Beyond Free College

Beyond Free College outlines an audacious national agendaconsistent with, but far more comprehensive than, the current free college movementthat builds on the best of US higher educations populist history such as the G.I. Bill and the community college transfer function. The authors align a wide constellation of higher education trendsonline learning, prior learning assessment, competency-based learning, high school college-credit with a rapidly shifting student transfer environment that privileges college credit as the pivotal educational catalyst to boost access and completion. The books agenda seeks greater productive investment in postsecondary education by privileging a single metriclower-cost-per-degree-grantedas the animating driver of a transfer pathway that will fulfill the potential of its historical, progressive innovators. Beyond Free Colleges goal is as simple as it is urgent: To galvanize higher education advocates in an effort to reorganize, reorient, and reignite the transfer function to serve the needs of a neotraditional student population that now constitutes the majority of college-goers in America; and in ways that advance completion, not just access to higher education.