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Cooke grant will help students transfer to UNC

The University is among eight colleges and universities to join the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation in a $27 million partnership aimed at enabling more community college students to earn bachelor.

UNC will receive almost $900,000 as a result of the partnership, the largest ever created to give these students access to top institutions of American higher education. UNC and the other schools will join the foundation to build model programs that enable academically qualified low- to moderate-income community college students to transfer to selective schools in unprecedented numbers. The other seven schools are Amherst College, Bucknell University, Cornell University, Mount Holyoke College, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California.

UNC’s efforts will focus on admitting and graduating transfer students from three area community colleges: Durham Technical Community College in Durham, Alamance Community College in Burlington, and Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh.

“We’re honored to be working with Jack Kent Cooke and with our neighbors in these three community colleges,” said Stephen Farmer, assistant provost and director of undergraduate admissions. “This grant will help more low- to moderate-income students find their way to Carolina. Just as important, it will help them succeed once they get here.”

Thomas Gould, assistant dean in University Transfer at Durham Technical Community College, echoed that sentiment.

“Durham Technical Community College is proud and excited to partner with the Carolina at in this important program,” Gould said. “This innovative initiative demonstrates the commitment of both institutions to the academic success of all citizens in our community. It also epitomizes the increasingly close working relationship between the community college and university system.”

To establish a four-year pilot for the initiative, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation is awarding grants totaling $6.77 million to the eight partner institutions, and the recipients are in turn committing $20.3 million in financial aid and other resources to expand or develop community college transfer programs that reach out to and support transfer students.

UNC will receive $898,789 from the foundation and contribute $2.3 million to the cause. The resulting partnership will create the Carolina Student Transfer Excellence Program (C-STEP). C-STEP will identify talented low- to moderate-income students while they are still in high school or early in their community college careers and guarantee their eventual transfer admission to UNC if they earn an associate degree and complete the C-STEP program at one of the partner colleges.

The program also will offer special events and advising, both at the students’ home college and at UNC, while they are pursuing their associate degrees, as well as provide exemplary financial aid and support services once they have enrolled at UNC and are pursuing their bachelor’s degrees. Qualifying students will be served by the Carolina Covenant, which enables students from low-income families to graduate from UNC debt-free through a combination of grants, scholarships and federal work-study.

By the end of the four-year pilot, at least 225 students will be participating at UNC and at the three partner colleges. The program aims not just to admit these students to UNC, but to provide the transition and support services that will help them graduate and on time.

“Our program is grounded in the principle that admission alone is a false promise unless it leads to excellence,” Farmer said. “Getting admitted is important, but it’s not nearly as important as graduating.”

Last year, UNC enrolled 157 community college transfer students, including 79 from Durham Technical Community College, Alamance Community College and Wake Technical Community College. By the end of the grant’s four-year term, C-STEP will serve 225 students and will increase by at least 35 the number of junior transfers enrolling at UNC from the three colleges.

SLICE provides taste of campus life for students, faculty and staff

Faculty, staff and students have a new way to weave through the maze of events and happenings on the UNC campus. Student Life Integrated Calendar of Events (SLICE), a new web site, is now available to everyone.

Events listed on slice.unc.edu, while posted by student organizations, are open to the entire campus community. Avoiding event overlap was the driving force behind the creation of SLICE. That’s why the developers from the Division of Student Affairs and Carolina students worked with many different groups — from the Faculty Council to the Orange County Visitor’s Bureau.

A quick search of the SLICE site allows groups to maximize possible participation before scheduling events.

“When there are several events at the same time, they lose impact,” said Mark Laabs, a senior who helped develop the web site. “SLICE can help prevent overlap and enhance the efforts of these groups.”

This is valuable for a campus that has struggled to communicate the range of events and activities available, said Laabs.

“There were many events that I did not learn about until I read about them a day later in the newspaper,” he said. “Through SLICE, hopefully we can provide more publicity for events before they take place.”

Along with SLICE, student organizations now have access to Mambo, an easy web site creation software program. Mambo does not require any knowledge of HTML, the code used to make a typical web site.

Brian Payst, UNC’s Director of Technology and Systems Support in the Divison of Student Affairs, was one of the major contributors to Mambo and SLICE.

“This tool came about because I noticed that a lot of student groups did not have web sites,” he said. “Or, if they did, these sites had not been updated in a long time. Either they did not know how to create at web site or did not have the resources. I wanted to find a way for all groups to easily build and maintain web sites.”

Mambo provides that framework, Payst noted.

“It offers a lot of the infrastructure, the students just need to write the content,” he said. “Once the information is on the student group web site, it will automatically be added to SLICE. We developed a program that pulls any updated calendar information from the student Mambo sites into SLICE every half hour. It is an easy process for all involved.”

The information is important, as UNC’s student organizations regularly bring relevant and interesting speakers to campus.

SLICE can provide professors with speakers or events to complement and enhance their own curricula.

By looking at the types of events appearing regularly on SLICE, administrators and other interested parties can gauge the issues and interests prevalent at any given moment in the campus community, Payst said.

SLICE has been a collaborative partnership between student affairs and students, Payst said. “We provided the technical expertise and the students provided content and helped spread the word.”