A few days ago, I heard about this “new deal” that Western Iowa Tech Community College (WITCC) and Wayne State College (WSC) made and I have to say that it has to be one of the dumbest agreements ever signed, and that it is something that no one is talking about.
What the agreement basically does is that students who enroll in classes at WITCC can have a seamless transfer to WSC when the time comes for them to graduate and then transfer to said college.
My biggest issue with this is the following: THIS IS HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED TO WORK ORIGINALLY!
Why does a community college have to sign an agreement so that all of their classes will transfer to another local four-year college as painlessly and easily as possible? Wasn’t the point of a community college supposed to do this already, especially if you’re going to a public four-year college afterward?
Also, even if you did go to a public four-year college in Nebraska, South Dakota, or anywhere else, why is there a distinction in general education classes? If they are all required by the government in each state, why does each community college and four-year college have classes that will work and won’t work? They’re government-mandated classes, so it should all be the same in theory, right? Everything should work and transfer correctly without a question
There is a problem with the number of credit hours too for both colleges. Iowa requires 60 hours of general education classes and Nebraska requires 30 credit hours. Which ones are the students going to be required to do? Another question is if they are going to be required to declare for WSC the moment they get to WITCC so that the community college can get them set up in that program, which might make it so that they only have to take 30 credit hours of classes. There needs to be clarification of this from the colleges.
You think that’s the only problem here? We’re not even close.
Another issue that this agreement does is that it eliminates the free market. What is happening is that these students are being suckered into going to WSC because they will not have to take as many credit hours, as well as the fact that WITCC has an agreement with them, therefore, it’s just easier to have the students transfer to WSC once they are done at WITCC.
There are more problems when all these colleges are doing is creating more bureaucracy! You have to go to a person, who has to go to a group, which has to meet with a committee, which has to talk about this kind of stuff? All of this, by the way, is just being done to keep idiots and worthless people in academia employed.
This hurts students too since they are somewhat limited in their options. What if you were a student who wanted to go to the University of Nebraska, University of Iowa, Iowa State University, University of Florida, or the University of Northwestern? Is the community college really going to have to have a partnership or affiliation agreement to make sure that all of your pointless and worthless general education classes transfer correctly. All of that paperwork just so that you don’t have to retake those genera education classes?
If anything, what this does prove is that the community colleges were not doing their job in helping students. They were not doing their job with the other colleges to make sure that everything was transferring adequately. Additionally, the four-year schools are just as much at fault as the community colleges since they would change the requirements and then not tell students at the community colleges about it until they had fully-enrolled and then had to take more pointless general education classes at the four-year college.
Both schools (WITCC and WSC) said that they want all students to have the best opportunities to succeed in life with this agreement. If that were the case, the agreement would not be needed because the community college would have made it so that they worked with WSC and all other public colleges in the area to make sure that everything was transferring adequately and meeting the requirements.
This agreement is not about students. For WITCC, this will allow them to possibly get more students who want something a little faster than the traditional route, but more so it will just make them look good and look as though they care about their students, even though we all should know that that isn’t the case. For WSC, this will give them a streamline of students and will allow them to get higher enrollment each year.
At the end of the day, this is not about the students. This is about creating more unnecessary bureaucracies and having a streamline full of students, and getting the giant payday from it too. Let’s also not forget that it eliminates the free market, which we all know colleges and professors hate.
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