Lots of universities in the US are lavish and expensive. Our state's branch campuses are the definition of utilitarian. Tuition is some of the lowest in the country. Salaries for professors at the branch campuses are lower than what we pay our high school teachers. Very little admin overhead. There's simply not much to cut.
Anyways, not saying it's right. But if you cut higher ed budgets, higher ed will get more expensive to the end user. Especially if the system was already hyper-efficient. Limiting transfer credits is pretty much the only way to make things more expensive to the end user without increasing tuition.
Whatever the setup, I think it is access to higher education at as local level is important.
Everything I've ever heard about and learned of the college admissions and pricing situation makes me prefer that latter.
Though, in the case of UoPeople, it's purely about nationally accreditation lacking the prestige (and sometimes rigor) of regional accreditation. It's been that way for at least a couple of decades since I started reading up on higher ed.
Spending three years at a community college and expecting the credits to transfer to a major university makes no sense for the institution. At that point they did a minority of your training, why would they recommend you?
Usually, a strong state-run community college program lets an Associates degree earned at a community college transfer into any public state university as a Junior. Most non-degree focused classes directly transfer. Going between states (staying in the same regional accreditation) seems to be difficult and not all states are set up like I had described. The theory being that someone who isn't quite ready for university has an opportunity to catch up and in my experience it gives more options when popular prerequisites are full. So the state has a reason to push for this.
I'm also skeptical about universities pointing to their qualification level because I've interviewed graduates from many well known universities and was kind of floored at the basic things many candidates seemed completely unfamiliar with.
Nationally accredited organizations don't have anyone pushing for this relationship. This seems to generally work for those schools because they can advertise as accredited, get a fig leaf of transferring credits, but usually want you to stay and complete tranning there. Most tend to be vocational which makes a lot of that moot.
I took some community college programming classes in NJ and NYC. Didn’t have to repeat the ones I did. I was in awe at how weak the curriculum was in both cases. It’s not the student’s faults imo that their programming skills were lacking. The classes weren’t challenging.
Yet some of them eventually transferred to State Uni for comp sci. It really amazed me. Wonder how they fared and if that just means that specific state school is just really easy too.
I spent 3 years (including Summers) at a CC then transferred into a top 10 engineering program. The 'extra' time was required because I needed to take a year of math classes before calculus.
And IMO, the CC's pre-engineering program left me better prepared for the university's department/major coursework than some of my peers who started at the university.
This makes no sense. Spend as long as you want at the community college, transfer all the credits you want, by definition they will all be 1xx or 2xx classes. Your degree will require half the classes to be 3xx & 4xx, so you will always have to spend at least two years at the university.
Do you remember which state and university?
