CSUN Connections is one of California’s first reverse transfer initiative, aligning California State University, Northridge and the Los Angeles Community College District in supporting stopped out students with degree bearing credits.
CSUN Connections is a reverse transfer initiative between Cal State Northridge and three LA Community college District campuses (LA Mission, LA Pierce, and LA Valley). This pilot in the Los Angeles area has two distinct tracks. The first, a traditional model of credit recovery reverse transfer, in which students who transferred to a four-year institution without earning an Associates degree and subsequently left without earning a Bachelor’s degree, can combine credits to earn the two-year degree. The second and innovative new model, creates a pathway for four-year students who are academically disqualified after their first year to seamlessly transfer to a community college, earn an Associate degree for transfer and return to CSUN and continue their degree program where they left off. This partnership was born of the L.A. Compact, a Cradle-to-Career effort that works across education sectors, government, business, and labor organizations to address inequities and barriers in our educational and workforce development systems.
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CSUN Connections charted a new path in reverse transfer. Traditionally, reverse transfer goes one way, in which students recover credits lost in the process between transferring from a two-year to four-year institution. In the same fashion of leaving an institution without a degree, CSUN Connections identified this as an issue in the California higher ed ecosystem, but for students beginning in a four-year institution. With no existing support systems, this collaborative found that students who were academically disqualified from CSUN after their first year had no known alternative educational paths. As such, CSUN Connections was also designed to interact with these students immediately before their disqualification and afterwards, in order to help them transfer into a community college and set a plan to return to CSUN with an Associate degree.
CSUN Connections was always designed to be a pilot in the LA region. The LA Compact, which as acted as the backbone of the initiative, works with numerous two- and four-year institutions in the region and across the state and has actively worked with the original collaborative partners to document the project processes, in order to replicate it among other campuses. Throughout the course of the CSUN Connections’ existence, the partners have shared these processes and findings with other campuses in order to support their own reverse transfer goals. In as such, UNITE-LA, CSUN, and LACCD are working to expand the partnership to other campuses and subsequently extend benefits that have been mutually agreed upon to those other causes, in effort to support more students.
IntersectLA is an interdisciplinary team of motivated CSUN students developing strategic experiences that elevate businesses, organizations, and communities through creative collaboration and design. IntersectLA was chosen as the media and marketing partner for the CSUN Connections initiative, as they are a part of the CSUN community and entirely composed of student creators. Teams of students, for the most part transfer students themselves, have developed all of the marketing, communications, design, and educational materials about the program that are regularly sent to students eligible to take part in the program. This peer-to-peer strategy has been invaluable throughout the process.
