By Garry Boulard
Nearly four years after the Washington state legislature passed a law allowing the state’s community college system to offer baccalaureate programs, Bellevue College has more than 60 students enrolled in two separate bachelor’s degree programs and has already seen its first graduating class.
“It has all worked out very well,” said Bellevue President Jean Floten regarding an idea that took root after a board member of the college, who was also a high-tech employer, said there was a growing need in his field for four-year graduates.
“This was the same thing we heard from other employers who were talking about the need for a new kind of degree, where people would come to them job-ready with a four-year background,” Floten said.
In response, the college applied to Washington’s Board for Community and Technical Colleges to be one of the first community colleges in the state to offer a four-year degree.
“When the pilots (demonstration programs) were created, there really was not a lot of controversy,” Floten said. “The branch campuses of the universities were desirous of admitting freshmen, and we were desirous of offering an upper division, so there was kind of a trade that was done in the name of providing greater services to students in the state.”
Today, there are seven community colleges in Washington that offer four-year degrees, while Bellevue has added an interior design program to its initial radiation and imaging sciences baccalaureate program.
A national trend
Bellevue’s embrace of four-year degrees represents a larger national trend that is seeing community colleges across the country increasingly getting the authority to award bachelor’s degrees, said Beth Hagan, executive director of the Community College Baccalaureate Association (CCBA).
“It’s all about meeting unmet needs,” she said, noting that 17 states—including New York, Texas and Florida—currently allow for community colleges to offer a variety of four-year degrees.
“In every state, universities are first asked if they would like to provide an applied workforce degree, a bachelor’s of arts degree, and most of the time they respond by saying ‘No, that this is not what we do,’” Hagan said. “So this has left it to the community colleges to fill the void.”
There are many initiatives going on right now that are moving several community colleges in the direction of offering four-year degrees, and the process varies from state to state, said Hagan, adding that CCBA also supports improved articulation agreements between two-year and four-year colleges, greater distance learning services and improved access at the community college to a bachelor’s degree via on-campus university centers.
Partnering with four-year institutions
In Illinois, Harper College in November announced its partnership with Northern Illinois University (NIU) to provide a four-year degree in applied management with an emphasis on public education.
The partnership is an important opportunity for everyone in public safety management—police, public safety and EMS, said Harper President Kenneth Ender.
“Those folks enter into those careers with associate degrees that we provide, but then in order to move into supervisory positions and management and more leadership roles, they really need a four-year management degree,” he said.
The announcement of the Harper-NIU partnership came after the community college considered offering a four-year degree program itself.
“We were willing to do that if we couldn’t find a partner to accommodate the needs of the students, with respect to both the courses and the architecture of the delivery system,” Ender said.
Oakton Community College (OCC) in Illinois has also signed a partnership agreement with NIU, which Tom Hamel, vice president for academic affairs at the college, called “nothing less than groundbreaking.”
“For students, our partnership with NIU is good because while most four-year institutions will accept an associate of arts or associate of science degree as a transfer degree, it has been unpredictable as to whether or not a transfer institution will accept an associate of applied science degree,” Hamel said.
But through the partnership, NIU and OCC are discussing applying the AAS toward a four-year degree, including public safety, Hamel said.
“That’s a very good thing for our students,” he said.
A similar partnership was crafted in 2006 between Maryland’s Harford Community College (HCC) and Towson University to develop a seamless community college-to-university transfer of credits, with an emphasis on math, science and education. But Towson, which has subsequently signed similar transfer agreements with all of Maryland’s community colleges, has also agreed to build a campus on land owned by HCC, adjacent to the two-year college’s Bel Air Campus.
It was during a conversation with Towson President Robert Caret that HCC President James LaCalle suggested that the two institutions further cement their ties by having Towson construct its own building on the community college campus. (HCC has had a regional higher education center since 1995. Currently, six institutions offer bachelor’s and master’s programs, and even a doctorate program, through the center.)
“We ended up talking to people in the community who very much liked the idea and have since signed a memorandum of understanding between our two colleges,” LaCalle said. “We have already selected an architectural firm to design the building and hope to break ground this coming August.”
The operating principle behind the university/community building project is to increase higher education access to residents of northeastern Maryland, LaCalle said.
“We are not going to be offering four-year degrees at our school, and we are not trying to become a four-year college,” LaCalle noted. “Even before Towson announced it was going to construct a building here, I made it very clear that we did not want to become a four-year school. We want to be a really good community college, which is what I think we are.”
At odds over ‘mission creep’
That emphasis on keeping the missions of the four-year and two-year institutions separate has dominated the debate in Michigan in response to a legislative proposal to allow the state’s 28 community colleges to offer bachelor’s of arts degrees in four applied areas: maritime technology, concrete technology, the culinary arts and nursing.
“There was opposition to the idea initially and there continues to be opposition,” said Michael Hanson, president of the Michigan Community College Association. “The four-year schools are fighting the proposal hard, and I would think that by the time it gets to the House floor, there will be a number of no votes.”
The reason for the opposition, which is spirited in part by the President’s Council of the State Universities of Michigan, is a concern that the state’s community colleges may be slowly inching towards becoming four-year institutions.
“They talk about mission creep,” Hanson said. “But this has nothing to do with that. It is about limited programs in certain parts of the state where access is currently not available for a four-year degree, particularly in the northern part of the state.”
“Besides, the University of Michigan is not going to put together a four-year concrete technology program,” Hanson added. “But it would make sense for Alpena Community College, which already has a world-class concrete technology program, to do so.”
Until the Michigan legislature takes a final vote on the matter, Hanson says two-year colleges supporting the move will continue to educated residents and lawmakers on the purpose of offering four-year degrees in certain areas.
“Once you talk to people who are initially opposed to the idea about what it is you are trying to do, many of them come around,” he said.
That same approach worked in Texas, where three community colleges have now been authorized to offer baccalaureates, said Martha Ellis, a former president of the Texas Association of Community Colleges.
“There was a lot of concern that the community colleges were diluting their mission, and that if they went the baccalaureate route, they would forget their mission altogether and no longer serve the community in the way that was intended,” she said.
But two-year colleges countered that the four-year degrees they wanted to offer were in applied technology programs, and that was very much a part of the community colleges’ mission,” said Ellis, who currently serves as the associate vice chancellor for community college partnerships with the University of Texas System.
“The legislature agreed, and since the four-year programs ended up being fairly limited in scope, most people have been satisfied. I have not heard anything negative,” she said.