GREENFIELD — For many Massachusetts college students, transferring credits from one college to another can be a nightmare.
Being unable to receive credit for college courses and ending up having to retake them at their new school means time, money and frustration and, for some, it’s enough to cause them to give up entirely.
That’s what Commissioner Carlos Santiago of the state Department of Higher Education wants to change, and he’s already begun working to do it, he told a gathering of local leaders, college faculty and students at Greenfield Community College Wednesday afternoon.
He spent the day on campus, attending meetings and touring the college as part of a tour of the state’s higher education institutions.
Santiago said fostering cooperation and communication among the state’s public colleges and universities has become one of his top priorities as he seeks to reduce barriers to a quality education across the system.
Changes in the nature of how higher education is delivered, including for-profit and online colleges that are loosely regulated, has brought higher education in Massachusetts to a crossroads, he said, and it will be important to make accessing public higher education easier for students going forward.
“Education is a major industry, and it’s the lifeblood not only of areas like Boston but also of communities like Greenfield,” Santiago said. “We have one of the most knowledge-based economies in the country.”
Last year, Santiago said, he was able to gather educators from each campus in some of the most popular fields for transfer students — like political science, economics, psychology, sociology, chemistry and biology — to come to an agreement on what the foundational courses of those majors are, then match them up among the schools and agree that they’ll be accepted for credit.
“I think higher education needs to begin acting more like a system,” he said. “We’re trying to create a unified system of transfer across all of our institutions, so that a student from Greenfield can transfer credits to any four-year public institution. We’ve never had that.”
Next year, Santiago said, he hopes to expand those agreements to cover 16 disciplines, which together account for nearly 70 percent of the state’s college transfer students.
Santiago also said he hopes to expand opportunities for Massachusetts high school students to experience college-level courses before they graduate, whether that’s through dual enrollment or college staff teaching in their schools, as well as early education opportunities.
“That’s where the neurons are connecting,” he said. “When you talk about someone going into a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) field, early education is the key; that’s where it’s going to happen. Student success doesn’t start in college, it starts a lot earlier.”
He also acknowledged that Massachusetts does a poor job providing adequate need-based aid to students, currently ranked 49th in the nation. MassGrant aid, he said, has gone from covering 40 percent of student tuition and fees to just 10 percent.
And it’s the community colleges, he said, that acutely feel the lack of aid, where some students are homeless and many of the schools have opened food pantries.
In light of that, Santiago said, the state’s new Commonwealth Commitment program, which will allow students who start a degree program at a community college and transfer to a four-year school within 2½ years to receive rebates and reductions in tuition and fees, is designed to make college more affordable for students.
“This is a completion initiative. Our students work, they struggle with life, and they need resources,” he said.
Transportation and poverty — both major issues in rural Franklin County — also present obstacles to local students trying to get an advanced degree, but Santiago told The Recorder that his department has less of an ability to solve those problems.
“What we can do is get the institutions to work on college affordability over all,” he said. “We’ve been doing some work on how to lower book costs for students, for instance. Things that we have some control over. But Massachusetts has a decentralized system of higher education and the campuses have a lot of autonomy, so what we try to do is get them to learn from each other — who has the best option for students and how can other campuses learn from that.”
Santiago started at the DHE in April 2013 as the senior deputy commissioner for academic affairs.
You can reach Tom Relihan at: trelihan@recorder.com
or 413-772-0261, ext. 264