The dividing line used to be clear between community colleges as one thing, and four-year colleges and universities as another.
Community colleges were two-year institutions. People sometimes used them to take lower-level collegiate courses, and then transfer to a four-year college or university, sometimes getting an associate degree in the process. Or they might take technical and vocational courses and training there, or do other preparatory work.
The four-year institutions, in this frame, would be where you find “higher education,†courses specifically leading to undergraduate or graduate degrees (“college degrees†in the usual sense).
The lines seem, of late, to be blurring.
It’s a national development, but it’s becoming increasingly visible in Idaho, and lately has erupted into some controversy. You can expect talk around the subject to grow.
Part of it has to do with community colleges beginning to offer bachelor’s degrees, which traditionally are the province of four-year institutions. The College of Southern Idaho at Twin Falls offers an Operations Management BAS Degree, which is a bachelor’s (intended for people who already have completed qualifications for an associate degree), but has been an outlier.
On November 9 the board of the College of Western Idaho (Meridian-Nampa, founded in 2007) voted to provide a business administration bachelor’s at the community college - now Idaho’s largest college by overall enrollment, and its fastest-growing. The decision would be effective only if the state Board of Education agrees.
The addition was in a sense market-driven. The Idaho Ed News reported that, “trustees pointed to a workforce demand. Within the past year, employers within 100 miles of CWI’s Nampa campus posted 18,000 listings for business-related jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree.†Idaho higher education isn’t meeting nearly those numbers.
The four-year institutions apparently do not approve. All four of Idaho’s four-years offer comparable (not exactly the same) business administration degrees, and three of them (Boise State University, the University of Idaho and Lewis-Clark State College) specifically asked the Board of Education to deny the request. (Idaho State University seems not to have weighed in.) BSU said that some of CWI’s arguments for the expansion were “inaccurate, unsupported and frankly outright misleading.â€
This has turned into a squabble, with the institutions starting to throw shade at each other over graduation rates and other data points. (The objection from the University of Idaho, given its proposed affiliation with the mostly online University of Phoenix, is of special interest.)
Whatever happens in this specific issue, social and economic pressure is likely to move toward the community colleges in expanding their offerings, and this pressure point may become an education and political flash point in years ahead.
One reason is money. Community colleges almost always are far less costly for students to attend than are four-year institutions, and that seems to be true (speaking generally) in Idaho as elsewhere. CWI has reported that its estimated tuition cost for a student to obtain the bachelor’s would be about $20,000, well below the four-year institutions.
Writ large - imagine this proposal for a bachelor’s degree expanding into a number of others over time - this could start to have a serious effect on the older Idaho colleges and universities, with overall ripple effects unclear. But one of them is likely to be money, if students begin drifting away toward the less-expensive and more convenient community colleges. If you can get many of the same results at the less costly community level, why not?
The state Board of Education is expected to consider, and probably decide, on the College of Western Idaho proposal at its December meeting. There are some indications it’s favorably inclined, but some of those indicators came before the other institutions began weighing in.
But this could mark the start of a reshaping of Idaho higher education. In the shape of college to come, the lines between different institutions, and different kinds of institutions, may become less clear.
(image/College of Western Idaho)