I am a student at CSN who resently came back to school. I am doing well in my classes, and enjoy my teachers. But the school has me as an out-of-state student, yet I am a resident of Nevada. CSN has a $3000 charge to my fee that I don’t think I should have to pay. I like attending CSN, but this makes me upset that I ever came back to school. Now because of this I am going to have to stop school. For CSN to have such a high drop out rate they should help students more on this situation. What can be done to fix this?

Van Thompson

Best,
K.C. Brekken
Director of Communications, CSN

Most of their students take the bulk of their classes with CSN.

This is not an alternative for all students since it requires a high degree of self motivation for a high school student to succeed at the college level. They have to take a lot more responsibility. There are no reminders about due dates for class work or help studying for tests, etc. However, the staff at NSHS is very helpful and provides a strong safety net to help identify and support students that have trouble adapting to the requirements of college. They provide a two week introduction to college class as well as regular classes that allow the staff to monitor student progress and provide assistance and tutoring to students that need the extra help.

Since there are some required high school level classes for juniors and seniors, a student needs to take more than a full load for 11th and 12th grade in order to graduate with both a high school and associates degree. However, most students graduate with enough credits to be close to an associates degree.

There are some additional challenges for students who want to participate in athletics, and other activities since NSHS (Nevada State High School) does not have a traditional campus or sports program.

Our own experience of NSHS has been overwhelmingly positive. Our youngest daughter graduated from NSHS this year with a regents diploma at the high school level. She also took extra winter and summer classes that allowed her to qualify for her associates degree. She was even able to continue in sports after some discussions with her local high schools athletics director.

This would mean the state would no longer subsidize online higher education. As such it is a de facto tuition increase for students who take online courses, effectively saying to them, “You may pay community college rates for in-person instruction, but if you want online instruction you must pay private college rates”.

A related goal is, due to budget constraints, to shrink the NSHE schools and CSN in particular.

Some questions to ask about the proposal:

1. Is there merit to the argument that online students should be treated differently (i.e., charged more for their courses) than in-person students? If, as some (and, I suspect, the proposal’s author or authors) would argue that online education is of lesser quality, why should students actually be charged more for it?

2. Is it fair to disabled students, rural students, and other students who may not have any choice but to take online courses (e.g., those with heavy work schedules, childcare or elder care obligations, etc.) to force them to pay more for online course delivery than they would for classroom courses?

3. What would be the “separate entity” responsible for student outcome assessment, and how would this entity work with the private vendor and (if any of us were willing to provide this service) ourselves as a NSHE group to define outcomes?

4. Why should the vendor receive bonuses for “timely degree completion”? Any potential conflicts of interest here, e.g., temptation here to water down courses or curriculums in order to achieve the bonus?

Why, oh, why, oh, why-o would we even consider associating the eight NSHE institutions, which all have at least some minimal reputations as places of higher education, with these mills, which have no such reputations and can’t claim any? (Well, they try by throwing a lot of numbers at us, but what the numbers actually tend to measure is Nothing Useful.)

#5 is also interesting because it basically says, “Let’s not do this anymore.” It doesn’t actually fix anything or suggest any solutions. It just says, “Let’s not do this anymore.” One previous solution to this issue has merely been to lower the cut scores. Did that actually increase any students’ ability to do college level work? Not a whit. But it made us look nominally better.

This also abdicates our responsibilities to our most at-risk students by outsourcing their futures. I think we need to take responsibility for these students. These are the last students who need to be offered a black-box programmed approach; they need individualized contact and loads of it. Basic Writing, in particular, tends to be most successful on the apprenticeship model, which implies a master. The mills offer no masters. The mills offer a journeyman trained to give a limited range of responses. If your child, or your niece or nephew, or your neighbor’s child, or anyone you know and like happens to be underprepared for college for one of a variety of reasons, is this what you have in mind for that child? Do you think it will help? Because I’m here to tell you that it won’t.

#8 is misguided. Yes, there are a number of students who benefit from such programs. Many of them are already enrolled in them. However, I think sending most Nevada high school graduates to universities having already completed a good number of credits misses some important information about students’ readiness levels for upper-level university work: Doogie Howser aside, putting 18-year-olds in university junior- and senior-level courses isn’t really doing them a favor; some of them are cognitively ready to be there, but many are not. Most of them would be better off in rigorous college-preparatory classes that prepare them to succeed in their general education coursework.

For several years, I sat on the College Readiness Assessment Task Force for Language Arts, a joint council involving faculty members from NSC, CSN, UNLV, and CCSD. We had some wonderful cross-institutional conversations that informed instruction and curriculum at all four institutions. Then the funding dried up. Maybe that could be reinstituted instead.

#9 is trying to bleed money away from CSN because our students don’t have a very good graduation rate. That’s the long and short of it. The fact that our graduation rate is improving doesn’t matter. The fact that none of the reasons for those low graduation rates could be improved by less money doesn’t matter. They’re not even trying to pretend anything else: #9 is taking money from the already underfunded champion of the state and trying to give it to schools that are already relatively well-funded based on their enrollments.

As I said, I think the recimmendations and goals are outstanding, but in addressing recommendation number four, there needs to be better communication and a greater consensus perhaps with the k-12 system of what our goals are overall for the state of Nevada’s children.