Kent State-Lakeland Collaboration

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For the last few months officials with Kent State University and Lakeland Community College have been conducting a joint needs assessment  to identify unmet educational goals and opportunities. Here is a summary of the key findings are:

§  Personal barriers are as limiting as financial barriers

§  College education must be linked to career and job success

§  The delivery of education is not necessarily optimized today

§  Colleges may need to take ownership of marketing higher education in a new framework

The next step of this collaboration will be to develop innovative solutions. A team of representatives from Kent State University and Lakeland Community College are meeting to prioritize the opportunities that were identified in the needs assessment. Ideas for educational programs or related services to address those opportunities will be evaluated and implementation groups of faculty and staff will be identified to begin work on the solutions that will create additional educational opportunities in Ashtabula, Geauga and Lake counties.

Any partnership opportunities will be designed to enhance both institutions, and the local campuses and their communities will be involved in the process. No plan will include scaling back existing programs, degrees or faculty. Existing building plans and degree offerings will only be enhanced by this process.
 
Many potential opportunities could be met within existing resources, and any plans would depend on consensus of the institutions and communities and would be consistent with statewide strategic planning. We look forward to creating new and exciting synergies for all students in Northeast Ohio.

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Comments

# Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 08/06/2008 - 16:33.

Interestingly absent from the Kent-Lakeland discussions is any mention of making it easier for non-traditional students to get the credentials we didn't need 30 years ago. For example, the Lakeland catalog lists ways to get non-traditional credit. 'Credit by experience' is 'almost never granted' according to every administrative and faculty person to whom I spoke. They were right- despite 15 years' experience in public speaking, they still want me to take Speech! 'Credit by certification'- you can have six certificates that equate to a class, but the credit will not appear on the transcript unless you take a second class in the same subject area (it's an elective- not a major!)If you're not going to grant the credit, take it out of the catalog. I dropped out of Lakeland and switched to a professional association-sponsored program where everything I learn is directly job related. I won't have an Associate Degree (at 55, what good is it anyway?) but I won't be spinning my wheels in useless classes that have nothing to do with my daily work. Oh, and when you tell a non-traditional student you'll give them 43 hours of credit for prior education, don't change it later to 38 and say 'Oops!. I'm not a kid and not impressed.