Students have no idea how political the relationship between the various educational institutions in San Diego really is. What schools are we talking are we talking about?  SDSU, CALSM, UCSD on one hand, and the community college districts on the other.   What do we mean by "political"?

Relationships become politically tainted, when selfish interests trump shared interests, and when institutional priorities come before serving students.  Community colleges provide a broad range of course programs, including university transfer programs.  For the latter, bachelor degree students can complete their lower-division requirements at the community college and their upper-division classes at the university, after transferring, saving money and reducing university program impacting, in the process.  So far so good.

However, in part due to the stifling influence of the tenure system, public study programs are too often neither current, nor do they result in marketable skill sets for graduates (hence the flourishing of private colleges and universities that do a better job of actually teaching students what they need to know for their future jobs).

The main result of these substandard programs is low enrollment; but unfortunately, this is not always seen as a problem: as long as enough students enroll to keep the full-time, tenured faculty employed, growth is not necessarily desired in these university departments, as that would only translate into more unwanted work for the tenured full-timers, especially the department chairs.

This inability to update the course offering to something current and marketable then results in a situation where bachelor degree programs are composed of second-rate, unattractive, non-competitive curricula that relatively few students find inspiring.

What does this have to do with community colleges?  Transfer programs are a large component of many community colleges' catalogs.  When a university program fails to attract substantial enrollments, community colleges suffer in two ways:

1. Lack of transfer student enrollment in lower-division classes that feed the underperforming program.
2. "Competition" with the receiving university, which tends to react to under-enrollment by moving lower-division courses to upper-division, so that students have to take the course at the university (traditionally, community colleges can offer pseudo-upper-division courses, but the public universities do not accept them for transfer, God only knows why ...)

Of course, the government currently focuses all its scrutiny on mediocre private institutions, instead of concurrently examining the viability not only of public programs, but also of the often dysfunctional relationships between public colleges and universities (academically characterized by their articulation agreements).

Students must remember the old Buyer Beware! adage: pay close attention to the state of articulation agreements to ensure courses taken at the community college are actually transferable, and evaluate the university's bachelor program and its professors for relevance in the workplace upon graduation.