Role Reversal

CLOSER ATTENTION AT A LOW COST

THE LOW PRICE TAG IS WHAT SOLD Warner Meeks on the engineering program at St. Louis Community College. A 15-credit semester at the college costs around $1,110, compared with approximately $3,900 at the University of Missouri-Rolla, where the 23-year-old will transfer in the fall as a junior. "You learn the same thing at a two-year college as you do at a four-year college, so it seems like a no-brainer to me to save the money," Meeks says.

TJ Bloch agrees. He spent a semester at the Rolla campus before a surgical procedure over winter break during his freshman year forced him to take some time off. Since St. Louis Community College was closer to home, he decided to take a few engineering classes there before going back to Rolla. Once enrolled at the community college, however, his original plan changed. "I realized it was a lot easier and cheaper to stay where I was," he says. This fall, the 21-year-old intends to transfer to the University of Missouri at St. Louis.

Bloch says the professors at St. Louis Community College are much more accessible than those at Rolla. "They provide the support network that you need in these first two years," he says. "If you have a problem, you can go right to them or ask a question in class. At a university, you're a number in a big class and have to go through a teaching assistant to get to the professor."

For the most part, engineering students at community colleges need the extra attention. Nearly all two-year colleges are open-admission institutions, meaning they basically take everyone who applies. As a result, many engineering students arrive at two-year colleges needing to brush up on the basics, particularly mathematics. They do that by taking remedial courses, which don't count toward their degree requirements.

At San Antonio College, Dimitriu persuaded the math department to group all the engineering students in remedial classes together. "If you bundle them with each other, there is peer pressure to finish so they can actually take courses that have something to do with engineering," he says. "Otherwise, they are dumped into remedial courses with students where they have nothing in common."

At Itasca, Ulseth has divided each semester into two terms, so that remedial students can take the extra classes they need without falling behind in completing their degree. Ulseth also works with the students when they arrive to quickly identify which four-year college they want to transfer to and ensures that they take only the courses required by that institution. "We don't let them take anything superfluous," he says. "We're not focusing on our degree requirements, we're focusing on their degree requirements."

The close attention given to engineering students at a community college seems to pay off. From 1999 to 2003, for instance, 110 students graduated from four-year engineering programs with associate's degrees from Itasca. Of those, 100 either became engineers or are on track to do so. At St. Louis Community College, 90 percent of the students who go on to four-year colleges graduate with a bachelor's degree, often with a grade-point average that is higher than the one they achieved earning their associate's degree, says Ashok Agrawal, dean of math, science, engineering and technology at St. Louis Community College. "Many universities find that once these students spend two years with us they are much better prepared," Agrawal says.