Perceived Barriers to Articulation: Institutional Characteristics

Extract

It has been generally acknowledged that a number of obstacles, or barriers, exist in the articulation process. Based on literature review, student characteristics as well as institutional characteristics may act as barriers. This paper focuses on institutional characteristics. The changed mission of the community college and a lack of standardization of curricula between two-year and four-year institutions of higher education have been identified as barriers to articulation. Suggested reforms are described.

“Perhaps the most critical question in the sociology of education is whether it is what a student brings to school or what schools do to students that explains ultimate educational achievement”.¹ In the process of articulation, especially from the two-year to four-year institution, there are both student characteristics, as well as institutional and curricular characteristics, that influence various outcomes.

The low percentage of students who successfully transferred from two-year colleges into four-year baccalaureate degree programs throughout the 1970s created a stimulus for research that has taken place throughout the last two decades. Educators throughout the country took seriously the data indicating that, although transfer rates had begun to decline during the 1960s, by the late 1970s the national transfer rate had reached a low point of 25% or less.^1-4

In the earlier days of the community college, during the 1950s, when they were still called “junior colleges”, the student transfer rates were approximately 50%. What might be the reason for a continual decline in transfer rates over the years? Researchers have addressed this question with another question: “What is…