In an effort to ease students’ troubles when transferring college credit, Sen. David Pearce, R- District 31, and Rep. Mike Thomson, R-Maryville, have introduced bills into the Missouri Senate and House of Representatives.

If passed, the bills would create a library of 25 lower-level college courses that would be transferable between any public Missouri colleges.

Thomson said his bill in the House and Pearce’s in the Senate are essentially the same.

“We’ve got one coming from both directions,” he said.

Pearce said his bill is designed to help increase Missouri’s graduation rate.

“We want about 60 percent of our population with a college degree by the year 2025,” he said. “To do that, we need to make the college experience quick and as cheap as possible.”

Pearce said 39 percent of Missourians have college degrees today, and another 24 percent have some post-high school education. He said studies have shown the amount of time it takes to earn a degree plays a part in graduation rates.

“The phrase ‘Time is the enemy’ is one that I think we should keep in mind,” he said. “The longer the people are in (college), the more likely they’re going to drop out, and the more debt they’re going to have when they do finally get out.”

Thomson said the bills also give the Coordinating Board for Higher Education the authority to ask schools to try to cut down on remediation classes.

“(They need to) look into research and find out how they can better bring students up to speed without all of these non-credit classes,” Thomson said. “Statistics say that the longer a student takes those, the less likely they are to graduate. It costs money and you don’t get credit.”

Both bills also mandate the Coordinating Board develop a policy for “reverse transfer,” according to the bills. The policy would allow any student with sufficient hours from more than one public institution that grants an associate degree to receive that degree.

Pearce said the bills focus on making it easier to transfer credits from two-year to four-year colleges.

“(With this bill), when a student is picking up classes at a two-year school, they will know at the very beginning if they will transfer or not to another college,” he said.

Agreements among colleges for transfer credits already exist between some Missouri institutions, but these bills will create the first universal agreement, Pearce said.

“There are literally hundreds of these agreements all over the state, but not one uniform course library of all of the courses that will be transferred,” he said. “This will help in that way, to make it easier to move from school to school.”

Pearce’s bill was passed in the Senate on Thursday morning and now has to be passed by the House. Thomson’s bill is in committee and should be on the House floor soon.

“It’s moving,” Pearce said. “There’s a lot of support for it.”