The S.C. Higher Education Tour visits Sumter
As promised, the Blogland has started its tour of our state's higher education facilities. We start this tour in Sumter, a town where defense, industry, and agriculture fit together with some really nice country to make a nice place to live and raise a family.In the middle of this, not too far from the center of town, is the town's techical college - Central Carolina Technical College. Right next door is the USC-Sumter campus. These two schools, both of which offer an Associate Degree as their terminal degree - not only duplicate services, they even share a parking lot.
In the past, efforts to upgrade USC-Sumter to a four-year college have been led by State Senator Phil Leventis, a local endangered species who barely won re-election in 2004, and who hasn't seen sixty percent of the vote since the 80s. These efforts have even been opposed opposed by the President of the USC system.The effort to strong-arm this was so outrageous that legislation to make it a four-year campus was bobtailed into the 2004 Life Sciences Act, without the support of the USC President or the Commission on Higher Education.
While it may have made some sense to have two-year "feeder" campuses for USC once upon a time, that time has passed. The technical college system has grown and evolved to offer transfer programs (I was one student who did the transfer route), and several of the two-year campuses in or near larger cities have grown into full-fledged four year campuses.
It seems to make more sense to merge those campuses into the two year system, and put those resources to work to improve our technical colleges and allow the USC system to focus on their undergraduate and graduate programs. Unless, of course, politics, turf and job security are your priorities. Then having two public colleges issuing Associate Degrees while sharing a parking lot makes perfect sense.
USC Sumter advocates claim there are more students at USC Sumter than USC Beaufort, which just became a four-year college. But people in and near Beaufort are 80 to 110 miles from a four-year public college, and the area is booming, with tens of thousands of people moving into the area every decade. By contrast, the Sumter region is, for the most part, pretty stagnant, and is about 40 miles away from both USC in Columbia and Francis Marion in Florence. Sumter's need is, at best, questionable, but Beaufort's need was real.
What Sumter needs is a State Senator with a little less ego and a little more concern for the educational needs of his district. If a hundred or so more of his constituents agree in '08 than in '04, maybe they can get one.
Stay tuned for the ongoing saga of the South Carolina Higher Education Tour ...
This might sound unusual coming from me, but I don't care much for the duplication argument. I believe different people need different environments to study within. Further, the more access our people have to higher education, the better off we are in the long term, because a better educated people can land more economic opportunties in today's global economy.
If a young man or young woman, for whatever reason, is not ready to leave home and go to USC or Francis Marion or wherever, but they can drive back and forth to USC Sumter and work a job and prepare to go somewhere else for a four year degree, I have no problem with that.
If duplication means there is twice the access for someone to find where they fit in trying to better themselves, I have not problem with that either.
Higher education is not the problem with educational costs in this state. The problem with the skyrocketing cost of education in South Carolina is the bloated administrations of the k-12 districts.
It is my belief that we could take the money we waste on K-12 administrative costs and give every kid a free ride towards two years of higher education, maybe more.
We have too many school districts, and too much overhead in K-12. When you commpare the higher education system to the K-12 system, the higher education system is efficient.
But, we can not have a real disccussion about K-12, because the SCEA has such a hold on politics in this state.
Twenty years ago, there might have been a difference between USC and tech colleges, but nowadays, the technical colleges have evolved to offer a more robust transfer curriculum, as they have in most states.
I got my Associate Degree from Trident Tech, and two weeks later, was at CofC. My advisor at Trident was just for Associate in the Arts students, and CofC admissions staff visited my school regularly.
As my final GPA at Trident was a 3.47, and my first semester GPA at CofC was 3.5 (final 3.71), I'd say I was well-prepared.
Trident Tech's transfer "gem" is their "2+2" program, where they get their Associate in Civil Engineering in tight cooperation with The Citadel, and then transfer there.
That facility would be far better off if they could combine the resources into one school. If you can get an Associate degree and transfer to a four-year college from either side of the same parking lot, why do you need to have two sets of administration to reach the same goal?
just shut the hell up and get lost.
I guess that it can be hard to have intelligent discussion of real issues in a state where everyone is a moron.