Objective: Problems with credit mobility, or the transfer of credits from a sending to a receiving institution, may be one reason why community college transfer students have low rates of bachelor’s degree completion. This study investigates different policy approaches to credit mobility and how college staff and students experience transfer at the campus level. Method: The study utilizes data from policy documents and legislative statutes, phone interviews with higher education system officials, and college staff across 10 states, and interview data with students and staff collected during site visits to 2- and 4-year colleges in Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. Results: We categorized credit mobility policies across a continuum, from system-wide transfer initiatives to local-level institution-to-institution approaches. We refer to these different policy systems as 2 + 2, credit equivalency, and institution-driven. Across the systems, policies may not be working as intended because many transfer students do not select a major and destination institution early enough in their community college career to avoid credit loss. Moreover, institutions may lack capacity to provide personalized support to students interested in transfer early in their career. Contributions: We provide a new framework to understand different policy approaches to ensuring transfer students’ credits transfer and apply to their major, and offer research, policy, and practice considerations to improve credit mobility across different policy systems.
Some liberal societies continue to require their schools to offer non-directive, but specifically religious education as part of the curriculum. This paper challenges that practice. It does so by articulating and defending a moral principle, which asserts that education policy must be regulated by principles that are acceptable to reasonable people. Thereafter, we argue that the leading arguments for prioritizing the study of religion in schools-arguments that claim that religion is special or that assert that the majority or parents are morally permitted to prioritise religion in schooling-are incompatible with the acceptability requirement.
In an oft-neglected chapter of his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith applies his economic arguments to the question of religious groups, arguing that a peaceable society is most efficiently secured not by state sponsorship of religion, but by an absence of support; in essence a free market of religious ideas. This article applies Smith's insights, and the wealth of supporting material from the intervening years, to the question of Islamic radicalisation in the UK. Contrary to current attempts to produce and support 'moderate' Islamic groups via state subsidy, I argue that such action actually runs the risk of fuelling extremism. The UK's Preventing Violent Extremism agenda is based on a mistaken assumption about why individuals join radical groups, as well as a false picture of how religious groups operate.
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