Hitt, who took over UCF in 1992, had already transformed the college, overseeing rapid growth that took it from 115th in enrollment nationally to the second-largest public university in the country, after Arizona State University. (Currently, it boasts more than 60,000 students.) Once dismissed as a commuter school with lax admission standards, UCF remade itself as a selective, major metropolitan research university. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush once said he believed Walt Disney and John Hitt had done more to transform Central Florida into a “vibrant, dynamic place” than any two people.

At that meeting years ago, Shugart felt no one was discussing the elephant in the room— how more two-year colleges were changing their mission and tacking on four-year degrees that made them all compete both for students and shrinking state resources.

“Don’t you think we need some direction?” Shugart recalled asking the group. The room was silent until Hitt spoke up: “I think we need that,” Shugart remembers him saying. Out in the parking lot, Hitt suggested he and Shugart meet to discuss the matter further.

When they spoke again, the first order of business was Florida’s 2+2 program, which guarantees any community college graduate an automatic transfer to a state university. But it doesn’t guarantee which university or program. And Shugart knew that the transfer process itself was often a huge stumbling block for students. Hitt thought the 2+2 model was good but that it had “glaring deficiencies.” They needed to take the paper guarantee and work together to realize its actual promise and full potential.

“Why don’t we just put it on steroids and see how far we can take it?” Shugart said.

A few weeks later, the two men came up with the broad outline for what would become DirectConnect. It would be an audacious and closely integrated program that guaranteed admission to UCF for anyone graduating from Valencia with an Associate degree and certain Associate in Science degrees. It would include a heavy emphasis on student advising and the linking and sharing of resources, providing UCF degree offerings on Valencia’s campuses and access for Valencia students to UCF junior- and senior-level programs and faculty on all UCF regional campuses, the mutual use of facilities and faculty and a concerted effort to align the schools’ curriculum to ensure as much continuity for students as possible. They also ultimately agreed that to serve the whole region, they needed to bring in the other three two-year colleges in the area. (Earlier this year, the university announced a fifth partner.)

DirectConnect launched in 2006—and it transformed both the two-year colleges and UCF itself. DirectConnect participants now make up a bigger share of new students at UCF, 41 percent in 2013-14, compared with incoming freshmen, 37 percent. (Transfer students from other institutions make up the rest. All together, more than 37,000 students—half of them minorities—have enrolled at UCF through the program.

***

As predawn darkness envelopes her house, Alex Castro sits at a table in her bedroom putting on the last touches of mascara and spritz of perfume before shoving books and frozen waffles in her backpack. “I brought waffles for breakfast since I don’t have a chance to eat anything,” she says.

Above, the Osceola campus of Valencia College, which consistently ranks as one of the top two-year colleges in the country. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Castro flicks off the light in her bedroom and makes her way through the dark house by the light of her cellphone, stepping softly down a hallway so she doesn’t wake her mother and two young siblings.

Outside, the street is illuminated by spotlights from neighbors’ garages. She checks the time—almost 6:30 a.m.—while waiting in her driveway for the small connector bus to pull into her subdivision. If she misses the connector or can’t schedule it, she must walk a mile in the dark to the closest bus stop.

On this morning, as it was, she has two more bus transfers ahead of her and more than a two-hour ride to class at the nearest Valencia College campus. “I literally leave at six o’clock in the morning and come back at six o’clock at night,” she says.

The bus pulls out and the sun rises slowly over the sprawl of shopping plazas and subdivisions with names like Solivita and Bellalago. Castro and her family live in Poinciana—a 43-square-mile unincorporated territory, riddled with subdivisions in suburban Osceola County, a still mostly rural county of citrus and cattle, south of Orlando. Part of Disney World sits in Osceola’s northwest corner.

While Valencia’s Osceola campus is only about 18 miles north in the city of Kissimmee, only one main road gets there. And on this morning, like every morning, Pleasant Hill Road is crawling with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Castro, on her second bus ride of the day, sighs as she checks the time on her cellphone. She will miss her next connection and have to take a later bus, leaving just 15 minutes on campus to heat up and eat her waffles before class.

Sanford "Sandy Shugart," president of Valencia College, came up with the idea for DirectConnect about ten years ago during a conversation in a parking lot with UCF President John Hitt. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Yet for Castro, Valencia’s Osceola campus is a godsend. Of Dominican descent and raised by a single mother, she wasn’t ready after high school to move away. “I’m a mama’s girl, oh my goodness!” she says. Even if she were admitted to UCF as a freshman, it would have been too expensive and even farther than Valencia, possibly three hours by bus.

She had at first dismissed Valencia, considering it “Grade 13,” as some students called two-year colleges. But a high school teacher convinced her that Valencia would help her, and she entered an intense individualized instruction program at the school that included remedial reading, writing and math. Her schedule was carefully mapped out for her.

She excelled in student leadership and was tapped to meet President Barack Obama twice when he visited campus. A Pell Grant paid for tuition and books, while her work-study job covered expenses. “They pushed me,” she says. “I think that’s what I needed.”

***

There was broad skepticism at first about DirectConnect from the community, Shugart says. Critics thought DirectConnect was “watering down” UCF by admitting students who had not achieved the same SAT scores as freshmen. “This guarantee [of admission to UCF] doesn’t apply to everyone who attends Valencia. It’s everyone who succeeds at Valencia,” Shugart swatted back. “And the data are quite clear: Those who succeed at Valencia are going to succeed at UCF.”