Second Annual Gateway/Parkside Articulation Summit

Last week Friday, March 15th 2019, leaders from UW-Parkside and Gateway Technical College came together to help students better navigate the journey to earning a post-secondary degree. This second annual articulation summit event allows these institutions the time to better align curriculum and program requirements so that students can seamlessly go from an associate’s degree program at Gateway to a bachelors program at UW-Parkside.

Currently, less than half of adults in our region, in Wisconsin, and the country, have post-secondary credentials, and as indicated in our Racine County Labor Force Survey, 55 percent of hard-to-fill jobs will require post-secondary credentials in the next two years. Across the country, institutions are working to make college completion attainable for all students, and as a Lumina Talent Hub, Racine and Kenosha Counties have been elevated as national leaders in this work.

Since the first summit in 2018, big steps towards this goal have been made. UW-Parkside and Gateway worked together to revise their agreement format and map the process of transferring, conduct a process mapping for a General Studies agreement, sign a student level data-sharing agreement, and create the collaborative advising network. In fact, the Higher Education Regional Alliance (HERA) in southeastern Wisconsin has marked this partnership a demonstration site for best practices and highlighted their template for articulation as a key factor for the successes of the partnership.

This year’s summit, the focus was on revising and revamping these articulation agreements to better meet the needs of students and adapt to accreditation changes for certain degree programs. Additionally, the shared data agreement helped show just how many students are transferring schools still undecided about a major, and that transfers happen both from Gateway into Parkside, and from Parkside to Gateway.

In the next year, the hope is to increase the number of programs with articulation agreements and create more pathways to high value post-secondary degrees. As Racine and Kenosha counties continue to be leaders in creating pathways to careers through the Talent Hub, the hope is to continue to scale these efforts to impact more students around the area, state, and country.

To learn more about the transferable degree programs at Gateway and Parkside: click here.