MSU Denver awards associate’s degrees to stopped-out students

Lisa Johnson, a 59-year-old grandmother of six, was “overwhelmed” when she learned she would receive a degree.

“I was shocked — I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I was just so happy. I’m the first one to graduate from college in my family. It took me a long time.”

Johnson is among 336 former students who accepted associate’s degrees from Metropolitan State University of Denver this year, thanks to a 2021 bill passed by the Colorado legislature. The degrees were awarded to students who accumulated at least 70 credit hours but stopped short of completing their bachelor’s degrees.

Twenty-seven of those former students, including Johnson, will be recognized in a first-of-its-kind event June 22. At the Associate of General Studies celebration, set for 9 a.m. at the Tivoli Turnhalle on the Auraria Campus, graduates will don caps and gowns and the stage will be decorated with banners and bunting. Including family and friends of the graduates, more than 200 people are expected to attend.

The University does not usually award associate’s degrees — it last did so in 1973, said Shaun Schafer, Ph.D., MSU Denver’s associate vice president of Curriculum, Academic Effectiveness and Policy Development. “This is an outgrowth of House Bill 21-1330, the Colorado Re-Engaged (CORE) Initiative. It was intended to allow universities to grant associate degrees for stopped-out students who met certain qualifications.”

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The effort to offer the degrees started late last year, when staff members in MSU Denver’s Office of the Registrar started combing through enrollment records dating from 2012 to 2021 to identify nearly 4,000 people who were potentially eligible for a degree Schafer said. Candidates had to have stopped out for at least three semesters and earned at least 70 credit hours.

“We let them know in January,” he said, adding that many email addresses were no longer active. “We got 336 people who took us up on it. We had this moment of, ‘We want to recognize these folks.’” The special celebration was organized because the venue for Spring Commencement was already at capacity, and since MSU Denver awarded the largest number of degrees in the state and a considerable number of CORE graduates expressed interest in attending an event, a separate ceremony made sense.

“June 22 is that event,” Schafer said. “It’s significant because this is our first batch. We had by far the largest group of folks that were potentially eligible of any institution in the state.” All of this year’s recipients have had their diplomas mailed to them.

Johnson, a Florida native who spent 20 years in the Army, took her first college course while she was stationed in Germany. Postings in South Korea and various U.S. installations followed. “I took one class, and I was hooked,” she said. “I was taking classes here and there at different universities, although I didn’t have a lot of time. I was a single parent of three kids, and it was very, very hard. But I did it.”

Her final posting was in Denver. She enrolled at MSU Denver in 2010 and took classes in Early Childhood Education and Social Work while working at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center as a purchasing agent. But everything ground to a halt in 2020 when she got Covid, developed pneumonia and was so sick she had to take six months off from work.

When she returned to the office, “I got it again. It was horrible,” she said. Long-Covid symptoms forced her to pause her education, but Johnson plans to return to MSU Denver in the fall to complete her bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, after she attends the award ceremony, she intends to travel to Florida to show her diploma to her mother.

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The pool of graduates receiving associate’s degrees this year is 58% male, and the oldest recipient is 76, according to the Registrar’s Office. They are from 15 states, and nearly 55% are first-generation college students. Ten are active military veterans.

Schafer said 70 credit hours represents a bit more than two years’ worth of coursework, a significant investment of time and money. “One of the problems we have right now is you have a lot of people holding a lot of credits,” he said. “But they have nothing, really, to show for the effort. This does take action to correct that.”

About 70 people who were contacted about the associate’s turned down the degree because they were planning to return to school and wanted to qualify for MSU Denver’s $1,000 Finish What You Started scholarship, Schafer said.

Recipients might value the associate’s for their own sake, but the credential could also serve as a career boost and perhaps spur them to return to finish their bachelor’s degrees, he said. Median earnings of associate’s degree completers are 18% higher than those with a high school diploma, and bachelor’s degree holders earn around 35% more than those with associate’s degrees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

“You want them to have the credential because that has some value, but the journey you started on was going to lead to a bachelor’s degree,” Schafer said. “This is a mile marker. We really hope people will engage with the University and finish what they started.”

To learn more about eligibility for the Associate of General Studies, visit the website or email [email protected].

See photos from the event.