Stacie Davis, a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is taking a drawing class at a local community college in addition to her regular course load at the university.
The reason: Davis, who is majoring in psychology and pre-occupational therapy, needs the art course to go into an occupational-therapy program.
“The classes at U. of I. are hard to get into unless you are an art major,” she said.
Also, the class times didn’t fit her schedule. But at two-year Parkland College in Champaign, she can take the class two evenings a week.
Davis is among an increasing number of students enrolled in four-year colleges and universities who, for various reasons, take some of their classes at community colleges.
During the 1995 spring semester, she took a course at Parkland in medical terminology, also needed for an occupational-therapy program. That course was “mostly memorizing the textbook and was easy,” she said.
“But the art is not a `blowoff’ class. It requires a lot of time. The class meets three hours twice a week, and the homework takes 5 to 10 hours a week. The teacher is good; she is demanding but very patient.”
Davis, 21, has applied to undergraduate occupational-therapy programs at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Kansas, Kansas City. (U. of I. doesn’t offer an undergraduate program.) If she is accepted, she plans to transfer in the fall. If not, she plans to complete her degree in psychology at U. of I., then pursue a graduate degree in occupational therapy.
Few statistics are available on the numbers of four-year college students taking community college classes because most colleges don’t keep records of this practice, educators said.
“We do know it is increasing because (information about it) is showing up more and more in the literature of community colleges,” said Arthur M. Cohen, professor of higher education and director of the Educational Resources Information Center Clearinghouse for Community Colleges at UCLA.
Community colleges are proud of their capability to serve four-year college students, he said.
Triton College in River Grove has seen one indication of this increase. In spring 1995, the community college received 376 calls for summer schedules from students attending about 40 institutions, said Gwen Kanelos, dean of students. About seven years ago, there were about 100 calls.
Kanelos attributed the increase, in part, to the high tuition at four-year schools. “If they can get a couple courses out of the way, they can cut the time it takes to graduate or graduate on time or take fewer courses during the year and work,” she said.
In Illinois, the average community college tuition is $1,323 a year, said Ross Hodel, deputy director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education. Public universities average $3,432 and private schools $12,413.
The traditional reason for taking community college courses has been that students have access to summer classes at schools near their homes, Cohen said. A new reason, however, is that universities are cutting back on lower-division classes and they fill up rapidly, so required courses aren’t always available.
Some students want to escape large lecture halls and classes taught by teaching assistants in favor of smaller classrooms and instructors who do nothing but teach, educators said. Some may be seeking easier courses.
Another indication of increased use of community colleges is implementation of agreements between some two- and four-year schools in Illinois on credit transfers.
One of the older agreements, called concurrent enrollment, is between the U. of I. and Parkland. It has been in place since the mid-1970s, said Bruce Hinely, assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the U. of I.
“The initial impetus came from Parkland to enable their students to take courses at the university that weren’t offered at Parkland,” he said. Then the university explored the possibility of its students taking courses at Parkland. “It seems to have worked well for both institutions.”
A student in the program must be approved by both institutions. Parkland has 78 students taking courses at U. of I., and 338 U. of I. students are taking classes at Parkland, according to officials at each school.
The major reason U. of I. students take freshman and sophomore classes at Parkland is a scheduling problem, Hinely said.
When Parkland students take classes at U. of I., it is often because they are prepared for a course but don’t have the number of credit hours to transfer, he said.
A more recent agreement, in a little different context, is between Truman College, which is one of the City Colleges of Chicago, and DePaul University.
Called the DePaul/Truman Bridge Program, it allows an interchange between Truman students and students in DePaul’s School for New Learning, an alternative adult program in which students may earn degrees on the basis of competencies instead of traditional college credits.
The first five students in the program, begun in the 1992-93 school year, will graduate this year, said Anghesom Atsbaha, acting assistant dean of continuing education at Truman and liaison for the program.
Each of the four classes in the program usually has 10 to 15 DePaul students and 20 to 25 Truman students.
Started with the help of a foundation grant, the program is designed to assist minority students but is open to anybody, Atsbaha said.
“We want two-year students to see what a four-year college is all about so they won’t be intimidated culturally or intellectually,” said David Justice, director of DePaul’s School for New Learning.
DePaul students take the courses because they may be requirements for a major or fit into their fields of study, Justice said. Other reasons include the class locations and an interest in the subject.
The classes, which are literature and film, sociology of urban life, practical math, and human ecology, are each team-taught by a teacher from DePaul and one from Truman. Half of each 14-week course is taught at Truman, on the North Side, and the other half at DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus. Truman students in the program pay Truman’s lower tuition rates.
After completing courses, students may continue toward a degree from DePaul, where a number of financial-aid programs are available, Justice said.
Phyllis Harris took two of the courses after enrolling part time at DePaul for a semester in 1994. She will graduate from DePaul in June.
She took literature and film and sociology of urban life to help prepare her better for work at DePaul. Her concentration is in public relations.
She found the courses to be “a little more intense” than her course at DePaul had been, she said. “We had a lot of homework and a lot of responsibility. When you finish at Truman, you’re well prepared for DePaul.”
There has been discussion among administrators of both schools about expanding the program.
“We hope to be working out the details of expanding to another community college by fall,” said Ronald Temple, chancellor of the City Colleges. “By the end of the next academic year, we hope to add three more (City) colleges and to be discussing (arrangements) with other universities.”
A more traditional and informal arrangement exists between Purdue University Calumet in Hammond and two nearby Illinois community colleges: South Suburban College in South Holland and Prairie State College in Chicago Heights.
The three schools work together to make sure their curricula coincide so that credits from the community colleges will transfer toward degrees from Purdue, said Sandra Singer, vice chancellor for academic affairs at Purdue. The arrangement has been in effect for about 15 years.
A similar effort is under way statewide by the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the Illinois Community College Board. Called the Illinois Articulation Initiative, the project aims to develop a curriculum at community colleges that will be accepted as transfer credit by participating four-year institutions. About 100 of the state’s 140 public four-year institutions, public community colleges and private four- and two-year schools take part in the voluntary program, said Ann Bragg, associate director of academic affairs for the Illinois Board of Higher Education.
The project, begun in January 1993, is in two parts. The first part, approved in September 1994 and now being implemented, was the development of a 37- to 41-credit core curriculum of general education courses that will transfer to four-year schools. It is expected to be in place statewide by summer 1998.
The second part, still being developed, is to identify community college courses in fields that will apply toward a student’s major at a four-year institution in the state. There is no target date for completion, but Bragg expects the project to take a couple of years.
“A number of institutions grant credit for associate of arts or science degrees,” Bragg said, “but the majority of transfer students don’t complete an associate’s degree. We want to more formally provide advice to students at community colleges” on the majors they might choose.
Transferring credit from community colleges to four-year schools has traditionally been a problem, and the only way to know whether a credit would transfer was to check with the four-year institution before enrolling in a community college class.
But there isn’t a significant difference in academic performance on standardized tests between students who take all their classes at four-year institutions and those who take some at community colleges, said Ernest Pascarella, professor of higher education at UIC.
Pascarella’s conclusion was the result of his nationwide study of the effects of both types of institutions on the cognitive development of 2,500 students at 23 institutions.
In spring 1993, at the end of their freshmen year, the students were evaluated in reading, math and critical thinking. They were evaluated in writing skills and science reasoning at the end of the following year.
Nevertheless, transferring from community colleges and taking classes there aren’t always success stories.
Candice Wilson, 20, a senior at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, started taking classes at a community college when she was a junior in high school. She earned an associate’s degree and transferred to SIU. She expects to graduate in August with a bachelor’s degree in physiology, which she will have earned in a total of three years after finishing high school. She hopes to go to medical school.
This semester she is taking calculus II at the community college because she took calculus I there. SIU has a different way of teaching it, she said.
She said she believes she would have been better off to have taken all her courses at a four-year school. “I was not prepared to go to a university at the junior level. My grades dropped from A’s and B’s to C’s.”
Wilson thinks this approach didn’t work for her because her field is highly specialized. “Physiology at SIU is extremely difficult,” she said.
She probably would have done fine, she said, in a field such as education. “It’s a matter of where you’re coming from and where you’re going.”
