Faculty Spotlight: Mark D’Amico brings passion for student success to work in transfer process improvement and non-credit program data studies

Since his first role at UNC Charlotte as a graduate assistant in what was then the Office of Adult Students and Evening Services, Mark D’Amico has been dedicated to helping students get access to the education they seek. Now as a professor of higher education, D’Amico has taken this mission and run with it.

D’Amico describes his early career experience as the true roots of his research interests. “When I was in admissions, no matter the institution where I was, I had this assumption that if universities and community colleges that were in or near the same town had a good relationship, that transfer should be easy. But I spent way too much time sitting across a desk from students telling them how their credits would not transfer, how they were going to lose time, how they burned their Pell Grant eligibility and all the other ways that transfer was going to be inefficient for them. It took me shifting to work at a community college to realize that it wasn’t necessarily bad decision making among students; it was that systems were really complicated and that we need a clearer picture of those systems and how students navigate them to be able to improve them.”

TRANSFER STUDENT EXPERIENCE

His longest-standing research investigation is the Transfer Research Project, an aggregate of individual studies that have investigated many aspects of life as a North Carolina transfer student moving from community college to a four-year institution. D’Amico, along with fellow faculty and many graduate students over the years, have studied transfer student behaviors, attitudes and outcomes to get a holistic picture of how students experience transfer, and then make recommendations for how institutions can improve that process.

D’Amico elaborated, “I use the word ‘experience’ intentionally because we are not just trying to understand the way that transfer systems are designed, although we do look at that from a policy perspective. We really want to uncover student behaviors and how students navigate the process in an effort to learn more about their experiences, so we can try to inform decisions about how we structure transfer for them, to make transfer policy and transfer practice meet students where they are.”

The biggest undertaking as part of the TRP is a longitudinal study, where the same subjects are interviewed years apart to track their progress and compare their experiences over a longer period of time, and ultimately see through to their outcomes as well. D’Amico shared, “We probably have over 350 hours of interviews. And the newest part of this, the interviews we’re analyzing now, is on how community college students experience both transfer and careers simultaneously — so the way that career informs transfer and the way that transfer informs careers.”

Findings

While the TRP will perhaps never be truly “finished,” D’Amico did share some of the lessons they’ve learned so far. “What we learned from looking at the publicly available data is that generally, only about 40% of students who transfer vertically — from community colleges to universities, following what we call the primary transfer feeder pattern. For example, that would be like transferring from Central Piedmont to UNC Charlotte, Pitt Community College to ECU, Guilford Tech to UNC Greensboro. That means almost 60% are transferring somewhere else. So unless you embrace a full statewide transfer ecosystem, it’s really difficult for students to navigate all of these different choices that may have different requirements.”

He also shared one of their earliest findings, before they even had funding to conduct this research. “Almost one in five students transferring from North Carolina community colleges to UNC system campuses are transferring with an applied associate’s degree, or an A.A.S, which is typically associated with workforce preparation rather than transfer to a four-year degree. But applied associate’s degrees are not a part of the statewide comprehensive articulation agreement; they are governed by institution-to-institution agreements, with the exception of a few specific degrees that have more uniform paths. In short, a lot of transferring is happening in a way that the overall statewide policy is not designed for.”

Impact

Studying these student experiences, parsing the data from these interviews and identifying the trends within them will allow D’Amico and the team to share with both the institutions and the state at large about what’s working and what should be reexamined. Recommendations resulting from this research will all have one thing in mind: improving the student experience, so that more transfer students leave their four-year institution with a degree and the skills they need to succeed in the career they’ve been training for.

The TRP is funded by the John M. Belk Foundation, but in the last few years, state organizations and nonprofits have also taken an interest in the transfer experience and the team’s research. D’Amico didn’t want to take credit, but he mentioned that one of the project’s recommendations was undertaken as a legislative agenda item by the nonprofit MyFutureNC, whose goal is to increase educational attainment across the state, and they were able to secure $2.5 million to expand the state’s transfer portal and its capabilities. D’Amico said, “We’re really fortunate to have been networked to share our findings as the state moves forward on transfer, and this is an excellent investment that the state is making to try to make transfer decisions more transparent for more students.”

NONCREDIT PROGRAMS AND WORKFORCE PELL

In recent years, programs at community colleges that are designed for workforce preparation have accelerated significantly, and are often created with completion, rather than credits toward a degree, in mind. D’Amico has seen this in his transfer work, with so many students completing A.A.S. degrees, but when you start to dig into coursework that leads to a completion credential, rather than a degree, the role that community colleges play is clearly strong, but in many cases, that’s where the data stops.

Enter the State Noncredit Data Project. D’Amico has partnered with colleague Michelle Van Noy at Rutgers University and others across the industry to foster the development of a more robust data infrastructure for these kinds of programs. He shared, “Noncredit education has been known historically as quote unquote the hidden college because the data are generally so lacking. On the non-credit side, there is no required federal data reporting for non-credit data.”

Without federal data collection, there are no universal standards for this data collection to drive what states collect. D’Amico says that what they’ve found has been “all over the board, everything from inconsistent data collection at the state level, to no data collection at the state level, to a couple states who do it really well.”

Findings

He and Van Noy have led their team to create a taxonomy to guide data collection efforts, working with eight different states to uncover what is being collected, what should be collected, and how that data can be used to improve these workforce preparation programs.

D’Amico shared,” That taxonomy really drives what we do in terms of our work with states and documenting what states do and has also led to a large number of presentations, and led directly into work around the new Workforce Pell legislation. Data is such an important part of states documenting whether or not programs are eligible for Workforce Pell, and it’s also needed to show if the programs that are approved for workforce Pell then continue to meet the student performance metrics they’re required to.”

Impact

This topic is what has led D’Amico to be in the news so frequently in the last year, as this research has informed the work of what led to the model Workforce Pell data framework, led by Strada Education Foundation. These ties even led him to present at the White House in 2024, to share their findings and taxonomy with leaders at the federal level.

D’Amico shared that the project has led to a national learning community that has had 49 states participate, as well as specialized working groups for state level leaders to convene and develop their state non-credit data, led by his team. Demonstrative data is imperative for institutions to submit their programs to be eligible for Workforce Pell grant use, which would drastically increase the number of students who are able to afford a given program. The data taxonomy this team has developed has been crucial to states being able to report that data as required by the federal government.

D’Amico said that adoption still widely varies: some states will have as little as zero to one approved Workforce Pell program this academic year, while North Carolina, despite not being one of the eight main states partnered with the project, will have a whopping 43.

And aside from eligibility, D’Amico pointed out that data is also necessary to ensure quality. “Data are necessary more holistically to understand which of these are programs of quality, that are yielding workforce relevant credentials that are truly helping individuals get the education they need to improve their lives. That quality is the driver behind all of this.”

THROUGHLINE

His emphasis on program quality circles right back into the undercurrent that has run throughout D’Amico’s career: improving systems so that they better serve students who are putting forth the effort, regardless of program type, to better themselves. He spoke of a piece he wrote for the American Council of Education years ago where he identified the “no dead end” mindset that community colleges should adopt to help students always have a path forward in their education, and that mindset is perhaps what has guided his work the most.

“It all points to ensuring that students have opportunities to get the skills and education that they need to be successful,” he said. “And that no education that they get is a dead end for additional education and additional careers. You can’t do that without great policy. You can’t do that without data to be able to document success and quality, and you can’t articulate non-credit to credit transfer if you’re not even housing the data in a way where non-credit and credit data can speak to each other.”

While this work may position D’Amico as an advocate for community colleges at first glance, there’s a slight difference to be articulated — he’s first and foremost an advocate for students. “My work is about using data to help make the systems work for students, and creating recommendations for policy and practice that can improve the the academic, societal, and economic outcomes for students.”

By Caroline Freeman