and developed transfer guides uh in 27 different disciplines. Now, we have two that are still in process, maybe three. Our final number is likely to be 30. Um, so those are two of the big parts of transfer. Virginia that were started, um, with Patricia who, who started with four of the, the real biggies. She started with engineering, computer science, business and education. Um, I don't think we've done any major as big as any of those majors since, but we've certainly increased the number of majors um tied with those elements. Those common curricula and transfer guides. We've made sure that the courses that are in our curricula are um consistent across all of our community colleges so that the four year colleges know that they will transfer the same, that students um hit on the same learning outcomes, the same topics no matter where they took those courses. Um part of transfer, Virginia from the start was also developing our general education packages. The 16 credit, we call it a passport and the 31 to 32 credit, we call it a uniform certificate of general studies, which is a mouthful. Um But the important part about those two things are that, that when students complete the passport, the 16 credit package or the uniform certificate of general studies, the 31 to 32 credit package, those um courses, those credits transfer to all of our public and most of our private four year institutions and the courses don't just transfer, but they transfer and fulfill general education requirements. Um So those are some of the biggest elements of transfer. Virginia. I would say that when we talk about where we started and where we've gotten to all of those pieces were um in place or in, in planning from the very start. And so what's happened since then is we've just gotten broader and deeper and brought in more institutions, more majors, more pathways. Um And uh with the same, um the same purposes in mind, always to provide these two plus two or 60 ish credits plus 60 ish credits pathways to a bachelor's degree. Um I have some things I would add to that, but I want to pause and check with Patricia because that was a lot and see if there's anything you would add to that Patricia. Well, two other things I'd add and then I hope you're gonna jump into the, the other side of things that, that normally you do jump into. But um the other thing that I'm excited about is, and I mentioned last time we really tried to make this all about being student friendly language, student friendly tools and resources. So another thing that happened uh as part of the transfer Virginia structure was the creation of statewide uh transfer agreement templates. So when a student looks at a transfer agreement to one university or another, they are set up exactly the same way so they can look at the different agreements and, and there's a lot of work put into those to make sure they are not legalese, we're not speaking legalese that we're speaking student language. So I'm excited about those templates. I think it made it easier for advisor also because they know right where to look when they're, they're trying to figure out the different requirements. And the other big success that we had structurally was the creation of the transfer Virginia portal uh which creates that complete warehouse of everything. Transfer and gives the students a transparent accessible, consistent look at all of their options. Uh but all of that is very structural and so queuing up MC Cole to maybe talk about how then transfer Virginia was able to morph or develop to, to go beyond the structural, those structural pieces had to be in place to do anything else. And all of the things just to reiterate. One thing that Patricia said, all of the things that were created and are being created through transfer Virginia, the common curricula, the transfer guides, the agreements, the courses, those all live on the portal um in an accessible way accessible to students, accessible to um advisors, high school counselors, families, uh anybody who would be seeking information about transfer, this would be the place to go. Um And we want to make sure I think Patricia mentioned this in our previous conversation, but I'd like to say it again because it's so important. Um There there are mhm the portal and everything, the portal, all things transfer. Virginia help address an information equity gap. That is, yeah, that I would say has been rampant, not unique to Virginia. Um but students living in certain parts of the state, um attending certain high schools coming from um less information um coming from, from backgrounds, whether it's because they're first generation college students or they're in poorer rural or urban school districts. Um, understaffed schools, students have not had equal access to information about transfer about community college options, even about four year college options. Um And most of the pathways through the community colleges that students would have been informed of, um, were very local, very regional. So if you were in this part of the state and you were a respective transfer student or you were a student who was going to go to the community college and then transfer to a four year school. The assumption was always that you would stay locally. I think it's an unspoken assumption. And I think it's a really unfair assumption and often I should say often the local, the local community college going to the local four year school is a great path for a student. There's nothing, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that path, but it's not the right path for every student. And when we think about students who are not transfer students, but our students who are going to go to a four year college right out of high school those students are inundated with information in high school, especially if they're good students. You know, they, or they performed well on the SAT. They're getting information, they're getting, um, financial aid opportunities, scholarship promises, explanations of why they should apply to this college. Sometimes very clear and easy uh, instructions on how to apply to a college. They're getting a lot of choices. But once a student gets to a community college, often they need to find those opportunities themselves. And um so there's students who already have more access to information, get more access to more information. And the portal helps students have access to all of this information wherever they are in whatever schools they're in. So that there are so many different ways and I haven't done it justice here to how transfer Virginia and the portal helps address some of these, some of these equity gaps. We cannot address all of the equity gaps through transfer Virginia because there are systemic challenges that, that I'm not even touching in this conversation, but I don't want to pretend like they're not there. Um So, um so those are, I'm gonna pause there because there's so much more I want to say, but I don't want to leap away from this topic before we've adequately addressed. You're, you're right in that we make a lot of assumptions, I think. Um at the beginning of the um our first part, we talked about that 80% of transfer students have intention to transfer. I only 20 do I actually read an article over the weekend that says that that number has now diminished just 16%. So there's definitely information gaps and, and I think that a lot of these gaps are not addressed because we make the assumptions that a student is going to um attend higher education in a very traditional way. And traditional traditional transfer way is two years at the community college and then two years at a bachelor's degree, we don't account for life circumstances. I mean, one thing that is common at a regional institution like mine is students um go to community college and then transfer to a very large university. Find out that they cannot be successful. It, it's just they don't fit in or, you know, um the learning environment wasn't what they needed. So they revert back to community colleges and then revert back to um a regional university. And so that's just part of life happening. We saw that a lot in COVID, people had to kind of backtrack and come back or move from larger institutions to regional institutions to be closer to home, to deal with familiar responsibilities. And so um the way that y'all are, y'all are explaining transfer, Virginia and the way it's very forward facing and understandable for students, I think is where we miss the point in transfer as a whole. We think that, you know, putting information on websites is sufficient. And that this because the student has already had a higher education experience, that common sense air quotes, um, they would know what to do and I think that's really where we miss the mark because to a student, a slight change in any environment is a daunting task. And while, you know, while we tell them, you know, transferring, um at the vintage is 2.0 and 30 credit hours, it's simple to them. It, it, it's an entire wall that they just cannot see beyond. So, um coming from a practitioner, um I truly appreciate the way y'all have set up transfer Virginia in a way that students can understand and the way that we always make the wrongful assumptions to, right? We assume that they know, but I always like to assume that they don't know, you know, and I put myself in the shoes of students um every day. Um I was, I'm an immigrant. Um I come from a Spanish speaking household, first generation college student, very low ses and so every time and, and I was just reviewing some of our, our travel brochures right before this podcast. Every time I look at it, I look at it from that lens. Does this brochure explain to somebody that does not know higher education? Does it explain what this program is and how it benefits them because that's so important. Uh For sure, I, I am so glad you brought in the, the idea of the assumptions that we make. I also really appreciate that you're constantly um revisiting your own assumptions and especially the assumptions other peoples are, other people are making about um the students that we want to serve. Um It brings up for me, one of the, one of our biggest, I'm going to go, I mean, frame it as opportunities, um an, an op, an opportunity that is filled with challenges. But from the start, I think, and it, I think it had to be this way transfer. Virginia was thinking primarily about the student who came into the community college wanting to do a two plus two pathway in a specific major. And that's what the legislation was assuming. I mean, it is create these pathways for the student who's starting at the community college, not the student you mentioned later, who went to a four year school and they came back to the community college, not the student who is going part time. Um not the student who started with an intention to study education and then realized they wanted to go into business or the first set of students that we were thinking about was the student that this, these were the students on a pretty, a pretty um easy is a bad word but a pretty simple, straightforward pathway. They could do two years, 60 credits at the community college transfer to any of our four year public, most of our four year private and complete their bachelor's degree in two additional years. And that's wonderful. And we want to make sure that we have these pathways for those students. But once we have those pathways built, we had to start thinking about all the students who weren't those students and how we could make sure that these pathways worked for them as well. And it's been, I think that's a really exciting challenge. I care about those students who are in the two plus two right out of high school pathway. But so many of our students aren't those students and we care deeply about those other students too. So thinking about how part time students fit into what we're working and how we can let them know that, that the guaranteed agreements and the transfer guides work for them too. Um, and thinking about um how to make sure that students who start on one path. And so are, you know, coming in with additional credits, how they can use those credits towards a different major or, or what they do with the c the credits that don't work towards their new major? Um Transfer is never boring. There are always additional um challenges complications, but they're really exciting and we, we want to constantly be um considering the things that we hadn't considered before and, and making sure that we're serving our, our transfer students. Well, and I'd love, um, I hope I'm not stealing something that you want to talk about later M Cole. But I think this is a perfect place to say it and, and it's, it's the piece that uh as we finished up the structure. M Cole and her team really started doing very well and that is hearing the student voice to identify those different students and their different challenges in their journeys. And, and um Nicole is becoming well known around the state for her student focus groups and, and what we learned from them and, and some of them have had the audience to almost tears. Some of them, you know, they've been cheering like to, to put students up in front of the transfer. Practitioners happens now quite regularly in Virginia and they are extremely powerful. And so, um I think that's where the transfer Virginia folks are really keeping tabs on. Are we really taking all students to heart here and understanding their world? So, um like I said, Nicole, sorry if I jumped in on that, but I just think it's done so well and I think other institutions are afraid to talk to students. And I, I just say how, how powerful they really are. You can't go wrong when you, when you listen to the voices of the students you serve, you can't, they will tell you exactly where we're missing the work and I think that we do that more often. Oh yeah, they will. They'll tell you exactly what you can do better to serve them. That's so important. Um Thank you for mentioning that and kudos to you Nicole for all the work um you mentioned. Um Yeah, we both all three of us mentioned um different types of transfer students. And so I'm gonna dive a little bit deeper um different types. So we have part timers, we have um dual enrolled students and then reverse transfer students. How does transfer Virginia work for these type of populations? So, I don't know, do you want me to mention what we did up front? And then you can kind of say where, how that helped or didn't maybe mile. So if we do reverse trans, OK, if we do reverse transfer first, um if if you listen to our last podcast, we talked about that everything we did in do in transfer Virginia is grassroots, initiated and then we do policies and things after the fact. And so we brought together eight universities and, and it was open to all but eight universities showed up at the table a couple of community colleges and we designed a reverse transfer toolkit for Virginia. And the idea was let's create a system of reverse transfer. So it won't matter which college the student is attending because remember the community colleges have to deal with all those universities. So having a consistent way of doing reverse transfer in Virginia, we had hoped would really help. We also work to automate it. So how do we automate reverse transfer to make some of the grunt work uh a little bit easier. So we created a comprehensive re reverse toolkit with sample permission forms, different ad ways to advertise just everything about reverse transfer. And then in addition to that, we put into state policy that if you're doing reverse transfer in Virginia, you must follow the reverse transfer toolkit. So if you're gonna do it do it consistently. Now, when I retired, we had one university on the brink of a busting loose on this. And I think they have, we I saw some post recently where they had hit a big kind of milestone for them. Uh but mccole maybe can update maybe that reverse transfer Toolkit doesn't exist in Virginia anymore, right? Uh-- So you may not have good news,-- right? I don't have bad news, but I don't have great news and that we do still have the tool kit. I think reverse transfer has. It definitely has not fall, fallen to the wayside, but it is something that we in the in the transfer. Virginia world need to be reminding um our both our four year institutions and our two year institutions as well as our advisor about it. Um It's not the challenge with reverse transfer is that it's not built in to any structure that we have. And so you need people who are aware of it for it to happen. And so we have some institutions, we have some advisors who are really tuned in and saying to students, oh, you could do this and once they, once a student knows they can do it, it's not hard to, to, to do the thing. But initiating the thing is challenging. Um, the way that we, one of the improvements that we've made with reverse transfer, um, that we're hopefully going to be able to implement in the next few months is easier electronic transcript exchange. Um, so that's been one of the challenges with reverse transfer is that everything is manual. Um So the faculty or the advising or registrars at the two year colleges have to be connecting with advising registrars at the four year colleges. Um And we're hoping that we're confident actually that with the electronic um transcript exchange opportunities, that would at least that step will be easier. But I do feel like reverse transfer is something that we um we need to continue um increasing our focus on. Um And I'll just add one other small detail um where uh the portal, the portal doesn't do the mechanics of reverse transfer. The portal does provide a very easy way for students to see how their courses transfer from one institution to another. And it's not just from the two year institution to the four year institution, they can also see how the course they took at the university transfers to the to um more information, but the system um still needs some gear tuning. So we talked about earlier, that transfer became a word in the last few years because of the enrollment, you know, decline, right? So it became an important thing. We need something that lights a fire under reverse transfer, right? And it's already there, completion leads to completion. And if we could help students complete that associates, there's their social mobility impact, there was all of that, but it doesn't seem to be a big enough fire to really get an entire state trying to do it as a system, right? Have that system in place. I have an idea for that fire and it'll lead to my next question. Um in Texas in January, um legislation was passed. Um and the um the way that community colleges were funded changed. So now community colleges are funded based on transfer out rates which has ignited a fire for community colleges to pursue partnerships. So, but the students can intentionally transfer out and complete um a degree at a university. Um There's no better motivation than funding, you know. And so, um that, that's really done that. Another um another thing I wanted to mention is in Texas, um the completion of an associate's degree is actually a benefit for the student who is pell eligible. Um It would give them access to additional funding, state granting straight state grants. And so with the Pell grant and the state grant, um it has become very affordable um for students to attend, especially regional institutions and complete their bachelor's degree. So my question is, what is the motivation um for students in Virginia to complete an associate's degree? What do they gain from it? Um Is there a financial component that could assist students in completing their bachelor's degree? And what would be the advantage for a community college? So for the student there, we do have a transfer grant, a state funded transfer grant that provides between 3500 or it depends on major and institution. Yeah, you're right. Um And uh so that, and, and student needs to have completed the associate degree to be able to receive the transfer grant. Um the pathways and the guaranteed admissions as depend on a student having completed the associate degree. Um So if a student transfers prior to completing the associate degree, we can't in, we, we don't promise that two plus two or 60 ish credit plus 60 ish credit pathway or the guaranteed admission that's in the guaranteed admission agreements. Um for the for the colleges, I mean, an advantage to, for the community colleges, an obvious advantage to students completing the associate degree is that much for us. Um in terms of funding and metrics relies on students having completed a credential um including a degree. So, um I don't think our funding formulas is the same. We don't have what you just described in Texas. Um But if a student completes, you know, 57 credits towards a 60 credit associate degree and transfers. They i it sounds traumatic to say they don't count, but they don't count in the way that they do if they complete 60 credits and receive that associate degree. So transfer Virginia is running again on passion and motivation, which is, which is truly, truly magical. Um because, you know, that means that, you know, the the professionals are out there um without, you know, selflessly um thinking of the students true success and without any compensation in exchange or, you know, with anything in return, just solely, you know, field on, on passion and, and the desire to change lives. Um My previous supervisor used to, used to say, you educate one student, you educate an entire family and that could not be more true um in, in education. Um Del and Moment. What is Joel and Romance M Nicole? How about you define dual enrollment? Because I'll mess it up and then I'll jump in after that. OK. Excellent. So dual enrollment means different things to different people in different areas in different states. So I'll define dual enrollment, how we define it in the Virginia Community College system um which is a dual enrollment student, is a student who is taking a class, a high school student who is taking a class um at the high school that is taught by either a high school faculty or a community college faculty. Um If it's a high school faculty, it's a high school faculty that is credentialed to teach college classes. Um and the student is receiving both high school credit for that course and community college credit for that course. So an easy example is a student who is taking our English 111, which is the composition one course. And they're receiving credit from the community college for taking that composition one course. And they are also receiving credit for high school for taking English 11 or English 12 the high school English requirement. So that's what we, that's how we use the term dual enrollment student in the Virginia Community College system. So when we started transfer Virginia, um there was a working group for dual enrollment, there still is that, that has always met and, and it's representatives from the high schools that meet with the community college system. I'm sorry, representatives from the community colleges that deliver or uh facilitate dual enrollment courses at their local high schools. Uh We identified a lot of major challenges around dual enrollment. A couple of the big ones were the over accumulation of, of credits that students were getting in high school that were then turning into uh wasted credit and wasted. Let me, I, I always get yelled at when I said wasted wasted credits in the sense that they are not going to apply to a degree. But that, and, and therefore the student was going to have to complete more than 120 credits for a Bachelor's degree. And that was, that was a big problem both in education of the families because they were expecting you take 70 credits in dual enrollment. That's 50 credits left for a Bachelor's degree. And that's not always the case. Uh, so I think that was probably the number one issue that was up, but also was what courses were offered via dual enrollment and, and that varied across the state significantly. Um And so a couple of things that uh we did was one, we really tried to dive in to identify what all, all the missing parts or all the the questions were about. And then uh we being uh transfer Virginia and the dual enrollment coordinator at the Virginia Community College System and the head of the K 12 academic, uh the Virginia Department of Ed, we collaborated together and created a dual enrollment transfer guide. Uh And it's a lengthy document that really and we worked very hard to be completely objective. So, for example, we clarified the benefits and opportunities of dual enrollment compared to uh API B clap, all of those things that students were having. You know, my son had to choose between dual enrollment English and A P English at the same school. So it's, you know, they, they, it really mapped that out. It also provided a talking guide on what conversations uh high school counselors should have with families about making informed decisions about their higher education path. So for example, now in Virginia, high school enrollment students have to be program placed, they have to be in an academic program, they cannot just take courses for the sake of taking courses. Uh And that has made a difference, but then you have to educate families on why that's important um type of thing. So um it has a talking guide in this toolkit or in this guide. Uh It also has a huge section on higher education lingo and what it all means. So we talked about that last time, right? The word pathway, what the heck does that mean? Right. And so it has that it has all the policies and legislation around dual enrollment, uh all the resources like we had AJ Lark report on dual enrollment getting that out there uh uh to people. Um And then it actually had a statewide, it was a table of all the courses the V CCS offers the community colleges offer that could pair with a high school course because what we found was one high school and community college would give English 111 credit for that comp class, but another one might give English 108 credit. I'm making that up, but that type of thing. And so now there is a statewide list at the VDOE as part of this guide that says if you're going to teach English uh 11 at the high school that pairs with English 111 at the community college so that it's consistent across the board for the students. It also opened the door for many high schools that didn't realize they had these other opportunities that they could do. Um So even if that document is, you know, if that's all it did, the one thing it did the best was it helped educate and streamline the and, and calm down the chaos in what classes were offered as dual enrollment. And for what purpose, you know, some stuff was offered and being touted as transfer level dual enrollment. And it wasn't. So we had to designate. Is this a transfer level course or does that belong in the CTE the career technical education area? Um So that's what happened in the structural side and, and then Nicole can maybe speak to uh what's happening now in dual enrollment. Yeah. And one thing that I would like to add to what Patricia des described is that um the opportunities that were developed through transfer, Virginia, like the 16 credit passport that I mentioned in the 31 to 32 credit uniform certificate of general studies. Students can obtain those or start working towards those while in high school through dual enrollment. So in that way, many of the um opportunities, most of the opportunities that are available to students who start at the community college um through transfer, Virginia are also available to students who started through dual enrollment. Um The only exception to that is for students who complete the associate degree. While in high school, there are some differences from institution to institution and how they receive those that also would be its own podcast episode that we will probably not pursue. But um we, so we've, we've worked and, and that um the guide that Patricia is describing is incredibly important because there wasn't a lot of consistency. Um Consistency has been a tenant of transfer, Virginia and has helped our students quite a bit and has helped with advising too. Um In Virginia, we very recently got legislation um that requires that all students in Virginia uh be able to obtain a the passport or the uniform certificate of general studies through dual enrollment while in high school. Um So we're facing a a new and um an exciting challenge there um because not all of the the high schools are able to offer all of the courses or all of the subjects that um students need to take in order to receive that uniform certificate of general studies or passport. So, um things are always exciting. That's we have new task forces now trying to figure out how we can um meet the requirements of that legislation and again serve our students. Well, because the idea behind it is a really valuable one that students be able to not just take dual enrollment courses, which is itself very helpful, but also that they be able to take dual enrollment courses that are transferable to and applicable um at the four year colleges. Um So whether they want to start dual enrollment in high school, then go on to the community college and then transfer to the four year institution or whether they're planning to do dual enrollment in high school and then go directly to a four year institution. Making sure like what Patricia was describing that they're taking courses that will be applicable to their degrees um is important as well. That's just another extra little challenge. I might add just two quick things to, to tap on. One is the the other challenge that dual enrollment and transfer level dual enrollment is going to have uh states like Virginia for 40 years in Virginia, the teacher prep programs at the universities were masters level programs. So all of the high school teachers were graduating with a master's in a certification in a subject area and they needed maybe another 345 math courses, let's say to teach dual enrollment math. But now in Virginia because of the critical shortage, uh the teacher ed programs are reverting back to bachelor's level programs. So as my generation continued to retire over the next 1015 years, you using those faculty at the high schools that already had master's degrees. And that was that big step in getting duly dual enrollment faculty. Uh So that's a, that's a big bubble and I think it's happening in other states across the country. Um The other thing I wanted to mention was connecting reverse transfer and dual enrollment. One of my soap boxes is that there is the biggest opportunity for reverse transfer just by getting dual enrollment students before they graduate from high school to check a box on a form that says, yes, I want my university to reverse transfer back the rest of my credits to the community college where I took 20 credits to do enrollment. And, and again, there are benefits for completing that program, both for the student and for the community colleges and it then drives up completion rates at the university. So, um I think there's an opportunity there that continues to be missed of, of students that would benefit from reverse transfer at in a large quantity. And as we try to tackle some of these enrollment cliffs, we are looking more to do an enrollment population. And so it is a, it is a different population than traditional transfer, which is really nontraditional transfer. Um We're never bored in transfer and um and we do see those despairing gaps of information even while they're in high school with counselors and advisers who are knowledgeable about higher education. One of the um 11 thing that I noticed early on in my career um was for example, that there were a lot of teachers who were certain try to teach economics and dual credit. So every, every student from a certain region had economics, the 23 01 class. And, and so when, you know, it was, they felt they felt infuriated when we would tell them this economics class does not count as math. And it was because it's so broadly on, on a few trends for uh pathways so broadly said, general math, you know, not specific to, you know, degrees or anything, anything. And so when you say general math that translates to somebody as, oh any math. And so I think high schools kind of looked at it and said, ok, let's teach economics. It's going to apply everywhere and it's not, it's only applicable um you know, to business degrees or liberal arts. Um And so there, there is always still that conversation that has, that has to take place to really understand how much a student knows before you try to tackle um what they're really asking um from you, especially when you deal with families for sure. So, um in, in all of this, in all of the work that transfer Virginia has done and in other states have done, um I think that um there is some commonality and one of it is the easy um credit mobility, right? The easiness of transferring credits to and from institutions within the state so that students can confer their associates degrees or bachelor's degrees, hopefully get master's degrees and they can um we can figure out the applicability um and have them be successful and hopefully contribute back to the state um thinking long term because acro and other organizations have been bringing up the issue of credit mobility at a national scale and I won't even touch international just at a national scale. Um you know, from your perspective and the, and the research that you've conducted, you know, what would that look like? I know that for me, for, you know, a practitioner that deals with transfer students every single day and, and I have them in my office because um it always brings me back down to earth and it makes me feel connected. So I, I love chatting with them. And so when they come in, it's always a reminder of we have so much more work to do. We have military credits, we have credits for prior learning. But even in state to state wide, I mean, can you imagine a way? And I think this is actually brought up, this has been brought up in several conversations within the acro spaces. Wouldn't it be cool if we had a portal where we could see how credits equate like from state to state so that we could just go look into this magical portal and it would tell us if this is a common core class in, you know, in Seattle or California, and we could just equate it to something on her, on her pathway. What would, what does that mean to you? What would that look like in a perfect space. Well, because I've been so intimately involved with the transfer Virginia portal. What I would like is for the um the programming brains of the world to bring together, you know, the transfer Virginia portal and connect it with sort of similar. I know not every state has something like the transfer Virginia portal, but I, I love your idea. I wouldn't want to be the one thinking about the mechanics or the programming of it. But um but I think it's a great idea that information um access to information and transparency of information is central to what we do with Trans Virginia and central to what you're describing on the acro side. And I think central to what students are thinking about. Um-- I don't have the answer but I love your-- vision.-- Maybe Patricia will take it up as her retirement project.-- I think so. I mean, so actually what I was going to say is that I feel like, well, what it's going to take is for faculty across the country to start to have faith in each other and to trust each other's judgment, right? Because right now and I'm a faculty member, but there's so much ownership and, and and tightness around. Oh no, that's not equivalent to ours. So we would need to break down that. But I think you could by doing something like Virginia did but growing it. So I'm thinking about the um accreditation regions. If everybody in the S AC OC got together and said, OK, we're going to create transferability amongst these regions and, and you know, here's freshman comp, everybody's freshman comp class. What's your number? OK. Put it in the database, right? The database and the technology is already there. Like our portal could be a na you know, it could be a regional or national, the technology is there, but it's about getting the institutions to trust each other and whether you grow it. Ok. Let's do Mid Atlantic, let's do Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina. Let's get the four of them to create that database. Nicole is talking about. Uh we already have wii out in, you know, Utah, Idaho, those states they could do that, right? And then you start connecting between those regions. But I think you're gonna have to grow it. Artificial intelligence is gonna play a big role in this if we let it. Oh, yes. So it can do a lot of that research for us and say here are all the freshman comp classes in the US. Here they are. And can we all agree to accept them? Right. So I, I would love it. We'll, we'll start that next week. Well, um Patricia and Dr mccole, thank you so much. Um this, these conversations and the work that you're doing so very near dear to my heart and to many of my colleagues who listen to transfer T um it's often we feel like misunderstood and, you know, like we're fighting against the way when we talk about trans students versus uh first time college student. So, um thank you so much for the work you've been doing for serving students at a higher capacity for being some of the biggest transfer champions that I know and, and I mean that like it and, and to keep something going and to keep um that project alive. It is, it is so wonderful. Thank you so much for all of the work that you do and for your service to transfer students. Thank you so much. This has been awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, and for all the work you're doing on the transfer side and I'm getting the conversations started and keeping going. Yeah, for sure. Transfer T listeners. I hope that you have enjoyed learning about transfer Virginia as much as I have. These conversations have filled my heart with enthusiasm and encouragement to keep learning, growing and advocating for transfer students. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast. So you can be alerted of our episode that they become available and get more detail about more topics in the transfer world and beyond. You won't want to miss out. We would greatly appreciate that you share and follow our other podcast as well. They are for the record, a reg podcast, admitted, an admissions podcast and heard higher education and real diversity. Lastly, if you're interested in being a guest in this podcast to share your transfer expertise or you would like to share some topic ideas with us, even provide some feedback. You can email us at transferee at acro.org. That is all for now. I hope you enjoyed all of this. Thank you so much for listening and that's the tea.