200 Years of Reinvention: How Athens State Built a Transfer-First Model

Dr. Catherine Wehlburg, President of Athens State University, leads an institution that has reinvented itself more than once across two centuries. Founded in 1822 as a women's college, Athens State later admitted men, had a stint as a Methodist institution, and spent decades as a community college designated as an upper-division partner for students transferring in from junior colleges. Today, it is one of Alabama's 14 public four-year institutions but still exists to primarily serve transfer and adult students.

At the heart of its history lives an institution that is constantly evolving and re-examining how they operate. Despite more than 40 years of experience serving transfer students, Athens State continues to ask how they can serve a population of students they already know better than most.

A Head Start on Transfer Students

In practice, Athens State accepts students only after they have earned at least 36 credit hours elsewhere, with roughly half of its student body arriving through community colleges while the other half consists of adult learners returning to finish or redirect a degree. While transfer students were once considered a negligible population when Athens State served this population through the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s, what was once an outlier has become a competitive advantage as more institutions chase transfer enrollment.

"Now, because of the enrollment changes that many institutions are having, transfer students are becoming a true, measured, and sought-after population," Wehlburg said. "And that's what we've been doing since the 80s. So we've got a little bit of a head start on that and part of our challenge is to make sure that we maintain that head start."

Building Structure Around Every Student's Path

Because Athens State students arrive with credit already in hand, the institution treats transfer evaluation and prior learning assessment as front-line operational work, not an afterthought. "One of the things that we do is, when students come in, we work really hard with them to make sure that their transfer credits are counted," Wehlburg said. This includes work experience as well. "If a student has work experience or other kinds of industry credentials that map to course outcomes, we give them prior learning assessment credit," she explains.

Since prior learning credit looks different for each student, this creates an interesting challenge for degree and schedule planning. Athens State created two-year program maps to give students a structured plan toward graduation, while also understanding that individual student timelines may not line up perfectly. "Not every student is coming in in the same place," Wehlburg explains. "And so we have two-year schedules, two-year rotations of courses for every one of our programs. And we hold to those, but we also have to, in some instances, offer directed study or other kinds of courses for students because we don't want them to have to wait another semester or two semesters for that one class in order to graduate."

While Athens State originally used program maps only for certain programs, the university is now extending the approach institution-wide. To create truly feasible maps, the institution is asking departments to scrutinize listed courses. Courses that rarely or never run can quietly become graduation barriers for students who plan to take them, only to be left scrambling to find another course or extend their timeline. On the scheduling side, there’s also the question of how many sections to offer. With most students enrolled part-time at Athens State, being deliberate about the number of sections offered is a necessity to balance budget constraints with how many students genuinely need a seat.

A Streamlined Strategic Plan With Built-In Measures

Initiatives such as program maps don’t just live in a vacuum at Athens State. Projects live under one of the four strategic plan pillars: student success for transfer students, student success for adult learners, community engagement, and innovative teaching and learning. While this sounds simple on the surface, each pillar has a dedicated champion and its own set of tracked metrics. Additionally, the individual projects underneath each pillar have their own dedicated metrics, giving the institution a single structure that ties day-to-day initiatives back to overall direction rather than tracking progress piecemeal.

Defining and Innovating Quality Instruction

As part of Athens State’s strategic plan work, Dr. Wehlburg and her team are critically thinking about what successful instruction and courses look like for transfer and adult learners. To achieve this, they formed a Summer Academy, where roughly 30 faculty spend two weeks examining course design in cohorts. Athens State pays faculty through a course-release stipend so they can spend the entire two weeks working on a project that is required to report measurable outcomes. "They spent two weeks, pretty full-time, looking at different aspects of what makes a good course," Wehlburg said. "And some of that had to do with how they do assignments, how they do assessment of student work, how they can use technology to help support some of that."

A related project asks faculty to define course quality itself, an exercise Wehlburg says only works if the institution is willing to sit with the ambiguity first. "If we had to have a rubric that looked at what a good course is, how might we do that?" she said. "And that's got all the nuance and everything that goes into: what is a good class? Because there is no one model, there is no one answer for that. But if we're not having these conversations, then the answer is we don't know what a good class is."

The Case for Pairing Metrics With Student Stories

With public confidence in higher education under pressure, Wehlburg treats the strategic plan as a tool for external communication as much as internal alignment. "With this strategic plan, I am able to talk about an overall strategic direction that we're going in, and be able to back that up with specific examples," she said. "I've got data, but I've also got the stories." One example she returns to often: a student whose internship at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville led to a job offer, three promotions, and eventually a formal learning partnership between the center and the university. "All of that is because this student had an internship, was prepared for that internship, got the job, and is now doing more and more things," she said.

That pairing of metrics and narrative gives Wehlburg something to bring to legislators, accreditors, and prospective students alike as a way of showing not just what the institution measures, but why those numbers matter to the people behind them.

A Closing Thought on Change

While structural change is never easy, Wehlburg is quick to point out the cost of inaction. "We all agree change is hard," she said. "But not changing has pretty big consequences too, especially where we are right now." Institutions, she argues, need to set a clear direction and hold to it. "Clearly communicate, this is where we're going, and this is why we're going in that way. And then be prepared to move in that direction, and don't get sidetracked."

To maintain momentum, Wehlburg advises minimizing exceptions and recognizing that short-term reactions likely won't matter in the long term. While keeping everyone on track requires sustained effort, Wehlburg is quick to point out that the people doing the work deserve credit for it. "Our faculty and our staff do a lot of work, and we need to hold them accountable for that work, and we need to recognize that work and appreciate that work."