U.S. Dept. of Ed Hosts ‘Raise the Bar: Attaining College Excellence and Equity Initiative’ at NOVA

The U.S. Department of Education hosted a summit on Thursday, November 9, for the Raise the Bar: Attaining College Excellence and Equity Initiative. Held in the Long Nguyen and Kimmy Duong Forum on NOVA’s Annandale Campus, the event brought together more than 200 higher education leaders from across the nation to discuss how to improve college transfer processes, facilitate movement from one postsecondary educational institution to another and help today’s college students save time and money.

ADVANCE student Brionna Walker represented NOVA and shared her powerful journey. She then introduced U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who shared remarks by video.

“If we want to ‘Raise the Bar’ for educational attainment in this country and create more equitable outcomes in higher education, then we need leaders to dramatically level up their support for transfer students,” Secretary Cardona said. “Our current higher education system stacks the deck against community college students who aspire to earn four-year degrees — denying acceptance of their credits, forcing them to retake courses and ultimately making their educational journeys longer and costlier than they need to be.”

NOVA President Anne M. Kress delivered keynote remarks at the summit. “The resilience, the intelligence, the drive, the focus that our students show is demonstrated in the results that they achieve because they can transfer and succeed. For our students, through more than 40 different transfer and articulation pathways, all their credits will transfer, and all their time will count. We know that they will be successful. It takes sitting around tables like this focusing on how we can advise our students, how we can align our curriculum, and how we can help all our colleges work together. We want the transition to be as effective as it can be.”

The ADVANCE program (a NOVA and George Mason University transfer partnership) was highlighted as a leader in the transfer space. More than 3,000 NOVA students transfer to George Mason every year. The program was noted for furthering the conversation between the two institutions and for continued student success.

Further, President Kress and Dr. Eun-Woo Chang, NOVA’s vice president of academic affairs and chief academic officer, served on a panel titled “Busting Transfer Myths to Overcome Barriers to Learner Mobility,” alongside Anne Holton, current professor and former interim president of George Mason University, and Micol Hutchison, director of transfer with the Virginia Community College System. The panel was moderated by Angel Royal, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at the American Association of Community Colleges.

The panel tackled the myths that still persist around transfer processes, emphasizing the urgency for states and institutions to build transfer-receptive cultures — and effectively implement transfer policy and practice — to pave the way for students to make their aspirations a reality.

After the leadership panel, NOVA students took center stage for a panel, “Listening to and Learning from Transfer Students.” Brionna Walker returned as a panelist, alongside Jamar Pride, ADVANCE student and program ambassador and Hannah Choi, ADVANCE alum and current Mason graduate student. The panel was moderated by Ernest Ezuego, a strategy officer for federal policy at the Lumina Foundation.

“NOVA isn’t just a community college; it’s the college for the community,” said Pride.

“I come from a low-income family with parents who are both immigrants, and my parents were a big part of why I went to college,” said Choi. “They were a big part of my support system as a first-generation college student. I wouldn’t have grown without them.”

Walker added, “I originally was going to college for engineering and machinery since I wanted to build houses, but I stopped to take care of my family. I returned to complete my education due to the injustices I was seeing. I want to get into victim advocacy and work on judicial reform.”

The U.S. Department of Education recently released groundbreaking new data on transfers that spotlights the top two-year and four-year institutional partnership in each state. Building on this year’s summits on data-driven improvement of transfer processes, next year the Department of Education will convene leaders to address holistic advising and wraparound services, as well as career-relevant learning pathways, in an effort to help more institutions increase completion rates, close completion gaps and ensure all students are earning credentials of value that lead to economic opportunity.

Submitted by:
Hoang Nguyen, Assoc. Director of External Comms., HDNguyen@nvcc.edu