In an October 2024 issue of Member Spotlight, the author detailed how Delta College rethought transfer efforts to better impact its students through agreements with four-year partners. As the new Dean of Transfer Programs and Online Learning, he was also charged with exploring transfer pathways to improve the college’s ability to better track students along their journey. Previously, Delta entered into a number of transfer agreements without regard for their efficacy among Delta students or whether they were needed in the first place. Delta needed to be more intentional with its transfer agreements to better serve our students, so transfer agreements were more thoughtful to maximize student impact.

As he began these efforts, the author quickly learned that faculty in a variety of disciplines had ideas and plans at the ready for specific transfer pathways. The initial collaboration with Delta faculty resulted in the college’s first two transfer pathways, in history and psychology. Within these transfer pathways, Delta College could track students in these disciplines while also giving students a sense of belonging at the community college level. Being able to identify themselves as a history or psychology major also helped prepare them for belonging in that group at the four-year institution.

First Delta College Transfer Pathways

In summer 2023, the author was approached by leading faculty in the history and psychology departments who asked about the possibility of setting up transfer pathways for students in their respective disciplines. At the same time, he was asked by President Michael Gavin to streamline the transfer process by researching and revamping how and with whom the college negotiated agreements with four-year partners. The questions we sought to answer were (1) how our students could get the most bang for their buck, and (2) what transfer institutions would most benefit them.

Delta history and psychology faculty were quick to work with the author and the Associate Director of Transfer Partnerships to construct transfer guides for these disciplines. The final products address Michigan Transfer Agreement requirements as well as those for discipline-specific courses in each pathway. For example, the history pathway includes a foreign language course because most Bachelor of Arts programs in history require foreign language coursework. The pathways also include a layered set of discipline-specific courses that prepare students to transfer into four-year partners’ degree programs as juniors by way of a traditional 2+2 agreement. History faculty worked hard to secure an agreement with Wayne State University (WSU) utilizing the history pathway that would immediately benefit students who chose to become history majors. Once the transfer guides were finalized, faculty went before Delta’s Curriculum Committee for review and, when approved, inclusion in the college catalog. From there, they were posted on both the Delta website and the websites of our partner institutions.

As a part of the process of negotiating transfer agreements, we invited four-year partners to the Delta College campus to see our facilities (i.e., labs, learning supports, resources) and get a sense for what academic life is like at our institution. We also used this visit as an opportunity to get to know one another and talk candidly about what we all hoped to gain from the partnership. Most importantly, we discussed how the partnership could help students on their academic journeys. The opportunity for faculty to discuss how the agreement could impact their students with faculty counterparts or the appropriate administrator from a partner institution was an essential aspect of the process.

Discipline-to-discipline collaboration took place through the initial transfer agreement conversations, as psychology and history faculty from both institutions discussed not only how the pathways would work but what would most prepare students for academic life at the four-year institution. Delta focuses on 2+2 agreements, through which our students leave with an associate’s degree and transfer into the partner institution as a junior, but we also consider 3+1 options, when available. The Delta-CMU 3+1 psychology transfer pathway, for instance, was negotiated in fall 2024. This agreement allows Delta students to transfer 90 credits into CMU and to complete their last year of college online at CMU, which is a win for our place-bound students. However, we also offer a traditional 2+2 pathway to CMU for psychology students.

While working through the development of these agreements, the Associate Director of Transfer Partnerships and the author met with Delta’s academic advisors to keep them apprised of what agreements were in the works. We typically detailed the areas of study impacted as well as how potential agreements could impact students, giving our advisors as much information as possible in advance so that once an agreement was in place, they could immediately communicate the benefits to students.

Lessons Learned

Transfer agreements can take about a year to finalize, given the back and forth between representatives from the two institutions and unforeseen delays, which can vary from institution to institution. Working through these potential pathways with faculty from both institutions can go a long way to speed up the overall process.

Lessons learned at Delta include the following:

1. Developing pathways is a great opportunity to get faculty in on the ground floor of transfer agreement development. Including them in related discussions from the beginning is key.
2. Keeping advisors informed about agreements helps to get the word out to and create excitement amongst students.

Next Steps

Delta College is continuing its work with four-year partners to develop transfer pathways for other disciplines that make sense for our students. Typically, new pathways arise as a result of faculty initiative. Delta faculty engage in communications with four-year faculty in the same discipline, then indicate an interest in growing a pathway to the Associate Director of Transfer Partnerships or the author, who initiates a formal pathway development process. Additionally, we are working to track the effectiveness of these partnerships by collecting data and entering it into our Tableau database, where Institutional Research will help us to interpret the data going forward.

Dr. David P. Hopkins, Jr. is Dean, Transfer Programs and Online Learning, at Delta College in University Center, Michigan.

Opinions expressed in Leadership Abstracts are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the League for Innovation in the Community College.