The Oakland Post

Decision not making dollars or sense

By editors
Posted: Wednesday, October 20th, 2010 at 12:20 am | Last Updated: Wednesday, October 20th, 2010 at 11:06 am Comments Print This Email This Tweet This Delicious

Say you buy a new car at sticker price. How would you feel if someone else could get the same car for a quarter of that cost?

Well, something like that has been happening every day at Oakland University since it debuted its first concurrent enrollment program in 2006.

Thanks to dual admissions programs launched in partnership with Macomb Community College, Oakland Community College and St. Clair County Community College, students can now seamlessly transfer to OU from community colleges after two years.

These programs effectively erase the line that once separated universities from community colleges.

In a recent interview with The Oakland Post, OU President Gary Russi said there would be more of these dual-admissions programs in the future, noting that school officials realized there was growth in community colleges because of the current economic climate in Michigan.

We understand access to higher education is a priority and do not disagree with the idea set forth by Dr. Russi and the administration.

What we fail to understand, however, is why an OU students would want pay for direct admission anymore.

The three current programs — M2O, O2O and SC42O — are similar in structure. All students in these programs are considered OU students, since they apply based on the school’s admissions standards.

To cut costs, students can still take the traditional money-saving route of taking two years of classes at a community college then transfer to a four-year institution.

What these programs cut out is the transfer portion. Many students who apply to OU come from surrounding communities and can easily choose this option.

For in-county undergraduate students who take 16 credit hours per semester, their first two years at OU would cost $19,808 compared to $4,408 at OCC, $5,120 at MCC and $6,176 at SC4.

In other words, those who concurrently enroll would spend approximately a quarter of what students who directly enroll at OU would for the same product. Why, then, attend  Oakland for a full four years?

“The character and nature of the collegiate experience is very different here,” Russi said.

Save for student-athletes and the small percentage of those who live on campus, however, OU has never been and cannot be a traditional university campus due to its huge percentage of commuter students.

The point of these programs is to be “sensitive to the cost of education,” Russi said.

Won’t prospective students choose the budget option that gets them an OU degree for a significantly lower price?

Basically, there is little to no incentive to ever choose paying more for a full four-year OU education when the net gain, a diploma, is exactly the same either way.

The administration, which has created these initiatives, is in no position to publicly acknowledge that an OU education is superior to that of any community college. They would never say that, but it’s true.

There must be a distinction between community colleges and a full-fledged research and doctoral university.

While the aim of these programs is to provide a convenient avenue to an OU education, enrollment through one of these programs still gives no guarantee that these students will end up graduating with a degree from Oakland. Is that a worthy gamble the university should take?

OU formed the first partnership of this type in the state, but there’s likely a very good reason it hadn’t been done before.

Ultimately, the dual admission programs shortchange students who enroll at OU for a full four years.