By AJ Howell-Williams Understanding the Transfer Population Let’s begin with some interesting findings from the recently released 2015 State of College Admission report, produced by NACAC. Nearly 40% of all students who began their college career in 2008 transferred...
Hello, my name is A.J. Williams, and this is my initial foray into a WACAC blog aimed at speaking to the Transfer perspective at a four year institution. The goal is to be able to speak to the joys, challenges, concerns, and questions of my colleagues on both sides of...
If you’re considering using social media to communicate with students and you haven’t yet read Andrew Watts’ post on Medium titled “A Teenager’s View on Social Media,” stop what you’re doing and go read it. Right now. It’s OK, I’ll wait. Take your time. No, really. Go...
If you’re reading this blog for the first time, welcome. And if you’ve read it before, welcome back. Whichever group you fall into, it’s a sure thing that somewhere on the interwebs, a data aggregator knows what pages you’ve clicked on to get here and is adding to the...
In a recent opinion column published in the Washington Post, University of Southern California President C.L. Max Nikias advocated strongly in favor of elite universities admitting a significant number of community college transfer students. Writing about the...
Name: that part was easy. Date of birth: June, 1989, which made me a few months short of my 25th birthday the first time I applied to transfer to a 4-year university. A lot older than my perfect cousin, who at my age was a college graduate and a newlywed, and eons...
The University of California (UC) recently released a report titled “Preparing California For Its Future: Enhancing Community College Student Transfer to UC,” which discusses imbalances in UC transfer admissions and examines possible social, economic, academic, and...
While many students this time of year are celebrating wonderful admission letters, scholarship awards, etc., and then there are also the other ones. You know the ones I mean. The students with the situations that make us sigh, cry, laugh, or triple facepalm. Some of...
I once took a class in which the instructor used what he referred to as the “Jeopardy Method” of grading. Under his system, students earned points for correct test answers, well-written essays, etc., but we could also lose points for poor performance, even on optional...
I recently read a thought-provoking essay titled “The Death of Expertise,” by Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School. I’m not an expert on expertise, so perhaps I shouldn’t try to summarize his article,...