Forty students this year are kicking off the degree partnership program between Johnson County Community College and Kansas University.

The program aims to help students graduate with both associate and bachelor’s degrees and allows them to get “the best of both schools for four years,” said J.D. Gragg, articulation development coordinator with JCCC.

Gragg said the institutions had discovered that many students were trying to dual-enroll on their own — for instance, taking classes in Lawrence some days of the week and in Overland Park on the other days — but he said that can be pretty difficult. There is a lot of background paperwork involved, plus working with different academic advisers.

“So we set out to make that process easier and then expand on dual-enrollment,” he said.

Gragg said approximately 400 to 450 JCCC students transfer to KU each fall, and approximately 200 to 250 transfer each spring. In fall of 2013, 454 transferred to KU and 165 transferred to Kansas State University, which was the next-highest number of students, according to the Kansas Board of Regents.

The initial group of 40 are students who specifically identified as wishing to complete associate degrees at JCCC to eventually transfer to KU, said Mary Ryan, special assistant to the senior vice provost for academic affairs at KU.

“It’s a great group to start with and really learn from this first year about how we can improve the partnership for these students,” she said.

Gragg said the number was intentionally kept small for this year.

“As we’re building the system, a lot of the work is behind-the-scenes stuff: it’s a lot of working with the registrar, working with admissions, working with financial aid to do a lot of things very manually that eventually will become automatic once we get the systems,” he said, noting that KU and JCCC use entirely different software to manage student information — PeopleSoft and Banner, respectively.

The traditional model for transferring has been called 2+2, meaning students spend two years at a community college plus two years at a university. Gragg said he doesn’t believe this is the most successful model for students.

Students who start their first years at a university typically don’t wait until their third year of school to start taking upper-division courses, Gragg said, but instead get started once they meet prerequisite requirements. This partnership aims to open up the possibilities and allow students to take the “meat and potatoes” courses for their degrees much sooner, he said.

“Once (students in the program have) met the prereqs, they can start taking upper-division classes sooner, which all the research shows leads to more successful, higher rates of graduation, better grades and overall better performance,” he said.

Students will also benefit from being able to form faculty connections at both schools, as well as from shared advising, Ryan said.

“I think our counselors at the community college and the academic advisers at KU work really hard to collaborate and stay in touch about these students and our transfer students,” she said.

There is also the opportunity for students to participate in clubs and organizations at KU, as well as take part in some events.

“We are creating some special programming and did some of that in the fall, and will continue to do that this spring in terms of getting the transfer students together and just helping them feel more comfortable with the university,” Ryan said. “Both institutions are continuing to work out possibilities of programming we can enhance. Some of the students were invited to a KU football game this fall, for example, for the partnership.”

The program is open to all majors. It doesn’t necessarily mean that more classes will transfer as equivalents — although almost all of JCCC’s college-level courses transfer to KU already, at least as elective credits, Gragg said — but if students have completed all requirements for the associate of arts degree through JCCC, they can transfer to KU having completed the first three out of six goals of the KU Core curriculum.

Ryan said KU’s proximity to JCCC was a helpful factor in bringing this partnership to fruition, but the university would like to work on similar arrangements with other institutions in the future.

“We certainly would like to continue to explore this with Kansas City Kansas Community College and other community colleges,” she said.

Ryan said she believes this partnership is “really important work” the two institutions are attempting.

“In many ways we’ve been working on this for many, many years, but I think we continue to get better at it, and really understanding the unique needs of transfer students,” Ryan said.