Richard Davenport, president of Minnesota State University, Mankato, is looking for ways to make it easier for students at two-year colleges to transfer to the four-year university, and is embarking on a statewide tour to make it happen, starting at Riverland Community College.
To make the often-frustrating transfer process easier on students, Davenport hopes to establish partnerships with two-year colleges across the state, which potentially would offer some of the Mankato university's upper division courses and programs on the two-year campuses.
According to James Douglass, director of communications at Riverland, the college already has an articulation agreement with Minnesota State University, Mankato for programs such as business, human service, auto service, music, theater, art and computer technology.
About 40 percent of students at the Mankato school are transfer students, according to Davenport, and most of them come from Riverland.
"We get more transfer students from Riverland than we do from any other two-year college, so Riverland is a very important school for us to work with," said Davenport. "We want to have a greater presence at Riverland and try to make a difference for the students and make life a little easier for them. It's so expensive to go to a university nowadays ... so we just have to change our practices to figure out how to reach them and help them pursue their higher education goals."
MSU enrolled about 1,000 new transfer students for the fall 2007 semester, 70 from Riverland. The university wants to increase enrollment from 14,500 to 20,000 in the coming years, Davenport said.
"Of course that's one objective, but the other thing is that our stats prove that transfer students tend to do better than the entering freshmen academically. The retention is much higher . ... Obviously it's going to be less expensive for students."
Davenport's tour -- the first of its kind for a Minnesota university president -- started Nov. 6 at Riverland Community College in Austin, and will continue over the next several months.
Davenport plans to visit all 25 of the two-year public colleges in the state, as well as some in central Iowa.
"I want to send a really strong message to two-year colleges," said Davenport. "I want to reach the students to say we want to help you. We want to make sure we hear what the students say. We need to do everything possible to simplify the transfer process for these students."
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