Beyond Free College

Making Higher Education Work for 21st Century Students

Eileen L. Strempel, Stephen J. Handel

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9798881873493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Beyond Free College outlines an audacious national agenda—consistent with, but far more comprehensive than, the current "free college" movement—that builds on the best of US higher education's populist history such as the G.I. Bill and the community college transfer function. The authors align a wide constellation of higher education trends—online learning, prior learning assessment, competency-based learning, high school college-credit— with a rapidly shifting student transfer environment that privileges college credit as the pivotal educational catalyst to boost access and completion. The book's agenda seeks greater productive investment in postsecondary education by privileging a single metric—lower-cost-per-degree-granted—as the animating driver of a transfer pathway that will fulfill the potential of its historical, progressive innovators. Beyond Free College's goal is as simple as it is urgent: To galvanize higher education advocates in an effort to reorganize, reorient, and reignite the transfer function to serve the needs of a neotraditional student population that now constitutes the majority of college-goers in America; and in ways that advance completion, not just access to higher education.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Beyond Free College
• Series Page
• Beyond Free College: Making Higher Education Work for 21st-Century Students
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1
• Transfer Contradictions
• Chapter 2
• The Flickering and Largely Untold History of Transfer
• Chapter 3
• Second Chances Are Good, But First Chances Are Better
• Chapter 4
• The Rise of Dual Credit
• Chapter 5
• Prior-Learning Credit
• Chapter 6
• Competency-Based Education
• Chapter 7
• Online Learning in the Twenty-First Century
• Chapter 8
• The Shifting Higher Education Landscape
• Chapter 9
• Tomorrowland
• Chapter 10
• Beyond Traditional Transfer
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors