The fundamental principle of Vision 2030 is the idea of taking college to the future learner.One is definitely dual enrollment. We have 436,000 eighth graders going into the ninth grade. What if, in the ninth grade, the default schedule was for those students to have at least a one college credit class — bringing college to them so they can start seeing what college is about. Twelve credits is a specific goal by the time they finish their four years of high school.
The Chancellor’s office is going to support colleges like ELAC, East Los Angeles College, to create partnerships with labor organizations … that will then give us access to hundreds of thousands of workers. We can come to an agreement to take college to them through their local community colleges. The third area is equitable baccalaureate attainment. We’re looking at both the transfer and the community college baccalaureate to really start increasing those numbers.
Q: Enrollment drops have been particularly acute among older students, what’s your plan to draw them back?: When you’re talking about adult learners who are in our system, they’re working, they’ve got children, they’ve got complexities in their life. Our traditional courses have been semester-length, and the semester could be 15 weeks, 16 weeks. Say hypothetically, there is a working mother who can focus on one class in five weeks — get that knocked out, focus on another class and another class.
Q: An increasing number of community colleges are offering bachelor’s degrees. Are you hoping to expand the number of bachelor’s programs offered at community colleges?[Assembly Bill] 927 allows us to be able to do 30 baccalaureate degrees every year. We’ve got a ways to even reach that number. I think we have the authority, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.