Timing is everything for Community College of Aurora dual track students

AURORA | As she wraps up her studies at Community College of Aurora and heads to a four-year university, Najwa Smith can look back at her three years at CCA and know one thing for certain about every class she took: “It wasn’t a waste of time,” she said.

That’s because every single credit she earned at CCA will transfer to Metro State University of Denver — a feat that hasn’t always happened for students looking to knock out their pre-requisites at a community college before moving on to a bigger and more expensive four-year school.

Smith credits CCA’s Student Success Center with making sure she didn’t take classes that wouldn’t transfer.

The center, which launched in July 2013, aims to help students — particularly students of color from low-income households — stay in school, and eventually transfer to a four-year university.

The program’s efforts range from the simple — including staff wearing T-shirts every Wednesday emblazoned with logos from various Colorado colleges in hopes of sparking interest in the schools. To more complicated efforts focused on making sure credits transfer, and that students pick a school that matches them academically and personally.

So far, officials say the program is working well.

The school had a retention rate from 2012 to 2013 of 44 percent, but last year, among students active in the center, that rate was 65 percent, and officials say CCA has seen it’s transfer rate grow by 25 percent in recent years, the second-fasted rate among Colorado community colleges.

Libby Klingsmith, the center’s director, said school officials are acutely aware that many students hope to use CCA as a stepping stone to further their education.

“Most of our students, we know, want to go on to a four-year school,” she said.

But transferring can be difficult. Beyond the challenges of transferring credits, students often have to discover a new campus far from home, and a whole new academic community. That’s why one of the center’s goals is to bring students on free visits to area schools. They recently took 36 students to Colorado State University at Pueblo and later this week are set to take another 65 to University of Northern Colorado.

This week, Lt. Governor Joe Garcia recognized the program as one of a handful of creative and successful programs at the state’s colleges.

Garcia, who has a background in higher education from his time as president at Pikes Peak Community College and later CSU Pueblo, said programs like this are crucial.

One especially important issue is the ability to transfer credits, he said. Garcia said he met a student during his time at Pikes Peak who took 90 credit hours and hoped to transfer to a four-year university, only to find out just 15 of his hours would transfer.

Garcia said the incentives in higher education haven;t always been organized in the proper way. For one, when students enroll in a school, pay for a few semesters and drop out, the school still gets paid. In some cases, the longer it takes a student to get to graduation, the better is financially for the school because they keep getting tuition, he said. “That’s just not a very good way to approach higher education,” he said.

The worst possible outcome for students, Garcia said, isn’t that they skip higher education. The worst scenario is that they enroll, spend a few years paying tuition and drop out with nothing but a hefty debt to show for their time.

Garcia said that while the focus in education-funding arguments tends to be on classroom spending, the Student Success Center shows that there are other places where the state needs to invest. The center isn’t a classroom, and much of the spending there wouldn’t be considered classroom spending, but Garcia said that doesn’t mean it is a place of bureaucratic waste.

“We know that they are not only valuable, they are critical,” he said.