Standing before community college presidents from across Michigan, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Lester Monts reiterated the reason for their gathering - to confront issues hindering low to moderate income community college students from transferring to the University.

The effort is supported by a million-dollar grant the University received from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, a nationwide scholarship foundation.

The meeting last Tuesday was the first in a series on the topic. No definite solutions are finalized - attendees only articulated their concerns and asked how the University plans to address them.

Washtenaw Community College President Larry Whitworth said the University needs to find ways to make itself more accessible to students who are 24 years or older and have families and bills to pay.

LSA senior Phillip Rutherford, a transfer student from Washtenaw, said that he has noticed that University professors are unlikely to make deadline or workload exceptions for students who have other obligations.

"At Michigan, everyone (here) is relatively the same age and school is supposed to be your life," Rutherford said. "It doesn't matter if you have a job or if you have children - your workload is not going to change based on that."

Art and Design junior Betsy Jo, a 58-year-old transfer student from WCC, said the number of older students there far exceeded the amount at the University.

Securing financial aid is a central concern for many transfer students.

The University recently committed $4.5 million to help community college transfer students, Monts said.

Rutherford said that he did not have many reservations about applying to the University because he knew the options available to him through financial aid.

"The reason why I wasn't so hesitant about transferring was because the (Michigan Transfer Initative for Emerging Scholars) program brought a financial aid advisor who spoke to us about ways to pay tuition," he said.

M-TIES is a joint program between WCC and the University that aids underrepresented minority students transferring to the University.

Many community college presidents also voiced their concern that the University does not accept dual-enrollment credits.

But Senior Associate Director of Admissions Sally Lindsley said the University accepts the credits in most cases.

"The University says that if students take a college course and they need it for high school graduation, they cannot double dip," she said.

If the University does not offer a comparable course to the one taken at a community college, no credit will be given, Lindsley said.

The University is currently working on updating course guides for each community college so it is clear which courses are equivalent.

The course guides for each community college have not been updated since the late 90s, said Lindsley, who is managing the update.

Rutherford said that because the course guides were old, it was not clear to him that his English class at Washtenaw would not meet the first-year writing requirement. He has yet to fulfill the requirement even though he is a senior English major.

Dilip Das, project manager for the Cooke Foundation grant, said other projects include creating an LSA advising staff specifically for transfer students and a team of University staff, who will travel to Michigan's 31 community colleges over four years to "build relationships and get a feel for the student body and potential transfer students."