Culture of Transformation
Community College Partnership Initiative Attracts Diverse Talent
High-achieving students such as Bertha Flores '12 (left) and Fadwa Ferradji '13 (right) increasingly are choosing community colleges as their first option, says Dottie Scheneman (center). Dickinson's Community College Partnership Initiative introduces students to the liberal arts and offers them a seamless transfer process.
by Michelle Simmons
One is a disgraced attorney; another is a sci-fi geek and misunderstood son of a Palestinian falafel maker. There’s also a washed-up high-school football star, a lawn-mowing slacker and a reformed hippie.
The quirky misfits at fictional Greendale Community College have made the NBC series Community a hit, but they also belie today’s economic and cultural reality: For myriad reasons, community colleges are increasingly a first choice for high-achieving students.
“For me, it was all about affordability,” says Bertha Flores ’12, who transferred to Dickinson from Montgomery College in Rockville, Md., in 2010.
Flores entered Montgomery working full time and attending classes part time. She quickly earned high grades and a scholarship to the Macklin Business Institute, one of the college’s three honors programs, which then allowed her to commit to her studies full time and join a community of scholars. Because of a new partnership between Dickinson and Montgomery, she learned about Dickinson and decided to apply.
In 2009, Dickinson signed partnership agreements with five mid-Atlantic community colleges as a means of joining two spheres of higher education that rarely intersect.
Community colleges have long had transfer or articulation agreements with baccalaureate institutions, but the Community College Partnership Initiative is a more structured approach, explains Dottie Scheneman, director of transfer admissions. Although not a dual-admission agreement, the initiative creates a pipeline for promising students who desire the liberal-arts experience.
The five colleges partnering with Dickinson—Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC), Northampton Community College and Montgomery County Community College (MCCC) in Pennsylvania; and Howard Community College and Montgomery College in Maryland—have successful track records with transfer students.
“We noticed how great these students were from these community colleges, so we really wanted to make it a more official and robust relationship,” says Scheneman.
Two recent graduates exemplify the quality of those transfer students. The year that the agreements were signed, Stephen Williams ’11 from HACC and Nadia ElFallah ’11 from Montgomery College arrived at Dickinson. Williams later became vice president of Student Senate and entered Teach for America after graduation; ElFallah was inducted into the Wheel and Chain leadership society and earned a grant to conduct research in Libya her senior year.
Under the new agreements, promising students like Williams and ElFallah are identified in their first year at their community colleges and receive intensive advising, streamlined financial-aid counseling and mentoring. “Many community-college students feel there’s no transfer option but to a state university,” says Scheneman. “We want to encourage these students to think outside the box, introduce them to the concept of the liberal arts.”
Students admitted under the partnership are eligible for the annual Phi Theta Kappa ($15,000), John Montgomery ($10,000) or Founders ($7,500) scholarships, as well as other institutional grants and loans.
Fadwa Ferradji ’13 is one of six students in the first cohort to transfer under the new agreement. “I wasn’t ready for college when I graduated from high school, and I knew there was always the possibility of my ending up at a community college,” she says. “I decided to take a year off to figure out what I wanted to do.”
She spent that year studying in Rome under the Rotary Youth Exchange program before starting classes in the honors program at MCCC, where her mother is a professor of French and Arabic. As a member of the All-Pennsylvania Academic Team, Ferradji had her choice of state universities on full scholarship, “but I was much more set on attending Dickinson,” she recalls.
“I drove my parents crazy. I wanted to do pre-med, then I wanted to do religion, then history,” she continues. “One of my professors at MCCC knew that I loved religion and history, but he also knew I loved the sciences, so he told me about anthropology.” At MCCC, she fell in love with the discipline and aims to study the co-evolution of humans and infectious diseases at Dickinson.
Ferradji also is planning to study at Dickinson’s program in Yaoundé, Cameroon, which has a strong anthropology department. By doing so, she faces one of the primary challenges for community-college transfer students: finding time to study abroad. “She got right on it and independently sought this out,” says Scheneman. “They really are unique in making these things happen. They’re just so used to navigating the system.”
To help students like Flores and Ferradji transition as seamlessly as possible, Scheneman and Norm Jones, dean of diversity/student development and assistant to the president, formed an on-campus team to help with academic advising, financial aid, campus resources and the residential experience.
“We tried to build an infrastructure that made sense in the context of transfers,” explains Jones. “You’re talking about folks who normally are commuting and juggling maybe two or three things outside of academic life.”
“These are adults in every sense of the word,” adds Scheneman. “They’re adults in their maturity, their focus.”
Jones also cites the sense of urgency that many of them feel—as one student noted, of having only two years to accomplish what fellow Dickinsonians do in four. “He wasn’t talking about getting requirements out of the way, but about leaving a legacy, making a mark. They all have that swirling around in their minds.”
Jones points to what he calls a “culture of transformation” created by many of the transfer students, noting that of the six who are members of the class of 2012, “three are RAs, two went through LeaderShape, four are involved in some form of student governance—whether it’s as class officers or in the senate—and four have had internships or participated in student-faculty research.”
Flores is one of those RAs. She also serves on the President’s Commission for Women and is vice president of the Latin American Club. Last summer, she waited tables on weekends and completed two internships: one with Montgomery County Council member Nancy Navarro and another with the Hispanic College Fund (HCF) in Washington, D.C.
Flores anticipates working with an organization such as HCF after graduation and points to mentors such as Jones and Professor of Political Science James Hoefler as keys to her success.
“I’m so grateful to be here,” says the policy-management major. “I’m the first in my family to get a bachelor’s degree, and I can’t wait until Commencement, when my parents get to see me walk. I just want to go around hugging everyone.”
Published January 2, 2012