My State Legislators Don’t Understand Higher Education But Ru(i)n It Anyway
Adding bureaucracy to create solutions that need problems to solve
Small-government, anti-bureaucratic “red tape” Republicans dominate my state’s legislature. Yet those same Republicans created a web of “red tape” that amounts to a solution in search of a problem in Higher Education.
Why? Because they don’t understand how Higher Education works.
But that’s not stopping them from passing another law to muck things up even more.
CORE42: the solution no one needed
Every public university and community college in Missouri had to scrap its existing General Education curriculum and adopt a common 42-hour block of Gen Ed courses distributed among seven standard categories.
An advisory committee of professors from each public university and community college (and a few private universities that chose to participate) gathered and created Missouri Transfer codes, or “MOTR” codes. Then someone sat down with course catalogues and assigned MOTRs to courses.
If students take a MOTR-coded course, then that course can transfer automatically to any other public university or community college within the same MOTR category.
Sounds great, right?
Except we already had a “transfer library” that achieved the same outcome. Many institutions have made articulation agreements to make transfers even easier. And if a course fell through the cracks, students and their advisors could request further consideration.
As the Coordinator of General Education, I often evaluate requests to count Course A as equivalent to Course B or at least the category in which it fits. I look at syllabi or ask a department chair to look at them, and we decide whether the course fits.
CORE42 removes the discretion — kind of. Instead of me deciding for my institution, a committee tells me and my institution what courses they think should transfer. The state legislature blew up our Gen Ed curricula to centralize the bureaucratic decision-making to solve a problem for which we already had solutions.
Worse, CORE42 doesn’t solve the problem of students transferring and discovering that they should have taken a different science or math or English course to fulfill a prerequisite for their major.
Enter an even worse idea.
CORE60: the solution that makes things worse
Now, the legislature wants to establish another advisory committee to decide which courses students should take as part of a 60-hour Associates degree, so that they will not need to take any additional “core” classes when they transfer.
This is a second draft. The first attempt would’ve applied to any Associates degree. Got an A.A. in construction management? No need to take the prereqs for pre-med!
Luckily, that attempt petered out. The new bill would apply only to biology, nursing, elementary education, psychology, and x.
But the problem remains. The Biology Department at the University of Missouri may not want to accept BIO 200 from Three Rivers Community College because it lacks the content or rigor they expect. Or TRCC may not even offer BIO200 because it lacks the laboratories and resources necessary. What the legislature wants may not even be possible.
In theory, the advisory committee will include professors who can select the right types of courses, evaluate whether Course A equals Course B, and craft 60-hour curricula that serve students well. But if Course B does not exist at most community colleges but is a prereq for most university biology, nursing, or education majors, then students will still find themselves taking those prereqs after transferring with their 60 hours. This will happen despite the thousands of hours professors, registrars, and administrators would spend creating a CORE60.
Universities could change their major requirements, except majors like nursing and education have accreditation requirements. Because no one wants the nurse or teacher with the less rigorous education and training.
But there’s an easy alternative to CORE60: the articulation agreements that many community colleges and universities already have.
Governance by the Ignorant
People who understand how Higher Education works would never pass a law like CORE42 or even consider something as ham-fisted and unnecessarily bureaucratic as CORE60. Yet my state legislators think they can solve “problems” with a wad of red tape that wastes so many educators’ time and energy.
Ironically, the ultimate solution to transfer problems is that conservative value, “personal responsibility.” Students should take personal responsibility for choosing a major, choosing a transfer institution, and figuring out which classes will transfer. If students don’t listen to professors or advisors or do their own homework, then they can encounter transfer issues no matter what laws get passed.
But Republicans aren’t really for personal responsibility and local control anymore.
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