If community colleges were to find all the formerly enrolled students whose academic records qualify them for an associate degree and retroactively award them the credential, then the number of associate degrees awarded in the United States would increase by at least 12%. This compelling projection by the Institute for Higher Education Policy is one of the primary reasons why it is working with the Lumina Foundation for Education to roll out the three-year, $1.3 million Project Win-Win. This initiative will financially support 35 community colleges and four-year institutions in six states — Louisiana , Missouri, New York , Ohio , Virginia and Wisconsin — so they can track down and retroactively award qualified students associate degrees who, for whatever reason, never received one. It also will help these institutions identify students who have recently dropped out who are “academically short” of an associate degree by nine credits or fewer and re-enroll them to finish a degree. ON THE WEB: Movement, but miles to go MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: Why reverse transfer? “Project Win-Win has the potential to make a considerable down payment on increased degree completion goals set by state governors and the Obama Administration,” said Michelle Asha Cooper, IHEP president, in a statement. Last year, nine of the project’s institutions ran a pilot of this program during a seven-month period; they awarded nearly 600 associate degrees and identified almost 1,600 students who were just shy of earning one. The pilot, however, revealed a number of difficulties that institutions face when attempting to retroactively award degrees. “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” said Stephanie Tarver, dean of enrollment management at McNeese State University, which awards associate degrees as well and was part of the pilot program. “We were kind of bumbling around in the dark a bit. When you pull data, it doesn’t always match up like you thought it would. You have to have a lot of staff to dedicate to a project like this to keep it going.” Then, even when candidates for degrees and those just shy of them were identified, reaching them proved just as challenging. “At that point, we don’t have as much control as we do in the other areas because these students have been out for a while,” Tarver said. “We didn’t know if the contact information we had for them was accurate. We didn’t know how to get accurate information without spending lots of money to find it. Also, when we finally did make contact, some of the students were leery of us. ‘You’re calling me out of the blue and saying I’m qualified for a degree and want to offer it to me? What’s the catch?’ ” Eventually, though, McNeese awarded about 15 associate degrees, out of approximately 150 former students who met degree requirements. Officials also tracked down about 300 students who were just short of graduation and are in the process of helping those who wish to complete find a way to do so. “A lot of the students who dropped out of school didn’t realize just how close they were to finishing,” Tarver said. “The success stories we’ve had are truly heartwarming, especially for those who didn’t realize they were qualified for a degree. We made an immediate impact on their lives. Rarely have I felt we’ve impacted students as we did through this project.” Though many of the institutions participating in the project had never before made efforts to retroactively award degrees, a few of them have been doing it for a while and have found ways to integrate this into regular degree audits for current students. Anna Flack, registrar at Suffolk County Community College, in New York, noted that her institution has made it a point to search for these “lost graduates” at least once every year for the past decade. “We did this on a small scale,” Flack said. “It was really part of office procedure. {hellip} We made it part of the daily responsibilities of the degree audit staff.” With students who are just a few credits short of earning an associate degree, Flack said, the college has adopted a no-pressure approach in approaching them. “We’ve just sent letters to students, saying that can finish if they’d like to,” Flack said. ” ‘Here are the different ways you can reach that degree.’ There’s no convincing, no strong-arming, no sales pitch. ‘We just see this, and we’d like you to know about it.’ ” Those pushing the project at the national level argue that, despite some of the challenges in the degree audit process, this is a relatively easy way to boost graduation rates around the country. “This is an issue that hasn’t been raised,” said Cliff Adelman, senior associate at IHEP. “We’re saying to these institutions, ‘Hey, guys, you haven’t paid attention to people based on your criteria who’ve crossed the degree threshold. You’ve been asleep at the wheel.’ There’s all this talk about awarding these degrees, but they’re just making a lot of noise. This is low-hanging fruit.”

Part of the story is solid. Part of it remains a mystery. What is certain is that on the night of Feb. 17, 1864, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley sank the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina to become the first submarine to sink a ship during combat. Then the Hunley itself literally sank into oblivion when it went down with its crew of eight. The resting place of the Civil War submarine, which had remained a mystery for more than century, finally was discovered in 1995 off Sullivan’s Island. But before the submarine sank, the story goes, it flashed a blue light to Confederate soldiers on the shore to signal success. But as this part of the story comes from second- and third-hand accounts, it “gets a little fuzzy,” says archaeologist Mike Scafuri of the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in Charleston, where the recovered Hunley is on display. Nobody knows whether the signal was supposed to be made directly after the attack or as the Hunley approached shore, Scafuri says. And another question remains: Could a lantern have produced a strong enough light for the soldiers to see? Hands-on investigation To try to answer the question of the mysterious blue signal, 12 students at Hamburg (Pa.) Area High School are building three replicas of the submarine’s lantern in the school’s metal shop. Retired history teacher Ned Eisenhuth and retired shop teacher Fred Lutkis began the project after expressing interest last summer in the history of the Hunley to the Lasch Conservation Center. Before they retired, Eisenhuth and Lutkis had worked with students at Minersville (Pa.) Area High School to create replicas of a Viking burial sled and a medieval cart. These will be the only true replicas of the Hunley’s lantern, Eisenhuth says. Next month, the school plans to donate the best replica of the lantern to the conservation center, which has been studying the submarine since it was excavated in 2000 with help from the Friends of the Hunley Organization. Scafuri says the conservation center and the high school hope to answer the following questions with replicas of the only light source on the Hunley: •Could the soldiers on shore have seen the blue light from more than 1,000 feet away? •Just how powerful was the lantern? •Could the lantern actually produce a blue-colored light? Using X-rays and drawings from the conservation center of the actual lantern remnants from the recovered submarine, students have begun soldering and molding sheet metal to form the lantern. The lantern consists of three cylinders that fit tightly inside one another: the outside, inside and lens cylinders, says Lutkus. “The hardest part has been going off the diagrams (of the lantern) that were mailed to us” by the conservation center, says Hamburg senior Cody Wertz, one of six students working on lantern construction. “There’s some stuff that you don’t know exactly, that we have to guess to the best of our ability what they would have had.” Goal: Historical accuracy Hamburg offers only woodshop, so Lutkus says he had to teach the students how to work with sheet metal, which proved difficult. “Sheet metal does not always do what you want it to do,” Lutkus says. “You’re taking a flat surface and making it three-dimensional. It’s not like wood where, if you mess up, you can fix it or hide things. When you mess up with sheet metal, you have to scrap it and start over.” Freshman Seth Kunkel says metalworking also can be dangerous: The soldering iron gets hot. He says he is picking up many of the techniques, such as using a roll iron to make cylinders and using a blowhorn stake to hammer metal into different shapes. Students also faced problems making the lamp historically accurate, Eisenhuth says. Restrictions on commercial whaling have made whale oil, which was burned in the original lamp, hard to come by. After consulting a lantern manufacturer, Eisenhuth says, he learned that kerosene — also available during the Civil War — would be a historically accurate alternative. The lanterns will be finished this month, and Eisenhuth says he hopes to donate two, rather than just the promised one, to the center and to put the third unused lantern on display at the high school.