Credit Evaluation
Written by Christopher Prawdzik
MAE 2010 Volume: 5 Issue: 2 (March)
In 1972, Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges (SOC) became the instrument by which military personnel—who frequently change station—were able to better complete their college degree programs amid the various circumstances that sometimes send them around the world at almost a moment’s notice.
Funded by the Defense Department, and in conjunction with the Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support (DANTES) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, SOC allows highly mobile military personnel to remain connected to their degrees and finish them with assurance that previous coursework—as well as practical military experience—can translate into credit earned and get them closer to their degree.
With the help of the American Council on Education (ACE), which basically coordinates institutions of higher learning, it was a way for servicemembers to get credit without additional classroom time.
With cooperation from institutions of higher learning across the country, not only is it now easier and easier for military personnel to transfer credit from one school to another, but they also have a variety of options that consider experience earned in the military as credit toward a college degree.
MAINTAINING COURSE
According to Amy Moorash, chief of academic advising for Stone Education Center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington, such efforts are essential for military personnel who continue to gain a wealth of experience in the military. Before arriving at Lewis-McChord, she served as an education services officer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for 18 months after serving six years at Army Continuing Education System headquarters in Alexandria, Va.
“I went from writing the policy and having it done through the proponency offices, and then down actually to the education centers where the day-to-day grind is done,” Moorash said. “So, in my role at headquarters, I had a lot of exposure to working with the Department of Defense and the Army’s programs and organizations that are designed to support maximum award of credit for servicemembers who have to move frequently.”
With that experience, she noted that the biggest challenge to servicemembers and families was that multiple deployments and permanent change of station moves meant different education centers, new schools and different choices at each location.
“We would never want to have a situation where—because the Army was moving someone frequently—it resulted in having the servicemember need to change schools repeatedly and then lose a number of credits,” Moorash said. That’s where SOC comes in. As a nonprofit organization, it becomes, in a sense, an “academic adviser” for students—a way for them to ensure their credits transfer among schools.
“If you’re a particular MOS [Military Occupational Specialty], and you have a specialty that the Army has trained you on, that time that you spend learning that material is worth college credit for you, and so the American Council on Education evaluated all of those MOSes,” she said. “The colleges that were part of SOC agreed to accept ACE recommended credit at a maximum level, so that servicemembers didn’t have to sit in college classes longer than necessary to prove their proficiency in a particular subject area.”
All SOC schools are voluntary participants, with about 1,800 schools participating to date.
“They want to do it because they recognize that servicemembers are going to put their money where their mouth is and go to a school that recognizes the unique struggles and challenges that they have as servicemembers,” Moorash said. “The other thing that SOC … allowed us to do, which took SOC even a step further, is it took a group of colleges and universities … all of which were regionally accredited, who agreed to two-way transferability of credit among those other member institutions.”
What it meant for the Army was that colleges and universities agreed to accept the credit from one of the other SOC schools for the previous courses taken.
Crucial to this is the SOC student agreement, Moorash said. It’s basically a contract between the servicemember and the college. The agreement encompasses all prior learning for the student and determines the maximum award for all courses, experience and credits an individual has accumulated for their particular degree requirement. It then outlines what that student has yet to complete to get the degree.
For the remaining courses, students receive a category code so they can search catalogs at other universities to see which courses may be available and where. Also, if degree requirements change after a student agreement is completed and signed, the servicemember’s degree program is grandfathered so future changes don’t affect the degree program, she added.
Of course, students often choose a non- SOC institution, but Moorash said in that case they work to counsel the student so he or she fully understands the ramifications of changing schools, and that some credits may not transfer.
“In some cases it really can’t be avoided,” she said. “It may really be that you started out in a particular degree field and you found out through the process of taking classes in that degree program that it really isn’t for you.”
OFF BASE AND ON CAMPUS
As with education centers on military installations, however, SOC is also a focus for off-base institutions, such as Empire State College, State University of New York, in Saratoga Springs.
“Because we also have students design their own degree program plans, we have, I think, a little more flexibility than other schools in that we can try to maximize that transfer credit by looking at exactly what they’re trying to bring in and include it in different ways in a degree program that works for them,” said Linda Frank, director of veteran and military education at Empire.
She noted that flexibility is crucial for students to guarantee transferability with SOC courses. She also lauded the SOC student agreements, which help other institutions do their best to award the credit earned by that student.
One challenge for schools is the difference between regional and national accreditation. According to Frank, however, Empire State College doesn’t have problems that other institutions might. Even though it is a regionally accredited school, Empire accepts credits from nationally accredited schools through an individual evaluation process.
“We assign an evaluator to work with them; the evaluator interviews them … and then the evaluator awards the credit based on the knowledge that they have expressed.”
While not a “testing” period per se, Frank said it’s basically a knowledge interview. With such an individualized effort, she said it was easy for Empire to become a SOC member.
“There are a number of schools who don’t seem to be familiar with the extensiveness of the ACE recommended credits and how valuable that is to military students,” Frank said. “We’ve invited ACE to come to our campus a couple of times, and they’ve done workshops for us and for other schools in the area ... [to describe] the process that they go through for evaluating that credit.”
She added that what Empire finds most important is to be fully prepared and armed with the information students need. “The students will follow the directions as long as the information is clear, so for them to know how to prepare, they need to know from the school who the point of contact is and which offices to deal with,” she said.
COMMUNITY EFFORT
In addition to four-year institutions, community colleges also are options for military personnel, and they can still get credit for many of their military experiences, often when they don’t even know it.
At Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio, for example, the school had 90 transcripts come in from individuals in the Army and 15 from the other military branches last year. Registrar Regina Randall Peal said the “smart transcript” from ACE is great because they get an ACE guide number, and the school can just use that guide number to see which sets of courses that the guide number transfers to.
“For example, if you’re looking at what they’ve done with regard to human resources, there would be a set of courses that we would bring that into,” she said. “So it could be four or maybe even five courses that they would get credit for.”< p> Oftentimes, it is the “nontraditional credit,” which would count toward any degree they might pursue, she said. At Columbus, the associate’s degree is the highest degree attainable, but students can also pursue certificates if they better suit a student’s educational needs.
“We work with the chairs of our various departments, and primarily, they’re the technical courses … because, of course those in the military primarily are working in technical fields,” Randall Peal said. “Engineering, human resources, other types of sports and exercise…business administration, those are the types of courses that actually have come in [from military personnel].”
For Columbus, however, the school might just be one step in a college career. Randall Peal noted the fact that the advising system set up in the school also is designed to help students transfer to a four-year institution, and faculty advisers work closely with students to make sure they’re on track when they transfer.
CORPS CURRICULUM
Whether a community or four-year institution, standardization of the process, spurred by SOC, is of the utmost importance when dealing with highly mobile and frequently deployed troops.
Perhaps more than any other service, the Marines fall into the category of frequently deployed. Belinda Jones, a contractor and senior education analyst with Indtai Inc., works at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., and says standardization is key when dealing with transfer of credit from one school to the other.
While she says different services sometimes use different methods, SOC utilization is important because of the guarantee in most cases of credit transfer from one school to the next.
But with this standardization, the Marines take it a step further. According to Jones, a Marine must have an entire degree plan mapped out by the time he or she reaches 12 credit hours.
“They have to sit down with one of our advisers,” Jones said. “We put that in our policy, and we really adhere to that. At 12 [hours], they get flagged in our system.”
It’s a directive from headquarters, and it goes right down to the installation level, where Marines have their plan determined at about the first semester mark in their higher education career.
She said you can’t make a student go to a SOC network school, but they emphasize the importance of getting as much earned credit as possible and the ways to do it.
“If they decide they don’t want to [attend a SOC school], we really let them know it’s up to that academic institution to accept that credit,” Jones said. “We will try our best and will refer them to the ones we know that they’re really not going to have any problems with.”
But she also added that she’s not seen a case with a Marine where there has been a big issue with transferring credit, or a school being inflexible and not understanding the training and effort put forth by the Marines.
In fact, cooperation is at its height and continues to grow. It’s just a matter of military personnel realizing there are institutions out there willing to work with them.
“When [academic institutions] call us,” Jones said, “they’re asking us how they can be more accommodating.” ♦