Negar Farakish

This journal article examines how students at six community colleges identified and weighed possible transfer destination colleges, and how dedicated and personalized advisement shaped students’ transfer plans and contributed to their transfer outcomes.

In this Innovative Higher Education article, the authors examine the development and dissolution of a partnership between a privately held firm and six community colleges, which had established honors programs with the goal of facilitating students' transfer to selective institutions.

In 2012, Quad Learning partnered with two community colleges to pilot American Honors, a program designed to help academically talented community college students overcome the challenges of transferring to more selective four-year destinations. This paper traces the components of the program's socially conscious theory of change, its for-profit business model, and the tensions between the two.

Based on a mixed-methods study at six colleges, this brief examines the domestic population served by American Honors; its key programmatic features; and community college student, faculty, and staff perspectives on the program.