Metropolitan State College of Denver is bringing bachelor’s degrees to community college, targeting two campuses with large numbers of African-American and Latino students.
The goal is to give community-college students – many of whom are single parents, low-income or older, working adults – the most convenient way to earn a four-year degree.
An added plus: It could bring a bit of relief to the overcrowded, three-college Auraria campus, where classrooms are booked from early morning to late evening.
The program, unique in Colorado, starts next month at Front Range Community College in Westminster. Next fall, Metro State plans to expand it to the Community College of Aurora.
“These are programs that will be available to every student – no question about that – but we think we can make some very specific inroads for students of color,” said Metro State president Stephen Jordan.
About 15 percent of students at Front Range are Latino, while about 21 percent of students at the Community College of Aurora are African-American.
One of Metro State’s motives is to boost graduation rates for students of color.
Just 44 percent of minority college students in Colorado make it to graduation, compared with 55 percent nationwide.
And more than half of minority college students in Colorado go to two-year community colleges instead of four-year schools.
The Front Range program will start with 10 Metro State classes and three majors – marketing, behavioral science and elementary education.
Administrators hope to extend the degree options to include Spanish, psychology, criminal justice and technical communications within a few years.
The choices resulted from a student survey at Front Range, where college president Karen Reinertson is asking professors and deans to pitch the program to students who have nearly enough credits for an associate’s degree.
“This is a smaller, easier-to- cope-with environment,” Reinertson said. “Some people don’t relish the idea of running down to the Auraria campus.”
Besides the commute, finding parking is often a battle at Auraria, which Metro State shares with the Community College of Denver and the University of Colorado at Denver.
In the first two weeks of registration, about 20 students have signed up for a Metro State course at Front Range. About 1,000 students are eligible, and administrators predict dozens more will register by next month.
Among those already signed up is Robin Padilla, a 38-year-old single mother of two who also works full time as a nurse. She plans to take Metro State’s upper-division courses in sociology and psychology in the spring to begin her path to a bachelor’s degree.
“I can get all the classes I need without running in circles,” Padilla said.
Full-time Metro State faculty will teach the courses, traveling to Westminster one or two days per week.
Communications professor Clark Germann expects to teach three courses at Auraria, plus a night class on Mondays and Wednesdays at Front Range. He volunteered when he heard about the program, called “2-plus-2” because students take two years with each institution.
“I feel very strongly about what we do at Metro,” Germann said. “We need to make it as easy as possible for our students to get bachelor’s degrees.”
In future years, Jordan hopes to expand the program to other community colleges. The Metro State president also wants to use fiber-optic links and video so that one professor could teach a course on three campuses, visiting each class every week or so.
The college will pay for the program through tuition and the per-student state funding it already receives.
Metro State studied similar programs in North Carolina, California and Florida before developing its plan. Jordan also followed the model at Eastern Washington University, where he was president before coming to Metro State a year and a half ago.
At least one other four-year school in Colorado, Adams State College in Alamosa, partners with a community college to offer seamless transfer. But Metro State is the only one offering bachelor’s degrees on a community-college campus.
“We can encourage them to continue their education, bringing their bachelor’s degree to them instead of making them come downtown to get it,” said Judi Diaz Bonacquisti, associate vice president for enrollment.
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
20
Students who have registered for Metro State College courses at Front Range Community College
44%
Minority college students in Colorado who graduate
55%
Minority college students nationwide who graduate
15%
Latino students at Front Range
21%
African-American students at Community College of Aurora
