Advantages of taking community college classes

The St. Thomas strategic plan was recently released, and among the many goals the plan discusses is lowering the cost of college. As the draft suggests, coordinating more with online and community colleges might not be a bad option.

I have several St. Thomas friends who attended community colleges before coming here. They will graduate early at a fraction of the cost of regular tuition. Why? They got their core curriculum largely out of the way at a much less expensive institution. Community college classes can be thousands of dollars cheaper than their university counterparts.

While it is understandable that St. Thomas wants all of its students to take a few classes in a variety of subjects, it doesn’t make sense that all those core classes are taken at the university itself. It makes more sense to take some of those at a community college or online.

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Attending a liberal arts university ensures that you graduate knowing a little math, a little English, a little science, a little theology, a little art and a little philosophy. This is why we have a core curriculum. It makes us more well-rounded. However, allowing students to take some community college classes doesn’t necessarily affect the value of the core curriculum. Having a core curriculum, which allows for community college credits, makes students just as well-rounded, so long as the quality of community college courses is equivalent to the quality at the university.

In some classes, students either know the material or they don’t. There isn’t much difference in quality from teacher to teacher or institution to institution. If you learned calculus online, you learned calculus, period. If you learned how to program in Java at a community college, you learned how to program in Java, period.

There isn’t much of a quality difference between institutions for certain types of classes. That is why St. Thomas already accepts credit from elsewhere for many of its core classes. That is why when St. Thomas says that it wants “to reduce student debt loads without compromising academic training or student engagement,” it needn’t fear further incorporating community colleges and online schools with the core curriculum.

Given the university already accepts many outside credits and given many outside classes are not meaningfully different, I’m glad St. Thomas plans to increase participation with high schools, community colleges and online schools for some of its lower level classes.

Of course, some classes, such as philosophy classes and high-level major classes, are better kept within the university. These are classes where the content can vary quite a bit from institution to institution.

With that said, St. Thomas would – as a whole – make meaningful progress toward addressing the colossal student debt problem by making it easier for students to transfer credits from less expensive schools.

Elliot Polsky can be reached at pols4319@stthomas.edu.

2 Replies to “Advantages of taking community college classes”

  1. The author could not be more wrong. It is shocking but not surprising that a UST student holds such views. Sadly his views are widely held among our students. More sadly they seem to be held by some faculty. Most sadly the strategic plan indicates they have infiltrated the administration. 
    The core is not “a little of this and a little of that.” Such a view is incredibly puerile. Furthermore, the author’s assumption that a community college class with generally much larger enrollment taught by an instructor who meets five to six classes daily, equals a UST class in providing individual attention is wide of the mark.
    It should not be necessary to say it, but, the core is the core of the UST experience. One can study chemistry, music, history, finance, etc. at many schools, but it is the core that make UST unique.
    There are reports that faculty in some department ENCOURAGE students to take core courses elsewhere. This is disrespectful to their colleagues who teach in the core and bordering on treason the university and its mission. Should this continue, the image widely held in the Twin Cities that UST is just a “business” school would become the reality.
    If the UST administration had any pride and gumption, it would require that ALL core courses be taken on campus. That the strategic plan hints at a move in the opposite diction is ominous indeed.

  2. I think the statement “so long as the quality of community college courses is equivalent to the quality at the university” implies a lot more than Mr. Polsky suggests. Take Finite Math, a core class many students take to fulfill their core requirement. Here at St. Thomas, as every course is a 4 credit course, each student gets 3 and 1/3 hours of class time, time in direct contact with the professor. Not only would that be more time than spent with the professor at a 3 credit community college course (let alone online courses), but due to the smaller class sizes, there is the opportunity for attention from the professor during that time. On top of that, each professor has office hours and is available to meet with the student outside of class for even more one-on-one time learning.
    The reason I bring this up is that as a tutor at the MaRC, I work with many students taking Finite and other core math courses, and it is obvious to me that this professor time is a significant benefit to the students’ learning. Plus, at another college, would students who have difficulty with some of the core classes have the option of going to the MaRC or the respective departmental tutor?
    And even beyond that, the topics covered in the course usually align with what the student will need to do in their accounting / business courses, while at some other college this might not be the case. 
    So perhaps we should consider more carefully what “quality” of classes entails. 

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