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And that’s basically it!
How are they going to extract wealth from the working class if there are affordable options for higher education?
There is no reason community colleges shouldn't offer bachelor's.
The professors all have masters or PhDs and have the same qualifications as teaching at universities.
My associates, from a community college was 1/3 of the cost of my bachelor's that I received at a "cheap" local state University .
Make college cheaper. Do it do it do it
The professors all have masters or PhDs and have the same qualifications as teaching at universities.
This is very much not the case. I work really well with my cc colleagues, but there are significant differences in qualifications since CC's teach lower division courses only.
The colleagues I have in analogous cc departments nearby? They don't even have appropriate credentials in the right discipline. Some of them will have a computer science undergraduate degree and then a business master's. Some will have two business degrees in marginally related fields. Most don't have Ph.D.s at all, so that is largely irrelevant.
The way they keep up with the field? Remarkably different. We do research which advanced the state of our field. Ideally the boundaries we push allow us to craft new and important experiences for our students, not just the same things you could look up in a government catalog.
You wouldn't have noticed because the instructors you had at the CC were only teaching first and second year courses. The bar is actually pretty low there, even in many universities. As a grad student I taught introductory sections possessing only a bachelor's in the subject. The truth is many cc instructors may not even know the materials at the upper division you may see at a 4 year.
I appreciate your lived experiences, but they are in the end of the consumer, where everything is tidied up (as well as it can be) on the other side for you. The actual reality is far different.
BTW, big leftist dude here. I want the cost to go down and the real solution? Go back to pre-1980s funding models prior to Reagan being governor of CA. He defunded education on a large scale, shifting the burden of education costs from state taxes to the individual 18 year old with no actual money.
Things got worse after that, as defunding became more advanced and more prolific. We can't further devalue degrees, nor can we afford to further defund 4+ year degrees because competition will collapse.
“We just kind of struggle a little bit to see how allowing community colleges to offer four-year baccalaureate degrees is our best use of those finite education dollars we have in the state,” Obradovich said“
Idk dude maybe increase the dollars rather than try to funnel all the low income or cost conscious learners into 1-2 donor approved fields?
They already compete against public universities, why would this be any different? They just don't want to compete at all, because that means the obscenely bloated admin paychecks may have to decrease
Professor/chair/whatever here. We don't really compete at all. It's actually the opposite. I work really well with the CC dean's in my area.
2 year degrees serve many important purposes. Some of them are down after their degree. Others transfer to us.
The former aren't a category that are interested in another 2 years anyway. No big deal.
The transfers? They are awesome from an administrative perspective. They produce degrees faster, which is important if we want our universities funded. They actually cost less to educate.
The big problem is that more CC's offering 4 years (outside of some special cases) is that it would turn things from a productive relationship to actual competition. That is disasterous for both parties as we need both to exist and work together in a productive fashion.
There are tons of smaller issues, but the whole system will become even more difficult to work if the standard divisions disappear.
There are only three public universities that offer bachelor's degrees in Iowa. Community colleges would absolutely increase the competition as community colleges could offer degrees closer to where people live.