Challenges to Awarding Degrees

Several lessons may be learned from the nine pilot institutions, which all encountered challenges along the way to awarding associate’s degrees retroactively to qualified students. The following are examples of problematic scenarios involved in negotiating the complex process of awarding degrees:

Local data systems may be hampered by prior changes in or upgrades to software (e.g., a software change in 2005 may isolate all students who entered before that date hence exclude them from the universe under investigation).
Local and state data may not be wholly compatible (e.g., they may use different identification systems for which cross-walks must be developed).
Not every institution possesses a membership level in the National Student Clearinghouse that allows them to find degree awards.
Degree audit software is, to put it kindly, immature (e.g., it is often not populated with courses that no longer are offered and for which equivalents are not programmed, or it sets degree fulfillment criteria to those in force in 2009 when the student in question entered under different criteria in 2003; most institutions had to turn to hand-and-eye review of transcript records for the degree audit, and this task is very time-consuming).
Nearly half of the 9,500 students in the pilot phase of Project Win-Win (see Full Project Win-Win Description with Appendixes) who passed through step 1 of the default process were transfers in, and ultimately, the most frequent “hold” on degrees lay in the fact that transcripts from other institutions attended by the student had never been received (and, by most state system policies, without a full transcript record, degrees cannot be awarded).
The default associate’s degree offered or awarded to the student is the A.A., A.S. or A.G.S., i.e. standard transfer degrees, whereas some students will be on the institution’s record books as candidates for an Associate of Applied Science (A.A.S.) in a particular occupational field, and may resist the offer of a standard transfer degree (even though they have been out of school for at least a year) on the false assumption that once the A.A. or A.S. is awarded they cannot return to school to finish requirements for the A.A.S.; participating institutions will be testing strategies for dealing with this problem.
Locating students who are “academically short” and hence potential degree completers is a major undertaking.

All of these lessons from the nine institutions in the pilot phase of Project Win-Win will help the expanded group of institutions negotiate the complex process of awarding degrees retroactively. The result will be far fewer qualified students walking around empty-handed and much improved degree completion rates at the associate’s level for community colleges and colleges, i.e. Project Win-Win.