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Role Reversal
ASEE Prism, Mar 2007 by Selingo, Jeffrey
* WHILE GETTING ACCEPTED TO A FOUR- YEAR ENGINEERING PROGRAM CAN BE DIFFICULT, ONCE THEY'RE IN, COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS PROVE THEIR WORTH AND WIN OVER UNIVERSITY SKEPTICS. * BY JEFFREY SELINGO * ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHARA LAZAR
WHEN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS considering careers in engineering look at colleges, they typically focus on large state universities with free-standing engineering schools or comprehensive private institutions. Regional public colleges often make the list as well. But one type of institution almost never makes the cut: community colleges.
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Although two-year colleges have long been seen as a stepping stone to a bachelor's degree in the United States, engineering is one of several academic fields in which four-year colleges have been reluctant to establish formal transfer agreements with community colleges. There are exceptions, of course. But for the most part, engineering professors at four-year universities believe that students should start their studies there because the undergraduate curriculum is packed with requirements that are best taken in sequence with the same cohort of students.
That viewpoint holds true at many four-year institutions despite the fact that 20 percent of engineering-degree holders began their academic careers by earning at least 10 credits at community colleges. Engineering instructors at two-year colleges say the real reason that their students have few transfer options is because many four-year institutions believe community colleges offer an inferior product. "We're not accepted or respected," says Ron Ulseth, an engineering instructor at Itasca Community College in Minnesota. Four-year colleges "are suspicious of us, and that's hard to overcome."
Now pressure is building for community colleges and four-year institutions to cooperate more closely to ensure that twoyear engineering students go on to earn a bachelor's degree in the subject. A landmark report released in 2005 by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council found that community colleges are already "essential" to the education of American engineers but "have not reached their full potential." It noted, for example, that 40 percent of recipients of bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering in 1999 and 2000 had attended a community college.
The call for two- and four-year colleges to graduate more engineers comes at a time when President Bush and Congress want to build a larger American workforce in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM fields. "This nation has enormous needs, and we need to look at how the different sectors of higher education can play a role in filling those needs," says James M. Rosser, president of California State University at Los Angeles and chairman of the National Academy committee that wrote the 2005 report, "Enhancing the Community College Pathway to Engineering Careers."
One crucial role community colleges can play, Rosser says, is helping to increase the diversity of the engineering workforce. Enrollments at community colleges include disproportionately large numbers from minority groups. The National Academy report noted that "in effect, community colleges have become an educational pipeline for underrepresented minorities entering the higher education system."
But that pipeline is clogged at a crucial point. "There are just too many barriers for two-year students who want to transfer to four-year colleges," Rosser says. "Some states and some institutions have done a good job at knocking down those barriers, but we need more of a national effort."
DIFFICULTY TRANSFERRING
THE REPORT ALSO RECOMMENDED the harmonizing of curricula at the two types of institutions.
In general, "successful transfer partners communicate frequently, visit each other's campuses, meet frequently to discuss curricular changes and even share faculties," the report said. Currently, though, few formal models for communication between the two types of colleges exists, and as a result, cooperation depends on ad hoc relationships between faculty and administrators.
At Itasca Community College, Ulseth says he has "solid" transfer agreements in place with six different four-year colleges. Lining up additional agreements, however, has been difficult. "At institutions where few of our students go, they're suspicious of us," Ulseth says. "Even when our students succeed at those places, there is turnover among faculty and we have to prove ourselves all over again."
About 85 percent of Itasca's 130 students in engineering and physics transfer to four-year engineering programs, with the majority going to the University of North Dakota.
In fact, the university even helps recruit students to Itasca. When North Dakota officials traveled to Grand Rapids, Minn. in December to meet with prospective students, they didn't just talk up their own institution; they also plugged the engineering program at nearby Itasca. They even brought along alumni who had transferred to the university from Itasca to provide testimonials about just how easy it was to make the move from the two-year college to the four-year university.
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