Transfer Program With UCLA (or not)

On the one hand, there is an article that says UCLA has joined a for-profit program to encourage community college transfers:

The for-profit company Quad Learning announced Friday it has recruited UCLA and Occidental College to be part of a national community college transfer alliance — but the program doesn’t come cheap. For about twice the cost of regular tuition, American Honors gives community college students extra support, coaching and smaller classes to help them transfer to 27 partner universities, including Purdue University and Ohio State.Chris Romer, co-founder of American Honors, said the universities have agreed to be “transfer friendly” to American Honors students…

Full article at http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2013/12/14/15403/two-california-colleges-part-of-new-for-profit-col/

On the other hand, when you go to the reported source for this article, it is a NY Times report that makes no mention of UCLA:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/education/top-students-at-community-colleges-to-have-chance-to-raise-ambitions.html

An article in Inside Higher Ed makes the same assertion as in the excerpt quoted above:

…Twenty-seven colleges, including highly selective private colleges such as Amherst and Swarthmore Colleges and selective publics like Purdue University and the University of California at [sic] Los Angeles, have joined the American Honors Network, in which they have agreed (with varying degrees of commitment) to recruit and enroll students transferring from the honors colleges established by the network’s two-year partners…

Full article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/13/major-2-year-colleges-and-selective-4-year-institutions-create-national-transfer

Not clear what the qualifier “with varying degrees of commitment” means.  So is this corporate hype?  Or is there a real program with UCLA?  If you Google “UCLA” and “Quad Learning,” you will find the Inside Higher Ed article and the article excerpted at the top of this posting, but not more.

If you Google “UCLA” and “American Honors” and “community colleges,” all you find is a website from the company that says some students who went through the program have gotten into UCLA.  But that statement – reproduced below – by itself doesn’t mean there is any formal program with UCLA.  (Some former Boy Scouts have gotten into UCLA, but that doesn’t mean UCLA has a program with the Boy Scouts.)

…Students from the first American Honors class have applied and been accepted to some of the most prestigious universities in the world for transfer, including Stanford, Vanderbilt, UCLA, University of Washington, Cornell University, and more…

Excerpt above from http://ccs.americanhonors.org/international/.