District gets $500K grant to ease transfer process

The Alamo Colleges District, which transfers nearly 20,000 students each year to fouryear institutions, is clarifying those pathways for students trying to navigate them, officials said Friday.

A three-year, $499,840 grant from the Greater Texas Foundation based in Bryan will create a student degree planning portal that will provide “seamless transfers to the district’s college and university partner institutions,” according to the district.

Alamo Colleges Chancellor Mike Flores said the college district has about 18,000 students “having a university upper division experience” through concurrent enrollment at a university or plans to transfer.

The grant will fund the district’s Credit Mobility Project, initially working through the University of Texas at San Antonio, “with the hope that we develop proof of concept and are able to bring it to scale with” 20-plus other university partners, he said at a press conference Friday.

“What we’re going to do is hardwire and provide a student-facing platform that provides a seamless experience for all of our 73,000-plus students to be able to transfer to UTSA or Texas A&M-SAN Antonio, or any of our private university partners, Flores said.

The district had 88,837 transfers in the five years ending in 2021. UTSA by far led the way with 18,371 student transfers, according to the district.

Texas A&M University-san Antonio came in a distant second with 8,390 transfers in that period, followed by Texas State University in San Marcos with 5,280; Texas A&M in College Station with 3,831; and the University of the Incarnate Word with 3,056 transfers.

Alamo Colleges and UTSA both have touted improvements to academic efficiencies in the past decade. The college district has reduced the number of credit hours its graduates completed toward associate’s degrees, from 92 hours to 65 hours — just above the minimum 60 hours required. UTSA, meanwhile, has lowered the average time for students to graduate with a four-year degree, from 5.4 years to 4.3 years, university President Taylor Eighmy said.

The end goal is “to have every one of our students realize their potential and opportunity by becoming educated and going off and making the world a better place,” Eighmy said.

“Our collective purpose as institutions of higher education is founded on this premise that we’re all born with the same potential but not given the same opportunities, and a higher education degree, a two- or four-year degree, is one of the most powerful, transformative things that can happen in a person’s life and affect deeply their trajectory,” he added.

About 45 percent of UTSA’S undergraduates transferred from twoyear programs, and half of those are “ACD kids,” Eighmy said.

Tania Kaur, a junior at UIW with a double major in sociology and political science, said she “found another one of my loves — sociology” while attending St. Philip’s College. The “wonderful advisors at Alamo Colleges” walked her through the transfer process, she said, including course registration and transfer agreements, then putting her in contact with transfer advisors at UIW.

“As a first generation student who quite literally did not know what she was doing, that help was critical for my success,” Kaur said.