Two Glouco schools align to make road map for engineering majors

Rowan University in Glassboro counts its engineering program as one of its premiere academic programs and has aggressive goals to expand enrollment.

A few miles away, in nearby Deptford, Rowan College at Gloucester County is working to grow its own engineering science program, potentially doubling the number of freshmen in the pre-baccalaureate program in just two years.

With both Rowan schools in Gloucester County looking to expand - and cut into a piece of the state's notorious annual "brain drain" of college students - school officials signed an agreement last week to align their engineering programs and create a road map for transfer.

Community college students will now take essentially the same courses as freshmen and sophomores at the university. Some community college classes could be taught by university faculty.

"How do I create a farm system, so to speak, where I can give every individual the ability to prove himself or herself?" Ali A. Houshmand, the president of Rowan University, said last week.

Traditionally, community college students were left to figure a path on their own: which courses are necessary prerequisites to transfer, which credits can transfer, in what order should courses be taken.

"We didn't have a pathway until now, so I did a general arts and sciences associate's degree. It basically meant I just took a bunch of overall math and science classes . . . I pretty much designed my own major," said Emily Barnes, who this summer is finishing her Rowan College at Gloucester County degree before transferring to Rowan University in the fall as a chemical engineering major.

The agreement, giving Rowan College at Gloucester County students a defined set of courses, would have kept Barnes from taking - and paying for - unnecessary classes.

It also would have saved her the frustration of personally trying to fit the community college courses into an ad hoc engineering degree, she said. The new agreement is aimed at students who wish to transfer to Rowan University's chemical engineering and biomedical engineering majors, though other engineering majors are also welcomed.

"I had to really search out a support system as far as what do I take, how do I achieve this?" said Barnes, 24, of Mullica Hill. "I took classes that won't count. I spent money on those; I spent time getting good grades on them. So when I'm transferring I'm going to be behind - which is fine, I'll just catch up over the summer."

Last year, the university and two-year college created a partnership in which Rowan College at Gloucester County students were guaranteed transfer acceptance to Rowan University, as long as they met GPA requirements. The engineering program, however, still required specific acceptance. That remains the case under the new agreement.

Brenden Rickards, dean of science, technology, engineering, and math programs at the community college, said he hoped to create a conditional acceptance agreement in the future, giving students a guarantee of getting into Rowan University's engineering program provided they successfully complete a set of courses that now match the four-year school's.

"What we're trying to do is retain some of the engineering talent in southern New Jersey," Rickards said.

If the agreement is successful, Rickards said, he expects to see the number of engineering freshmen at the community college increase to between 75 and 100, from the current incoming classes of 30 to 50 students.

With more students spending two years at community college before transferring, Rowan University can focus more on upper-level courses, its president said.

"To me, this automatically means that I have doubled the capacity of the university," Houshmand said.

The Rowan agreement - creating what education experts call "guided pathways" - "represents a very promising approach," said Davis Jenkins, a senior research associate at Columbia University's Community College Research Center.

Formalizing those pathways is especially important because the community colleges enroll a disproportionate number of minority and low-income students, Jenkins said.

"It's an important entryway for this key segment," Jenkins said. "And if we want to increase the extent to which people generally - but especially people who have been underserved by higher education - get bachelor's degrees, then transfer is the way to do that."