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community colleges

The Joy—and Value Received—of Community Colleges

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Well, I came away from the community college’s four-day-long series of  training workshops feeling quite pleased. Really, I’d call them “courses,” because they were so full of content. A lot of new ideas surfaced, even though the instructor had already introduced me to many of the concepts in one-on-ones over the past several weeks. I also discovered a passle of new-to-me resources, and it was a nice opportunity to meet other faculty.

The faculty support the Maricopa Community College District provides for its adjunct faculty exceeds astonishing. Many of us were actually paid to attend these workshops, unheard-of at the Great Desert University. Not only that, but yesterday another set of paid(!!!) teacher training workshops was announced, coming up this fall.

You have to have worked at a university, where adjuncts are the lowest of the low, to understand how remarkable that is. Of course, it behooves the district to treat adjuncts decently, since 80 percent of its faculty is adjunct. However, the same can be said of any university freshman composition program, and I can assure you, “decently” is not the operative term in those precincts.

From what I can tell, Paradise Valley’s faculty support is outstanding across the board, whether for adjuncts or for full-timers. In the first place, community college full-time faculty are paid a decent wage—significantly more than most GDU faculty earn. But more to the point, Paradise Valley has enough support staff, and their training fits the faculty’s needs.

At this point, GDU West has one lonely (very excellent, very hard-working) IT staffer providing BlackBoard training and support; another who used to help was moved to the main campus. Even before the crash provided an excuse to gut the West campus’s staff, these two women were massively overworked. They could point you in the right direction, but ultimately you learned what you could about the software and about online course design by the seat of your pants. On rare occasions, the university would mount a two-hour workshop, but these were often led by faculty who had no more training than the rest of us in online instruction—it was, in short, the blind leading the blind.

The woman who led this summer’s workshops not only is experienced in teaching college-level courses, she’s completing a Ph.D. in instructional design. And it shows. She has really smart ideas about ways to set up an online course so students can navigate quickly and simply, and she also offered a number of strategies to keep the course academically rigorous without killing the instructor with overwork.

So personally, I’m very pleased about the outcome for the magazine writing course. What I’ve learned from her is going to make the course much more effective, and I’m really looking forward to engaging these ideas.

I can’t say whether this is typical of all community colleges, although I wouldn’t be surprised, since a community college’s mandate is teaching, rather than an amalgam of teaching, service, and research. Lower-division students, in particular, tend to get short shrift at universities: gigantic classes, tyro instructors, and little administrative support. If I had children who were going to attend a state university—or if I were a person who was about to embark on a four-year degree program—I would strongly recommend taking the first two years at a community college and then transferring.

The value received goes way beyond the savings in tuition, which are substantial. The real value: your students will be going to a school where somebody cares whether they succeed.

Financial Freedom: Education and training

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The other day, Funny about Money started a series on making your way toward financial freedom, the state where you find yourself independent of the day job and free to do what you want to do with your life. We identified several components in this project, all of them having to do with personal finance.

Today, let’s start with the first of those: Education

One issue we should bear in mind is the difference between true education and vocational training. A bachelor’s degree in business, engineering, or nursing (for example) may line you up to get a decent job, but it may not make you an educated person.

Education furnishes your mind. Broad reading, writing, thought, and discussion make you a wiser person and cultivate your ability to think logically, to recognize flim-flam, and to make good decisions. For that reason, a good undergraduate degree in the liberal arts is useful—maybe even indispensable—to anyone who hopes to take a leadership role in industry, government, education, and the  law. Those of us who aspire to high-powered careers in any of those need a strong undergraduate degree in the liberal arts followed by a graduate or professional degree in business, law, science, or technology.

Some graduate degrees are scams and should be avoided. A master of fine arts in writing, for example, will leave you fully unemployable while teaching you nothing that you wouldn’t have learned by spending the same amount of time applying your bottom to the seat of your desk chair. Graduate degrees in vague new pushmi-pullyu programs with no real entry requirements, such as Arizona State University’s “master of liberal studies,” are similarly suspect: if you want a degree in the liberal arts, take the GRE and get yourself into a solid program such as English, history, or mathematics.

Undergraduate technical degrees are useful in that they provide high-level vocational training for young people whose cast of mind is not especially academic. Often the resulting job opportunities are better paid, at least at the entry level, than a bachelor’s degree in the liberal or fine arts will generate. Over time, however, people with bachelor’s degrees in subjects like business, education, and technology may need master’s degrees or professional certifications to move up in their trades.

On the college level, vocational training—which defines a large number of undergraduate and graduate-level programs—will set you up to get a job, assuming jobs in your major are available by the time you graduate. Vocational education includes degree programs in business, nursing, medicine, engineering, computer sciences, graphic arts, education, and journalism, to name a few. It must be remembered that none of these guarantees high-paying work. To the contrary,  some, such as journalism and education, pretty much guarantee their graduates low pay. Some, such as accountancy, provide entrée to trades that make a good living but that may bore the pants off you.

Many people truly are not suited for higher education. Sometimes this has to do with the student’s level of maturity—some should delay college until they are focused enough to profit from it. Having to earn a living for a while speeds maturity and creates a much better college student. Others are more likely to succeed in the trades than in low-level white-collar jobs; in the case of young people who are not interested in school or who find study painfully difficult and discouraging, a short stint in a community college and a decent apprenticeship may be a smarter strategy. A person with skills in the trades is likely to earn as much as or more than an ill-educated college graduate. Remember that most millionaires in the United States are owners of businesses that provide services like pest control and plumbing. The beauty of the trades is that the work can’t easily be offshored. Even though some of these jobs pay little more than minimum wage, an ambitious young person can learn the trade well and then build his or her own business. Once you’re hiring someone else for minimum wage, you’re in a position to make a good living.

Choose wisely and choose well: consider first what you really want to do; then whether you want to do that for the rest of your life; and finally what you can earn with the credentials the degree provides.

None of this, as we all know, is likely to be cheap. A young person who’s savvy to personal finance or an older but wiser person who’s going back to school can find ways to minimize the damage. The idea should be to avoid a heavy burden of student loans, which can saddle a young person for years—even, possibly, for the rest of one’s life.

One obvious strategy that many people overlook is simply to take your first two years of undergraduate work at a community college. These schools are much cheaper than universities and are often close enough to home that you can live with your parents for an extra couple of years. Yeah, we know: what a drag! But have you priced apartments lately? Lower-division courses at community colleges are usually staffed with professionals who are dedicated to teaching, in contrast to universities, which often foist the scutwork courses onto exploited graduate students, underpaid junior faculty distracted by the grinding quest to attain tenure, or senior faculty more interested in their research than in teaching.

It’s important to be sure that courses you take in a community college will transfer to the university of your choice. Many state universities have articulation programs with local colleges, and some state legislatures have mandated that their universities accept credit from community colleges; however, these rules may not apply to out-of-state colleges.

If you’re an excellent student but can’t afford an expensive private college, seek “Ivy League public schools,” such as Michigan or Berkeley. If you’re fortunate enough to live in a state that hosts one of these institutions, by all means try to get in. Savings can be huge, and the quality of education is good. If you have to go out of state, consider living and working there for a year or two to establish residency before enrolling—most state schools require a local driver’s license and evidence that you or (if you’re still a minor) your parents have paid state taxes.

Whether you go to a community college or an in-state university, living at home can save a great deal of money, lightening the load of student loan debt by many thousands of dollars.

Working your way through school is a hard row to hoe, but the reward can be huge: freedom from student debt. The federal government has a work-study program designed for students in need. If your family’s relative affluence renders you ineligible for this program, most universities and colleges have their own work-study programs or part-time job opportunities that provide a small salary and enough flexibility to work around class hours.

Summers offer you the chance either to take on full-time work temporarily, racking up some savings for the following school year, or to speed your way toward graduation by taking coursework. Two summer sessions of six credits adds up to twelve credits, the equivalent of a full semester. In your lower-division years, consider a community college for summer school—just be sure, before you sign up, that your university will accept transfer credits for the classes you take.

An alternative to work-study is a regular 50% FTE job at a university or college. Most institutions provide a tuition waiver for employees. Pay, especially in public schools, is usually abysmal, but it should cover studenty lodging and help pay the other bills. Jobs not considered part of a work-study program may have rigid hours that preclude attending certain classes. However, schools are famously flexible (it’s part of political correctness), and so you often can obtain work on campus that will allow time to take your courses. Pay, though poor, is usually better than student work, and you get a full range of benefits.

Look for scholarships, fellowships, and grants to help underwrite the cost of college or vocational training. A surprising amount of free money goes unused, simply because people are unaware of the opportunities. Some are offered by local groups, service clubs, communities, and churches and are so specific that even candidates who qualify for them don’t think of looking for them. Check websites that aggregate information on scholarships, and ask at college and public library reference desks for leads to funding opportunities.

Some students come up with enterprises to help underwrite costs, such as the guy who realized he could make a profit buying back students’ used books for more than the bookstore paid for them and then reselling them for less than the bookstore charged. Find a need and fill it: this requires some ingenuity, but a microbusiness run out of a dorm room or an apartment can go a long way toward defraying the cost of education.

Speaking of dorm rooms and apartments, refrain from regular drinking, partying, or drug use. These cost a ton of money. You’re already spending enough to keep you in the traces for the rest of your life. Why make things harder on yourself?

Book publishers, seeing a captive audience, have turned textbook publishing into assembly-line fleecing of the sheep. Textbooks are so expensive that some colleges are seriously considering abandoning books altogether and having students use websites. This is a recipe for further dumbing-down of America’s already dumbed down educational system, but that’s another topic…  Consider ways to keep at least some of the wool on your back.

First and foremost: buy books anywhere but at the campus bookstore. Amazon.com is almost invariably cheaper than college bookstores. Try to get your books used, and sell them back through Amazon, using the bookstore’s repurchasing program as your last resort. Look online for sellers and buyers; some online outfits offer a better deal than either Amazon or the bookstore.

A cheaper but less convenient alternative is to use the library. Many texts are put on reserve and so can be accessed during library hours; others are available for check-out and often can be re-checked for the better part of a semester. If a course’s texts are not on reserve, ask the professor if she or he will put them in reserve.

I don’t recommend asking the professor if you really need to buy the book. It’s extremely annoying. Faculty know about and dislike the cost of textbooks. If the professor didn’t think you needed the book for the course, he or she wouldn’t have put it on the syllabus! This strategy flags you in the professor’s mind as someone who’s in school for a rubber-stamp degree and who doesn’t care about the course, its content, or its value. It starts you off on the wrong foot: avoid!

Starting off on the right foot, though, is what adequate education or vocational training will do for you. Even if you have to go back to school later in life to obtain the training you need, a degree, a certificate, or an apprenticeship will help you to earn enough to position yourself for your future of financial independence.

Financial Freedom

• An Overview
• Education
• Work
• Debt
• The health insurance hurdle
The roof over your head

First day of class…

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So now I’ve met my first class at Paradise Valley Community College. I haven’t read their diagnostic writing yet, but on the face of it I can’t see the students are much different from the ones at GDU West. A few are a little younger: in Arizona high-school kids can take community college courses, and so ambitious university-bound young people will get the widely hated freshman comp requirement out of the way in their senior year at the lower tuition rate.

If a few are probably not university material, they appear to have redeeming qualities. Some are older returning students, retooling for new jobs after having been laid off. The latter—older students—are always the best to have.

Yesterday I applied for the full-time position that came up at one of the colleges relatively close to my home, a day late and many dollars short. Probably won’t get it, but a friend at Paradise Valley says an opening may come up there. That would be a highly desirable place to work, and the commute would be easier because it’s a straight shot up the freeway, not ten or twelve miles across crowded, hectic surface streets.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to get a real job with the district. Back when things were beginning to get truly grim fin the morale department for everyone at GDU, I applied for several openings at colleges where the drive didn’t seem too awful (some of the schools are in far-flung suburbs).  As you can imagine, everybody and her little sister wants one of those jobs. A friend at Phoenix College told me her hiring committee got some 300 applications for a position I applied for there. Because these jobs are exceptionally well paid, for teaching—especially in the minds of liberal arts graduates, who perceive their prospects as dismal—the colleges often see applicants with Ivy-League degrees. This stiff competition is complicated by the politics of race: one job I tried to get was withdrawn when a faction on the hiring committee held out for a minority hire, and, because the job was not advertised as a targeted hire, the rest of the committee wouldn’t go along with it.

The closest I came to success with that endeavor occurred when a college that really was beyond reasonable driving distance called at the tag end of a semester and asked me to appear the following day prepared to deliver a PowerPoint presentation on a subject of their choice. The university had a strict deadline for when you could file your grades, and I still had fifty or a hundred papers to read and semester grades to assess, justify, confirm, and post. The deadline was the same day as the proposed PP pitch. I suggested they let me give a presentation on a composition-related subject that I had in the can; they wouldn’t accept that.

Weighing the probability that I wouldn’t get the job vs. the certainty that filing grades late would result in a black blot on my personnel file, I declined the privilege. Just as well: I hate driving around the Valley, and getting to that school would have entailed an endless drive over a freeway that seems to jam up every day.

After those two episodes, I got discouraged—one might say “sank into the morass of depression that afflicted all of my colleagues”—and stopped applying.

Obviously, given the possibility of earning $20,000 or $30,000 a year more for the same amount and kind of work I was doing at our supposedly more august university, I should’ve kept trying!

The district has three colleges within reasonable driving distance of home. I’m going to start applying for every single full-time opening that comes up in those three venues. Because of the recession, there won’t be many. But thankfully, Obama recognizes the importance of community colleges, and so some funding is being directed thataway. That a single full-time position came up at all is a good sign. There’ll be quite a backlog of people applying, and because many will be adjunct faculty already working there, I don’t have a snowball’s chance. But…

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Community Colleges: Baby-boomer nirvana

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Next fall, I want to take 125 credits at Paradise Valley Community College. Think they’ll let me audit those? For those of us boomers who are into lifelong learning, this place is some sort of heaven. The English Department chair gave me a college catalogue, which I’ve been perusing with growing amazement and joy.

Some of these courses sound too wonderful for words.  Eight different courses on computer graphic art and design, starting with introductory and intermediate digital phtography and going thorugh computer animation, web-site design, and computer-aided graphic arts. Five courses in ceramic-making. Fifteen classes in drawing, painting, and watercolor. Wanna dance? There’s ballroom, swing, Latin, hip-hop, Middle-Eastern, West African, and Brazilian dancing! You can learn to speak Japanese and Chinese (why go or here?). Music in World Cultures….Rock Music and Culture. Private instruction in voice, jazz and classical piano, guitar, trumpet, French horn, trombone, tuba, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, saxophone, violin, viola, violoncello, and contrabass. Or maybe you’d like to get fit: weight training; six courses in fitness; all sorts of group exercise sessions. And get this: you can earn college credit for going on one of several spectacularly scenic hikes! We have caving. We have canyoneering. We have rock climbing. We have mountain biking at Sedona. One credit each.

Then there are the anthro courses: Bones, Stones, and Human Evolution. Buried Cities and Lost Tribes (a semester each: Old World and New World). Magic, Witchcraft, and Healing: An Introduction to Comparative Healing.

After having edited a bunch of Poisoned Pen Press’s best detective novels, it’s occurred to me that I, too, could write those things. But…how to find out enough about detective work to do a decent job at it?

Well. A would-be detective writer could easily cobble together her own course of studies at PVCC. While we’re in the anthropology department, we could start with Introduction to Forensic Anthropology.

Survey of the role of forensic anthropologist, from the crime scene to the courtroom. Understand how a forensic anthropologist can determine life history of an individual. Contrubitions of forensic anthropology to crime scene and other legal investigation. How forensic anthropology is used to decipher historic cases, and how it is depicted in poular culture. Case studies involoving criminal investigations, mass disaster incidents, and global human right issues.

Prerequisites: none

Moving on to administration of justice, the wannabe crime writer can take a three-credit course in Serial Killers and Mass Murderers, and another called Forensic Pathology: Death Investigation (should fit right in with the forensic anthropology training). Then there’s plain old Criminology:

Study of deviance, society’s role in defining behavior; theories of criminality and the economic, social, and psychological impact of crime; relationship between statistics and crime trends. Examines crime victimization and the various types of crime and categories of offenders.

Prerequisites: None

Gosh. Think of that. There are no prereqs for any of these courses. You could actually learn enough to turn yourself into a pretty respectable crime writer.

The tuition is very reasonable: $71 per credit hour; $96 per hour if you want to audit. That’s only about $300 a course—four months of instruction. For dance, fitness, and outdoorsy activities, all one-credit courses, it’s a hundred bucks. You couldn’t get a guided hiking tour of Sedona for that price on the commercial market—and you sure couldn’t get sixteen sessions of dance instruction for that. Most dance studios don’t advertise their prices (if you have to ask, after all…); the Academy of Ballroom Dance charges $120 for just six lessons.

This is a bonanza for the retired and the frugal. At a very reasonable cost, you can develop a hobby, meet new friends, learn a new line of work, get fit. Why join a gym if you have a community college down the road? And why be bored?

Awesome. I can’t wait to get retired.

😀