At Loyola, other four-year colleges, a chance to earn a two-year associate degree as a start

Jazmin Mejia went straight from high school to what she thought was the perfect fit at Loyola University Chicago, a 30-minute drive from the neighborhood where she grew up.

But Mejia was quickly overwhelmed at the North Side campus of nearly 17,000 students.

“The classes were too big,” says Mejia, 18. “I was struggling to ask for help.”

A year later, she says college has become much more manageable.

Mejia left Loyola’s main campus in favor of the university’s Arrupe College, a two-year program downtown that offers associate degrees. Taking smaller classes with instructors who interact more with students has been a game-changer for her.

“The professors try to communicate with you and try to understand your situation,” Mejia says over breakfast in the Arrupe cafeteria.

Two-year associate degrees have long been offered almost exclusively at community colleges. But the model pioneered at Loyola is picking up steam at private, not-for-profit four-year universities around the country. Many are Jesuit schools like Loyola and say lower-cost two-year associate degree programs particularly help students who need the most support.

“It’s a reach-in culture,” says the Rev. Thomas Neitzke, Arrupe’s dean. “It’s that total wraparound both in the classroom and outside the classroom.”

Now, there’s a concerted push to expand associate degree programs at four-year universities. It’s largely being championed by Steve Katsouros, Arrupe’s founding dean and the president and chief executive officer of the Come to Believe Network, a nonprofit focused on bringing two-year degrees to four-year schools.

The network provides grants to help universities start associate degree programs, according to Katsouros. In addition to Loyola, schools that have opened or plan to open two-year colleges include the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, the University of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City, Butler University in Indiana and Boston College.

A handful of other schools, such as the University of the Pacific in California, are separately considering programs. And Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation nonprofit, is exploring partnering with Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles to create an associate degree program.

Even just considering the concept can help a college learn more about the needs of its broader student body, Katsouros says. Programs in the Come to Believe Network must commit to enrolling lower-income students and keeping students’ loan debt to a minimum. At Arrupe, the advertised tuition is a little over $13,000 a year, though scholarships and work-study programs mean most students pay about $2,000.

“We try to identify the factors that prevent students from being successful,” Katsouros says, noting that most of the colleges also offer some combination of free meals, laptops and housing.

Data is sparse for the fledgling programs, but the hope is that most graduates will go on to finish bachelor’s degrees at universities. Even modest success in that endeavor would be a huge improvement over national success rates at community colleges.

While 80% of community college students say they plan to get bachelor’s degrees, only 16% do it within six years, according to the Aspen Institute and the Community College Research Center, or CCRC, at Teachers College, Columbia University. The numbers are even worse for low-income (11%), Black (9%) and Hispanic (13%) students. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

While it’s hard to compare millions of community college students to the relative handful who attend these new two-year programs, the differences are stark. At Loyola’s Arrupe College, for instance, 50% of students graduate, and 70% of them continue to bachelor’s degree programs.

More universities should be offering associate degrees, according to Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the CCRC.

“These are institutions that could use their prestige and dedication to high-quality teaching to really onboard students” who would otherwise not attend college, Jenkins says. “This is building a bridge into the college, using the college’s strength.”

Most of the new programs guarantee graduates admission to the parent campus. At Butler University, which will open its two-year Founder’s College to 100 students next year, students who graduate from Founder’s with good enough grades will automatically be able to finish their bachelor’s degrees at the university, according to Brooke Barnett, Butler’s provost.

Students will have no debt after the first two years, Barnett says, and those who go on to Butler will pay no more than a total of $10,000 for the full four years. Founder’s College is being funded entirely by foundations and donors, she says, and will fulfill the university’s longtime goal of offering low-cost degrees to underrepresented students.

“We want to give students the opportunity to flourish and shine and show the talents they can bring,” Barnett says. “They have not always been given those opportunities.”

Some universities, including Butler, are using the associate degree programs as an opportunity to introduce students to the main campus without overwhelming them with huge classes. Others, including Loyola and Boston College, are keeping associate students separate to ease them into college life.

Boston College’s new Messina College will open to 100 students this summer about a mile from the main campus on property it acquired from a college that closed. Messina College leaders hope the initial isolation will help avoid the culture shock of a large campus and keep students from dropping out.

“There’s a great advantage in having our students start off in that smaller setting,” says Erick Berrelleza, Messina’s founding dean.

Though the concept of universities offering associate degrees is relatively new, community colleges in about half the country have introduced bachelor’s degrees in a handful of disciplines in the past decade — an innovation universities haven’t always welcomed.

Before Idaho approved a plan in March for a community college to offer bachelor’s degrees, Boise State University argued against the proposal, essentially saying it would step on the university’s toes.

“Indeed, it could hurt effective and efficient postsecondary education in Idaho,” the university wrote to the state Board of Education, “cannibalizing limited resources available to postsecondary education and duplicating degree offerings in the same region.”

Community colleges have not yet voiced concerns about universities offering associate degrees, and the CCRC’s Jenkins says there’s no reason for community colleges to worry about these relatively small two-year programs. Still, he says, it will be important for universities to collaborate with community colleges.

“Where it’s been done well, there’s been negotiation,” he says. “I would hope this would encourage community colleges to partner with four-year institutions.”

Several four-year schools say they had not talked formally with community colleges before starting associate programs. That includes the University of Mount Saint Vincent, which will open its new two-year Seton College this summer on its campus in the Bronx.

A spokesman for Bronx Community College declined to answer questions about the Mount Saint Vincent program. The borough’s other community college, Hostos, did not respond to interview requests.

St. Thomas University opened its associate degree program in 2017. There has been no friction between the university and St. Paul College, the closest community college. St. Paul College leaders have been supportive of the initiative, according to Austin Calhoun, a St. Paul spokeswoman.

“That’s 200 more students in the Twin Cities per year getting access to higher education,” she says. “St. Thomas is definitely the outlier. If the University of Minnesota got in the game, that would be a different scale.”

At Arrupe College, sophomore Jonathan Larbi was splitting time between school and a campus job in the admissions office while preparing to continue his education at Loyola next year. Larbi, who hopes to go to medical school and become a pediatrician, grew up in Chicago and Ghana and had planned to go to Loyola straight out of high school, “but it wasn’t the smartest financial decision.”

Starting at Arrupe has worked well, he says, since he feels like a Loyola student but doesn’t have to pay the university’s $50,000-plus tuition.

“It’s kind of the best of both worlds,” he says. “Their resources are our resources.”