The Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) professional development movement, community college students' emerging intentionality, and the role of two- and four-year higher education faculty intersect in a proactive model proposed by the author that advocates ECEC community college programs separate from the vocational tradition and establishes ECEC transfer degrees to four-year programs. Degree structures must be built with flexibility, and encompass checkpoints and highly articulated options as student intentionality unfolds. The proactive model is constructed from Morgan's (1994) 21 st century model of professionalism and her conception of students' emerging intentionality, combined with Brint and Karabel's (1989) models that attempt to explain why community colleges moved from conferring primarily transfer degrees to conferring primarily vocational degrees. (Contains 1 footnote.)