[quote="Publisher;c-22731141"An associate Degree would make the college credits earned permanent as opposed to becoming invalid with the passage of time (a certain number of years that students credits remain valid toward earning a bachelor’s degree).
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Colleges vary in policies, so general statements would be risky to rely on. An associates degree may not necessarily be composed entirely of courses useful for a bachelor’s degree, or transferable to a given four year school. Expiration policy could also vary by school.
@ucbalumnus: My suggestion is that the 4 year school award associate’s degrees to those who complete, essentially, half of the credits required for a bachelor’s degree.
Important in order to permanently retain credits already earned & in order to enable one to apply for jobs which require a “college degree”.
While not ideal as it might encourage some to quit halfway through the pursuit of a bachelor’s degree, it is better–at least in my view–than leaving a university with the feeling of incompleteness and. possibly, a feeling of failure.
An Associate’s Degree is an accomplishment & this accomplishment may create energy to push forward toward a bachelor’s degree and it may lengthen the time frame for earning a bachelor’s degree.
Motivation is important. The sense of pride & accomplishment one should get from earning an associate’s degree should help to motivate students facing challenges toward a better life–whether that is derived from continuing on to complete the requirements for a bachelor’s degree or whether it means qualifying for a better job because one has a recognized college degree (an associate’s degree).
An Associate’s degree is NOT half a bachelor’s degree, as many students discover when they try to transfer. The community colleges in my area do not have (for example) the right math and science courses for many majors at a four year university. You can take the right math course for a Gen Ed requirement in Early Childhood Education which is NOT the right math for a degree in bio or engineering. You can get a job as a pharm tech in my state with an AA, but you will be very disappointed to discover that you are not “half” a pharmacist, or half a BS in chemistry, or half a “pre med” even when you’ve taken the courses in those areas. And an AA in Business Management pretty much qualifies you to work as an administrative assistant-- it does not get you halfway to a BS in Accounting or finance.
Publisher- I recognize the sentiment behind your idea, but in many instances you are throwing up yet another roadblock.
@blossom: My suggestion is that the 4 year university award the associate’s degree for coursework completed at that 4 year university during one’s pursuit toward a bachelor’s degree.
Counseling students is a key here as course selection is important.
@blossom: I do not understand how earning an associate’s degree is "throwing up yet another roadblock " in the context of 4 year universities with sub-50% graduation rates. I do, however, agree that advising, planning & course selection is important.
As for those transferring from a community college to a 4 year university, my understanding is that many states co-ordinate the courses so that it is noted as to whether or not a particular course will satisfy the 4 year public university requirement. This is an example of why academic counseling is important for those in the early stages of their college career.
What one can do with an associate’s degree may be limited, but certainly gives one more options than for those with just a high school diploma. For example: An employer may be more willing to hire & to train one who has earned an associate’s degree than one who just has earned a high school diploma.
We all have to start somewhere. If an associate’s degree enables one to secure a position in a company with benefits & training & the opportunity to advance, then the administrative assistant position is a valuable opportunity.
Throwing up another roadblock- a student leaves their four year university after two years (usually because they’ve run out of money) and has an AA degree. Five years later, their situation is stabilized- usually because an employer is willing to pay tuition for the successful completion of courses that lead to a Bachelor’s degree. So far so good!
But the courses taken five years ago are NOT the ones needed for the Bachelor’s. The stats class the 18 year old took which satisfied a distribution requirement for a math class is NOT the stats class that the now 23 year old needs to take for a degree in supply chain management, or psychology, or virtually anything else.
So the now 23 year old is not 4 years away from completing a Bachelor’s degree, one course at a time, on their employers dime. The now 23 year old is 8 or 10 years away since most of the “AA” qualifying courses have to be retaken, and the likelihood that the now 23 year old is going to commit to this same employer in order to finish a degree is pretty close to zero.
One more roadblock.
And I’m not knocking Admin assistant roles. They are both a great career path long term, and a wonderful stepping stone. But the two year AA certificate/degree is not a panacea for what ails higher ed, especially if young kids from disadvantaged/first gen families discover after the fact that their employment options aren’t so great after two years worth of time, sacrifice, and cash-- and in many cases- loans.
Even for the same major at the same college, courses and requirements could change, so that courses taken years or decades ago may no longer be applicable to major requirements after returning to the same college in the same major after many gap years or decades, regardless of whether an associates degree was earned in the earlier time in college.
It also seems to be rare for college credits to actually expire, but becoming inapplicable to anything other than general elective credit due to changing courses and requirements is a risk for any student returning after many gap years or decades.
Obviously, changing major can be an additional way to make previous course work inapplicable, but that occurs even if the student is continuously enrolled in college. Those returning to a different college additionally have the usual transfer credit mismatch issues as well.
Actually, it probably is, in the same way that Calculus I or Chemistry I are general classes that apply to almost all majors that require a calculus or chemistry class.
Colleges may offer different versions of these courses. For example:
Introductory statistics may be non-calculus-based or calculus-based. Different majors may require one or the other, or may require a major-specific version.
Calculus may come in versions for math majors, engineering majors, and business majors.
Chemistry may come in versions for chemistry and chemical engineering majors or other majors.
But choosing between these different versions is more of an issue of planning course selection when one is undecided between different majors, as opposed to “credit expiration”.
I am quite familiar with one of the schools on this list, as my daughter is a student there. It may be a “national university” by the U.S. News’ standards, but it is not what anyone else would think of as a national university, and this is probably true of a number of other schools on the list. It also attracts a lot of military and military spouses as students because of its location, and its admission standards are fairly low. It is no academic powerhouse, but it has a place in the world. The OP’s suggestion that he has any business tolerating or not tolerating the job they’re doing is a baffling. Why is it any of his (or our) business?
This Graduation Rate only includes students that started as full-time freshman on one campus and graduated later from the same campus…
In many cases these schools have a high percentage of students that are low-income (Pell), first-generation with weak high-school preparation for college.
Some of these students transfer to a “better” college once their grades improve and then they graduate from the second college within 6 years… However, that doesn’t help the first school’s graduation rate.
In the case of CUNY - City College and the University of New Mexico both schools have 10% or more of students that start at one school but end up graduating from another 4 year college after transferring.
So, some of these schools on the list do have over a 50% graduation rate after accounting for transfers.
@planit: The reference to “tolerating” was intended to convey my opinion that the students at these schools deserve better. Even though not the best academically & as many are struggling financially, their time, money, & effort desrve a better outcome in my opinion.
While the universities are offering an opportunity, I also believe that these universities have an obligation to their students to help them progress to earning a degree.
P.S. While “open enrollment” schools may be expected to have low 6 year graduation rates, as I pointed out above, several of these ranked 15 national universities with sub-50% admit rates engage in selective admissions.
Also important to note that these are among the 292 ranked national universities out of 399 national universities. This indicates that these are schools capable of doing better than sub-50% 6 year graduation rates–although any with heavy military enrollment lose students to military transfers among bases which is beyond the control of both the student & the school.
@Publisher Why do students deserve better? Unless you’re talking about institutional barriers to graduating on time (eg, course availability, etc), which is usually not the case at any of these schools, the 6-year graduation rate is meaningless to any individual student. As everyone has tried to explain to you, the reasons students usually don’t graduate within 6 years is due to various personal obstacles.
Most graduation rate differences are due to student characteristics. From a college standpoint, these are selection effects, rather than treatment effects.
A college can, of course, influence both selection effects and treatment effects. However, influencing selection effects to improve graduation rates commonly means excluding many of the students who could benefit from going to college (e.g. the Auburn and Alabama method of avoiding enrolling students who have neither high end academic credentials nor family money, rather than “giving everyone a chance”).
Actions that change treatment effects would be more helpful to those students, but these can often be expensive (e.g. offering a full ride to every student to greatly reduce the likelihood of financial dropout may be unaffordable to the college). Even then, there is a limit to what can be done based on student characteristics (even with the best of college support and no financial limitations, 3.0 HS GPA students are not likely to have the same graduation rates as 4.0 HS GPA students).
Someone earlier in the thread raised the disparity between Ole Miss (flagship of the highest poverty state in the country)'s graduation rate in the mid-60s and UNM (second highest poverty in the country flagship)'s graduation rate in the upper 40s. The implication was that UNM is doing something wrong.
Ole Miss is 77% white. In a 40% black state. UNM is 35% white in a 46% Hispanic state. To my mind, UNM is doing the right thing by serving large underserved populations in its state. Ole Miss is the very opposite of what we should be encouraging.
Even more interesting was another school OP mentioned approvingly, LSU. According to the US Census Bureau, Louisiana is 32.7% African American; According to Forbes, LSU is 71.5% white, 12.85% African American.
It’s also important to note that, on average, 62% of all college students graduate in six years. In light of the many non-academic issues facing the students at the New Mexico schools, their average graduation rate isn’t that far from the national average. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_ctr.asp
such comparisons --often reported in the media – are false equivalents. The question is not the makeup of the state of LA, but the make-up of the high school graduates who are college-ready. The former – in the census – includes infants and seniors…the latter is the output of K12.
https://www.bayoubrief.com/2019/04/11/at-lsu-racial-diversity-is-a-financial-necessity/
“In 2016, 44 percent of Louisiana’s high school graduates were black. But that fall, black students made up just 13 percent of LSU’s freshman class. At 31-points, the gap is one of the three widest in the nation, tied with the University of South Carolina for second place, behind Ole Miss, with a 39-point gap.Updated data for all 50 states, showing the disparities between African-American and Latino high school graduates and African-American and Latino freshman enrollment at flagship universities, can be seen here.”
But please, further illuminate us with the “false equivalents.”