Transfer Without Surprises, Part 3

Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state. They were built because the Great Lakes are difficult waters. The lakes are big, crowded with traffic and unforgiving of anyone navigating by guesswork. A lighthouse doesn’t steer a ship. It marks the hazards, holds a fixed position and helps everyone moving through the same water navigate safely.

That is close to how I think about the role of the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential (MiLEAP) in the state’s transfer ecosystem. Faculty and staff draw the charts; our job is just to keep the light on.

For most of this state’s history, there was no state-level entity responsible for how students move between colleges and universities. That work happened anyway through decades of voluntary collaboration among educators and institutions that genuinely cared about getting it right, building things together like the Michigan Transfer Agreement, which took effect in 2014 but was built on a statewide general education agreement dating back to 1972.

People are rightly proud of that history. The challenge now is how to make that work easier to see, easier to sustain and easier for more institutions to participate in.

In 2024, the Legislature directed our department to change that, and the Office of Higher Education took on three jobs: connecting, convening and communicating. Since fall 2025, we have convened nearly 1,000 faculty and staff from more than 60 Michigan colleges and universities. Faculty work groups in 10 academic disciplines, spanning business, computer and information sciences, data science, design and applied arts, health-care administration, and teacher education, met in person and then continued meeting virtually to build statewide transfer agreements and corresponding major maps set to launch in fall 2027.

What I want to describe here is what that has actually looked like from where I sit, partway through.

Building the Network

Michigan’s transfer network already existed informally. Faculty knew colleagues at other institutions; advisers had counterparts they called. What did not exist was any formal structure making those connections reliable, visible or available to people who hadn’t happened to build them personally.

When I started with MiLEAP, I told institutions plainly that I was there to help. That took a while to land, and I understand why. Michigan’s colleges and universities are protective of their autonomy and no one at the state had played this role before, so there was no reason to assume what it would mean. What changed wasn’t anything I said. It was the experience of walking into a collaborative, productive, solution-oriented conversation they didn’t have to organize themselves.

Colleen Kibin, director of transfer partnerships at Eastern Michigan University, put it in terms I think about often. Connecting faculty across institutions is a real part of her job, and it is slow, one relationship at a time.

“It’s very time-intensive, a lot to coordinate,” she said. “A huge benefit of this MiLEAP Transfer Pathways work is that it’s been done for us—everybody organized, together, in the room. It’s nice not to be the one who has to do everything.”

Real Talk and the Space to Have It

Curriculum alignment work is highly complex. It requires faculty to compare programs they have built carefully, defend choices they may not have recently examined and occasionally concede that a colleague at another institution has a better argument or a compelling reason to adapt. That only happens when people have room to disagree openly and work through the details together. Creating and holding that space is most of what our facilitation does.

Jennifer Fager, associate dean at Lake Superior State University, described a debate from an earlier round of this work that illustrates this well: Faculty were at an impasse over whether business law belonged at the 200 or 300 level. This question had real consequences, since community colleges typically don’t offer 300-level courses, so the answer determined whether a student could take it at their community college before transferring or had to wait.

“It was a big debate,” she said, “until finally the faculty realized they were all using the same textbook. Had they not been at the same table, they would not have known that. We often share syllabi, but we don’t often drill down to the level of which textbook is being used.”

The Layers Underneath

A pathway map is not finished when a discipline agrees on its courses. It has to fit together with the Michigan Transfer Agreement, the statewide package of roughly 30 general education credits that transfer as a bloc among participating institutions. The MTA is foundational to how transfer works here, and it was built before this current effort. For a pathway to actually serve a student, the discipline and general education requirements must be designed to overlap so that a single course does as much work as possible toward both.

Teacher education shows the problem clearly. Because education courses can’t count toward the MTA’s general education distribution, community colleges created parallel versions—science education, math education—that consume the credits students would otherwise need elsewhere. On paper, the structure seemed to require it. Kris Zook of Lake Michigan College described the moment it opened up:

The ‘aha moment’ came in conversation with our four-year partners. They’re not asking students to do both. A lab science can count as science education and satisfy the general education requirement. Once you have that, you can fit in the courses on diversity and ed law and ed psych.”

Computer science found its own answer to the same problem. Robert Banta, who teaches computer science at Macomb Community College, described a degree that came out of an earlier round of this work: a pre–computer science transfer pathway “that combines core computer science coursework with Michigan Transfer Agreement requirements,” built so students can prepare for transfer at Macomb while staying flexible about which university they land at.

Some of this is still being worked out. Computer science faculty agreed early that a data structures course would be a viable community college transfer course. When they compared course outcomes, it got more complicated, as Banta shared: “Some outcomes are already addressed through existing community college course offerings, while others will need to be incorporated into a new course.”

And agreeing in a work group is only the beginning, according to Zook of Lake Michigan College. “Asking each institution to go back to another large group of people who are highly educated, with opinions and interests, and asking them to change is sometimes not easy. And then it also costs time and money and resources to implement.”

Every one of these conversations comes back to the same question: What will actually let this student arrive prepared and on time? That framing comes from the faculty who teach those students.

Fager, of Lake Superior State, has seen what happens when that goes wrong. Over the years at more than one institution, she’s watched students headed into teaching take science courses built for other fields, courses heavy on anatomy and physiology, instead of the general biology and teacher-certification exam required. She stressed that her team makes sure “that when they have a choice between Biology class A and B, they pick B, because B is the right one for that program," she said. Otherwise, she said, students finish with something like 150 credits instead of 120. “I think that is academic malpractice.”

Defining the Roles

In Michigan, we are building something new on a foundation that already existed, and we are doing both at once. Our office is young. Gov. Whitmer created MiLEAP in 2023. There was no established state role in transfer to inherit, which means we are constructing it together with the field. We have been intentional about building that role with institutions, rather than defining it for them.

That is slower work. It takes time to build the trust needed to change how institutions work together. Institutions have told me clearly what they think the state should do. Sometimes, when we brainstorm what that role could look like in concrete terms, they reconsider. So we adjust. Everyone bends a little.

We are converting an informal network into durable infrastructure, drawing clearer lines around what a decentralized ecosystem cannot maintain on its own: updated maps, consistent agreements, shared communication, real accountability. A colleague in the field gave me a new frame on accountability that I now use constantly. She said what we actually need is to uphold the integrity of this work. She is right, and integrity requires structure and accountability.

Patricia Parker, who has facilitated this work in other states and is our lead consultant at Sova, believes the work in Michigan is building a great foundation for the state: “This work is happening across the country, and every state takes its own approach. What stands out about Michigan is that the people doing it are building the structure and doing the work at the same time, and they’re doing it voluntarily, not because anyone ordered them to. That’s harder. It’s also more likely to last.”

What Comes Next

Most of the effort so far has gone into the pathway maps, which are still in development ahead of their fall 2027 launch. But they are just one part of the work. A statewide work group is beginning efforts to improve the MTA itself. And all of it has to arrive somewhere students can actually find it, which means mitransfer.org has to become the place students can use to plan. Pathways, the MTA and the navigation tools students use are three parts of one thing. Students are crossing that water right now while this work goes on, and our job at MiLEAP is to keep the light on.