Book Launch for “Beyond Free College” Presented by UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies and Herb Alpert School of Music

A book launch webinar to discuss “Beyond Free College: Making Higher Education Work for 21st Century Students,” by Dean Eileen Strempel, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and Stephen J. Handel, executive director of the Higher Education for The College Board, will take place on Tuesday, Feb. 16. The conversation will be moderated by Christina (Tina) Christie, Wasserman Dean of the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.

Strempel is the inaugural dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA. An American Council on Education Fellow and a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, Dean Strempel is a national recognized champion of transfer students and views quality public education as one of the principal social justice issues of the times. Prior to her arrival at UCLA, she served as senior vice provost for academic affairs at the University of Cincinnati.

As executive director of The College Board, Handel now consults with universities to implement enrollment practices that serve the needs of first-year and transfer students. He previously served as the chief admissions officer for the University of California system.

“Beyond Free College” is published by the American Association of Community Colleges and outlines a national agenda consistent with, but more comprehensive than the “free college” movement, building on the best of U.S. higher education’s populist history such as the G.I. Bill and the community college transfer function.

The book’s agenda seeks greater productive investment in postsecondary education by privileging a single metric—lower-cost-per-degree-granted—as the animating driver of a transfer pathway that will fulfill the potential of its historical, progressive innovators.

With “Beyond Free College,” Strempel and Handel aim to galvanize higher education advocates in an effort to reorganize, reorient, and reignite the transfer function to serve the needs of a neo-traditional student population that now constitutes the majority of college-goers in America; and in ways that advance completion, not just access to higher education.

This event is presented by the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

To attend this event, visit this Zoom link.