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Originally Posted by New Era
Heavily subsidized? No, not really. The idea that colleges and universities are getting a ton of money is a wives tale. The most successful schools have a great ability to fund raise, which gives them a competitive advantage. The amount of money given to the schools from the states is a drop in the bucket to what is raised through alumni and private interests. ASU has not turned things around because the State of Arizona gave them money. Just the opposite actually. The State of Arizona, just like states all over the country, have reduced spending on higher ed and forced the schools to find money elsewhere.
That is correct. Those two year degrees are transferable, if you meet admission requirements. Just because you have an associates does not mean you are going to be automatically accepted into another school and the program of your choice. State schools do have the ability to spin up extra sessions, if they can find qualified instructors. There is the rub. In demand programs are usually limited by the availability of instructors, so the programs can only accept so many students. If you are not in the top X% of applicants, you're not getting in. That's just the way things work, and transfers always have a challenge because they don't already have the foot in the door so to speak.
California's system is quite extensive because it is a very large state. Texas is another that has a very impressive system. All states have similar systems and operate in similar fashions. It's not like they can go way off the road map in how they do things, as the accrediting bodies have a lot of say in how things work. Same with the feds and how the schools interface with them. There are a lot of differences between systems, but because students are becoming more transient in nature you're starting to see a lot more systems find ways to normalize processes and get on board with doing things the same way. California does do things well, but they also have some serious challenges. Same with Texas. Fortunately, everyone is now learning from each other and sharing best practices to make things work better for the student.
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Our community colleges have published admission requirements by university that if you meet them you are guaranteed to be accepted to that program. Students are aware of what they are and it generally a better route to go to get into a lot of in demand schools than to try to qualify with high school gpa and SAT scores.
Any kind of expansion of public funding of schools needs to make use of community colleges both as a gateway into 4 year schools and for 1 or 2 year vocational specific programs.
I don't know if there is a bigger waste of public and parent money and student's time than first year students sitting in a lecture hall with 100 other kids listening to a tenured professor who doesn't want to be teaching the class, and is likely not even an effective communicator. I've been told by guidance counselor's that students that start in community college have a higher rate of graduation at 4 year schools than kids who start there.