Yahoo! News: Community College units not transferring in California

[symbolipoint]

There's a news report shown on Yahoo! of community college course credits not accepted for transfer-students to the CSU system schools. (These are schools in California.)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/waste-time-community-college-transfers-043010995.html("Other" picked because not sure this classification; courses transferring or not)

 

[MidgetDwarf]

There's a news report shown on Yahoo! of community college course credits not accepted for transfer-students to the CSU system schools. (These are schools in California.)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/waste-time-community-college-transfers-043010995.html("Other" picked because not sure this classification; courses transferring or not)

I was hoping this article would explain what that means for students in California getting an AS-T for transfer.

 

[CrysPhys]

I'm glad to see the title of the thread has been edited for clarification. It was originally " news: c.c. units not transferring". I first thought it had to do with a glitch in metric to English conversion.

 

[Office_Shredder]

I always assumed 2 years community College, 2 years university was a pipe dream that you couldn't achieve in most places, but I'm pretty surprised that California hasn't been able to make this process work right. At their size it seems like there should be enough demand to standardize among the public schools which community College courses are going to count for which credit.

 

[Vanadium 50]

The story definitely has a slant to it. "nearly half lost at least some work. On average, those students lost the equivalent of almost a full semester" could have been written "over half lost no work, and among those who did, it averaged under a semester"

"deemed less rigorous than those at Bakersfield — even though some used the same textbooks" - could be if School X goes through 85% of the book at School Y goes through 65%.

Oh and if "I’m taking the classes and I’m like, ‘This is exactly what I took,’” I'd say like the English classes didn't exactly like stick.

The fact that the article isn't very serious doesn't mean the problem isn't. We want incompatible things. We want community colleges open to the community, not just the academically elite. We want our state colleges to be the best of the best, and we want people who transfer from CC to state colleges to do so and still finish on time. Oh, and did I mention? We want to do this keeping tuition and taxes low.

 

[Joshy]

I recommend to any (California) community college readers to visit ASSIST.org.

I'm not sure if it will work for you, but it worked for me. It's been a long while since I've done that, and so I don't know if there has been any (big) changes or added caveats, but it looks about the same to me just prettier now. I also heard about TAG, but I did not personally use this. I "heard" but I do not know if they watered it down or not, but the gist of it was that taking specific coursework and exceeding some threshold relatively high GPA could secure your admissions to some universities.

Something I don't like about these agreements is that it's not very consistent with the coursework, and so I think this could be a cause of many units not transferring. Students don't want to put all of their eggs into one basket by placing big bets on one university and take transferrable units only for that one. If they don't get in after banking on that one, then that will likely negatively impact their schedule; however: they need to pad the schedule with all these extra coursework so they have a fallback plan at university #2 or #3, and this causes them to have a lot of extra courses when they transfer. An example of this issue for electrical engineers is UC San Diego doesn't accept any engineering coursework for transfer; almost all the other universities did require it (UCB, UCLA, UCSC, UCD). Some universities like UCB wanted 3 biology courses that need to be taken in a series, and nobody else wanted it. The rigor of a class looked very independent of the university, and some classes I dropped it and took it the following term at the same institution... it would be "like" a new class.

This gets even more wild when you need to consider something like IGETC. Engineering students at least in my class were advised to NOT do IGETC, but when I followed this recommendation it tacked 11 more classes to my schedule, which was pretty significant. If I could go back and tell myself something I would (1) do IGETC since I was getting an associates anyways and was so close, and (2) choose a different university because the one I went to was not a good fit for me and I looked away when I saw the red flags.