Madison College Partners with the United Negro College Fund: Integrated Higher Education (Part 1 of 2)
Yohlunda Mosely Hill is Madison College’s point person in establishing partnerships with four-year higher education institutions to help Madison College graduates have a seamless four-year collegiate experience.
by Jonathan Gramling
For some students, Madison College is the end point of their college career as they earn associate’s degrees and/or get certified in the skilled trades and other professions. For others, it is the first stage of their higher education career. But making that transition to a four-year college may not be as easy as it appears.
For Yolunda Mosely Hill, Madison College's Transfer Center and Services Director, it’s not only a matter of Madison College students making a successful transition to another institution, it’s also a matter of setting them up to be successful at those four-year colleges. And so Hill’s office has been setting up partnerships with the four-year colleges that will maximize the work that Madison College graduates have pout in.
“We don’t want a ton of partnerships that don’t maximize the credits for our students,” Hill said. “But we do want partnerships that count as many of the credits that they have taken at Madison College as possible. The whole purpose for a lot of our students to come to Madison College is cost effectiveness. They want to save dollars. They want to be mindful of the investment in applying those credits somewhere else, having that money saved, because ideally that is what we want to help them accomplish. So making sure that when they transfer the credit, as much of that credit transfer as possible, so that they can bypass all of the barriers that they would encounter if they transferred outside of an articulation agreement. That’s usually the pathway that we establish with our partners — an articulation agreement, counting the credits, sometimes there are some scholarship opportunities, guaranteed admission depending on the partner or direct admission to their major and not have to do another application process. We’re trying to reduce the barriers as well so that students can get that bachelor’s degree.”
And that is the whole point, that the Madison College graduates are successful at that next level.
“We aren’t just looking at how many students transfer,” Hill said. “It’s how many students transfer and complete the bachelor’s degree because we know the bachelor’s degree attainment is what makes the difference. And some of our students will transfer and never complete that bachelor’s. And that is what we want to make sure is not happening. I would say a lot of the work that we’ve been doing probably over the past 10 years is building that structure, and being intentional about the partnerships.”
In order to reach the thousands of students who are enrolled at Madison College, Hill and her staff rely upon internal partnerships to make sure that every student has the information and resources they need to continue their education.
“I’m over at Goodman South one day a week now and that is designed to help connect with our faculty and staff here,” Hill said. “We’re a pretty small shop. So we can’t do a lot of that interaction with students. But we know the instructors, we know the advisors have that relationship and rapport with students. So the more they know about transfer and how to connect students to the resources, the more informed our students will be. We’re being very mindful of that and that relationship building.”
Hill and her office have also been developing the transfer assistance capacity of Madison College through Transfer Summits that they have held.
“The first one we did was just for the Madison College community so that we could create some understanding and norming around transfer,” Hill said. “Jili Wang who is a faculty member at UW-Madison was our keynote speaker. This past May, we did our second one. It was a virtual summit. We invited our colleagues from the WTCS system and we had two keynote speakers. Darla Cooper is from the California Community College System. They are doing some amazing things out there, especially around equity and being mindful of underrepresented and underserved students and how to support them. We have an article, I think it’s called Getting through the Gate, which is focused on students getting really close to the transfer gate and then they back out or they never complete the transfer process. And then we had Gloria Crisp. She’s a faculty member out of Oregon State University. Her focus is specifically on underrepresented students and Latinx students and helping them complete that transfer process. They were our two keynote speakers this past year. And so we’ll have our third one next June. It’s design is to create community around transfer and around understanding how we can assist our students.”
And then part of that transfer structure that Hill and her office at putting in place is to maximize the student’s academic experience once they have transferred to the four-year college.
“You are close to getting your degree,” Hill said about a student getting close to graduating. “And while you are working towards it, you don’t know who to talk to. You knew you were supposed to finish it, but sometimes, you don’t get told how to finish it. So that’s what we are trying to do, make sure students know there is support and resources to help them finish that bachelor’s.”
Again, it’s the quality of the transfer as much as it is the quantity of transfers taking place.
Next Issue: Madison College’s Transfer Partners