New Haven Independent

GCC President Dorsey Kendrick signed an “articulation agreement” with University of Bridgeport President Neil Albert Salonen Wednesday morning. Under the agreement, a student who graduates Gateway with a 3.5 grade point average is eligible for a $10,000 annual scholarship at UB. Applicants with a 3.0 average receive an $8,000 annual scholarship; and applicants with a 2. to 2.99 are eligible for a $6,000 annual scholarship.

The average annual tuition at UB is $24,000

While Gateway has such agreements with the University of New Haven and University of Connecticut as well as other schools, this arrangement with UB is, said Dr. Kendrick, one that provides the most generous scholarship support to date. “That’s critical for our students,” she said, “for whom the financial impediment is often what keeps them from advancing.”

that UB is the first university in the state to grant full junior status to students completing the associate degree program at community colleges.

Another of the draws of UB for GCC students is that the school’s many international exchange and study-abroad programs. President Salonen said his director of admission could not attend the ceremony because she was in Dubai and other countries of the Middle East setting up recruitment and other programs.

Lauren Doninger, GCC’s director of general studies programs and one of the principal designers of the agreement, said that now many students finish a two-year college like Gateway with 60 credits, but when they transfer to a four-year school, they find that only 30 of them will count. “With this agreement… a freshman will know exactly how many credits in which fields are required. It will be as if they’re going both to GCC and UB at once.”

Currently some 40 percent of Gateway students transfer to four-year colleges.

Doninger said the program is part of the effort to change the image of GCC from one that is a vocational school, to where it is seen an effective preparatory school for the four-year college.

And for the workforce, added David Cooper, who is GCC director of corporate and continuing education. He said that increasingly Gateway is preparing kids for the science and technology and business-based economy of the future.

“Why?” he asked rhetorically as he and Doninger stood in front of a rendering of GCC’s new building coming to Church Street in the years ahead. “Because Connecticut has a serious problem of out-migration, or brain drain. About seven to 10,000 students who graduate leave the state for work. The jobs are not here.”

However, Gateway’s students, many of whom are already working in the local economy, tend to stay around, to the tune of 80 percent.

UB’s president sang the same hopeful tune: “Research shows that where kids go to a four-year college, that is often where they settle.” Provided, of course, there are jobs.

Salonen and Cooper both envision graduates of the GCC-UB axis to start such businesses and ultimately perhaps even to form consortia or science “parks” in the New Haven or Bridgeport areas.

With the huge downturn in the economy, Doninger is already seeing many students who had hoped to go out of town to school or to a four-year institution come to Gateway. “Increasingly, with programs like this with UB,” she said, “students’ first two years are going to be challenging, and our young people are going to be well prepared and partially funded for transfer to continue their education.”

“Let students like ours have a little achievement,” said Kendrick, “one step at a time, and then provide hope that the door for a four-year degree for them can open, and it is amazing what you see.”