As students are shuffling into your offices with fall registration questions, you might be hearing, “what the heck is MTA?”  We’ve got you covered!  For those who aren’t aware, the MACRAO Agreement is being replaced by the Michigan Transfer Agreement (MTA) this fall.  Public Michigan universities will begin accepting MTA’s as blocks of courses going toward, if not completing, bachelor’s degree general education requirements.  Why the change, isn’t that what MACRAO did?  Yep.  MACRAO, however, wasn’t accepted by all public Michigan universities.  MTA will be (ostensibly).  MACRAO also frequently required some (or much) fine-tuning to meet individual transfer institution requirements.  MTA won’t require so much (supposedly).

What about students already pursuing MACRAO?  Good question!  They’re covered.  Students who’ve begun courses prior to fall 2014 can still do MACRAO (or they can do MTA if they want) as long as they are continuously enrolled while completing it.  Continuously enrolled means not taking three or more consecutive semesters, including summer, off.  Students who take three consecutive semesters off are no longer eligible for MACRAO.  NMC will continue to provide the MACRAO Stamp and universities currently accepting it will continue to accept it through the summer of 2019.

So what does the MTA look like?  It looks a little like MACRAO, but there are some changes:

• The Associate in Science and Arts (ASA) containing MTA will be 60 credits, not 64 (MTA, like MACRAO, can be completed without finishing the ASA.  But completing the ASA will automatically complete MTA or MACRAO)
• Courses going toward MTA need to be 2.0’s or better
• There is a Group 1 Mathematics requirement of MTH 120 or above
• Two fewer credits (6 instead of 8) are required in each of the Humanities, Natural Science, and Social Science areas
• Group 1 Mathematics courses won’t count toward the Natural Science requirement (for MACRAO, Group 1 Math could count toward the Science/Math area requirement)

For a degree worksheet outlining MTA requirements, see here.  For an MTA/MACRAO comparison worksheet, see here.

The Advising Center is offering a training on April 10^th (8:30 in SH 113) to give advisors some practice evaluating credits for MTA (this will be the same training we held at a Friday Forum a few weeks ago).  There is also an MTA Regional Training Session the same day.  Our training will be more specific to NMC. The regional training will be an overview of MTA.  Please get in touch with us if you have questions.