Moon Shot for Equity

Co-Chairs: 

Dominique Bennett, Student Success Coordinator, College of Health Sciences

Ann Colgan, Director, Interdisciplinary Studies, Associate Professor

Levi Tucker, Student Success Coordinator, College of Arts and Humanities

Members:

Beatrice Adera, Chair and Professor of Special Education

Hannah Ashley, Professor and Coordinator of Youth Empowerment and Urban Studies (YES) Program

Josh Auld, Assistant Chair and Associate Professor of Biology

Michele Belliveau, Professor of Social Work

Rommel Gaudalupe, Director of Data Management and Business Intelligence

Erran Robson, Assistant Registrar for Transfer Services

Joanne Sullivan, Associate Professor of Nutrition

Johny Tadros, Program Counselor, Psychology

Devan Zgleszewski, Director of New Student Programs

Danielle Zimmerman, Solutions Architect

Students who transfer often are unable to articulate all of their previously earned credits at their new institution. By some measures, students transferring from two-year schools to four-year schools lose 40% of their previously earned credits. Transfer is also an often-overlooked equity issue: students of color are often much less likely to successfully transfer credits. (Student Success Playbook, Rec. 11, EAB)

• Courses in AA and AS academic maps at DCCC will transfer and apply to appropriate degrees at WCU without creating excess credit. Students who complete AA and AS degrees at DCCC on Moon Shot academic maps and transfer to participating four-year institutions will do so with junior-level status. For students in AAS programs, WCU will develop academic maps to fully maximize the transferability of courses.
• WCU will deploy the EAB Prospective Student Portal to ensure efficient articulation of earned credits and inform students of viable transfer pathways leading to timely completion and career opportunities.
• WCU will maintain and make available degree rules and equivalency tables in a manner that can be utilized by Navigate technology.

August 2023: The Transfer Pathways team worked collaboratively and engaged in interviews with the campus community in data analysis, surveys, and other forms of research to identify barriers to success specific to WCU transfer students of color. We identified a couple of overarching issues with far-reaching consequences that produce structural barriers to success for our TRN students of color: the colorblindness of WCU policies and departments, and the burden on TRN students to navigate WCU instead of WCU consistently welcoming, supporting, and advising new TRN students. We have made an initial set of recommendations for changes to WCU policies and practices to close institutional equity gaps for transfer students and will continue to work closely with DCCC and EAB in the coming academic year.

September 2022: We have focused on 3 keys tasks: (1) Understanding available data, (2) Discussing issues we have observed as barriers to equity, and (3) Playing with solutions to those barriers – in discussions designed to help us keep our overarching goals in mind.