California’s Coastline Community College is set to create low-cost, online bachelor’s degree pathways where students can enroll simultaneously at one of three public universities, none of which are in California.
The new partnership between Coastline and the University of Massachusetts Online, Penn State University’s World Campus and the University of Illinois-Springfield should go live next spring. The project’s leaders hope it will serve as a model for expanding capacity at California’s community colleges, which have been forced to turn away hundreds of thousands of students because of budget cuts.
Under the project, students would attend Coastline full-time for their first year of course offerings, with a targeted haul of 30 credits. They would then be concurrently enrolled at the college and one of its three university partners for the next two years. The curriculum of that segment would be 60 credits. Then, the final year would be 30 credits of “capstone” courses at the online university. Students could complete their associate degree on their way to a bachelor’s.
The partnership was featured by Inside Higher Education on October 30, 2012.
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