Uncertainty over newly established General Education (GE) pathway resulted in opposing opinions from California State University and Long Beach State officials.
The controversy was over the state-level decision to make changes in GE requirements, a decision that impacted individual campuses.
State legislation passed the Student Transfer Achievement Reform Act in 2021, which established the requirement for a new transfer pathway.
According to AB 928, “a report released in September 2020 by the Public Policy Institute of California found that a large gap exists between the number of students who hope to transfer and those who do: 19% of students with a stated transfer goal do so within four years; 28% do so within six years.”
Interim Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic and Faculty Programs Laura Massa said this new pathway is meant to simplify the process of community college students meeting transfer requirements without taking excess units. This results in more students successfully transferring.
Massa said that this new GE breadth system was written in collaboration with students and teachers about what was necessary to ease community college transfer.
“A few years ago, Assemblymember Marc Berman had heard enough, he’d hear about the transfer being confusing and complex and it taking students too long to get through,” Massa said.
Massa said the CSU system translated this need for a new pathway stated in the bill. These efforts produced a GE fulfillment pattern that changes credit worth for certain courses, modifies required courses and decreases the required GE credit number from 39 to 34 units, according to the CSU website.
The name of this pattern is Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum. The plan was approved in spring 2023 and is set to take effect in fall 2025, according to the website.
“I feel the reason for this change is directly coming from the legislation-legislatures, they have this bill kind of forcing the CSU, UC [systems] to make changes, right,” said Pei-Fang Hung, the academic senate chair. “And so unifying this GE pathway can help students transfer to either the UC or CSU system.”
Academic Senate Vice Chair Neil Hultgren said, as an English professor, he was not in favor of the removal of an arts or humanities course from the incoming curriculum.
“I think humanities and arts are really important,” Hultgren said. “So seeing those get eliminated from the curriculum is for me, a disappointment.”
The California State University system is set to vote in January 2024 on having the same GE standard apply to freshman starting at the university level, according to the CSU website.
Hultgren said possible issues like having two GE pathways for students, “are part of why it’s so tricky when the legislature gets involved in these decisions. [Be]cause then we end up with having to make a series of really tough choices related to what subjects our students should know, but the choices have already been made for us, at least partly.”
Hung said that these decisions should be made at the faculty level.
“Faculty should have charge when it comes to curriculum, and this drive as I mentioned earlier was coming from the legislature,” Hung said.