By Nina Payne
Trinity Times Correspondent
Students who transfer from one college to another often struggle to keep many of their credits when they transition to a new institution of higher education.
In many cases, transfer students must retake some of their courses or add on an additional semester to complete their bachelor’s degree.
With the new articulation agreement between New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College and Trinity Washington University, those transfer students graduating with an associate degree will have a seamless transfer into Trinity’s baccalaureate program.
The formal articulation agreement signing ceremony took place at Trinity’s campus July 25, 2023, where the presidents and provosts of both institutions came together to seal the deal.
This agreement is intended to create better opportunities for low-income students – who are often students of color – to extend their education beyond community college to the university level.
Trinity President Patricia McGuire told the Trinity Times that an articulation agreement is a contract between two institutions of higher education in which they agree to accept the academic credits earned in a two-year associate degree without a re-evaluation of each course by a university.
This agreement will allow BMCC graduates with an associate degree to easily transfer to Trinity since their courses would have already been vetted by the university’s academic team.
“At BMCC we strive to equalize access to a quality education, careers with family sustaining wages and an enhanced quality of life,” BMCC President Anthony E. Munroe said. “We are proud to strengthen this commitment with our collaboration with Trinity Washington University.”
This agreement ensures that if a BMCC graduate were to transfer to Trinity, they won’t fall behind.
“Effective transfer agreements are extremely important to encourage students who start out in community college programs to continue their education at advanced degree levels,” McGuire said. “A significant proportion of community college students are low-income students of color, students who can be easily discouraged by the bureaucracy, cost and even snobbishness of more traditional educational institutions.”
Trinity already has in place articulation agreements with several community colleges in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia.
Most of Trinity’s transfer students come from community colleges in the DMV.
The articulation agreement with BMCC is the first in Trinity’s history that comes from a school outside of the DMV, and McGuire hopes to expand other such pacts with colleges in other parts of the U.S.
The conversation of some sort of cooperation between the two institutions has been in the works since before the pandemic, and this past July these ideas came to fruition, said Carlota Ocampo, Trinity’s provost.
This new agreement allows BMCC graduates to seamlessly transfer into Trinity’s programs in the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Professional Studies.
The list of programs includes Business Administration, Criminal Justice, Psychology, Online Nursing RN to BSN, Public Health and various programs with both schools from an AA in Liberal Arts, allowing those students to pursue a variety of majors.
Like a dual enrollment – where high school students earn college and secondary school credits at the same time – students can earn their associate degree at BMCC and transfer to Trinity without missing a beat or losing any money, Ocampo said.
The agreement will also give these New York students an opportunity to attend university in the nation’s capital, she added, allowing current Trinity students to mix and mingle with people from other areas of the country, creating a diverse, healthy and harmonious community for everyone.
“First and most important, we hope that BMCC students who transfer to Trinity for their baccalaureate degrees will have an outstanding experience academically and socially, taking full advantage of the resources of Washington, and sharing in our Trinity friendships and traditions,” McGuire said.
These kinds of programs were on the mind of Miguel Cardona, Secretary of Education, during July’s U.S. Department of Education’s National Summit on Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, calling on universities throughout the country to “solve the nightmare that is transfer” by making transfer among schools seamless. McGuire hopes that Trinity’s new partnership with BMCC is a great example of how the university is responding to this kind of national need.