Update: Issue has been Resolved!

This post has been a long time in coming--since I work for SJSU, I had to clear it with the Powers That Be that I'm OK to write such a thing. That said, here's a disclaimer: These are my experiences and opinions, SJSU can't have them :-). This article will be edited and reposted whenever new information becomes available.

For the last two years, seven months, and 25 days (and counting), I've been trying to get San Jose State University to grant me credit for all lower division general education requirements. This is the story of how I got here, why I'm still waiting, and what this might mean for the community at large. Many thanks to the folks at Mission College and the Ombudsman's office at SJSU for their continued help--with any luck, this will be fixed and someday I'll be able to graduate. Click "Read More" to continue.

Back in fall '92, a much younger (and lazier, and less cynical, and...) version of yours truly started at Arizona State University as an Electrical Engineering major. After a number of bad decisions, one particularly depressing engineering class, increasingly worsening grades and numerous administrative nightmares, I was in a state of school-shock and decided to leave ASU and start working. I sold computers for a year, did 18 months of tech support for a major shipping provider (including 9 months of being tech support for the tech support folks), did call center scheduling for a year or so, and a few more months of tech support for good measure.

At some point, I decided that going back to school part-time might be a good idea. Instead of braving the horrors of Arizona State again, however, I restarted at Mesa Community College. It turns out that this was a great idea--the experience made up for a fair amount of ASU trauma and I finally developed something resembling a work ethic. I was still not a huge fan of the ASU experience, but at least school was fun again. Enter 1999 and the dot-com era and my wife and I moved to Silicon Valley. In 2001, I started back to school at Mission College in Santa Clara. I spent months going through all the necessary paperwork to get my transcripts sent and to beg, borrow and plead for as much GE credit as I could muster while taking reasonably difficult math, science, and engineering classes (among others) and working full-time for Sun Microsystems.

Two Associates' degrees later, I calculated (on a spreadsheet) that my shortest path to a reasonably technical Bachelor's was through the Computer Science department at SJSU (this despite holding an Associate's degree in Engineering). I did an additional semester part-time at Mission to minimize my time in the parking nightmare that is downtown San Jose and to fill out as many CS requirements as I could ahead of time. I finally transferred in time for Fall '05. I had Mission send a GE certification and SJSU received a cert well ahead of time--January '05. I was under the impression that I would receive a complete cert, and had no idea what Mission actually sent SJSU until much later. I did, however, make a point of checking the "Academic Advising Report" on MySJSU with some regularity and eventually noticed that some (not all) of my GE areas were covered in the report.

It's worth noting that my experience with ASU was so bad that I was not about to take any chances with SJSU. When I found out that the GE certification is (at least in theory) a binding contract that compels the target CSU school to not require additional lower-division GE, I jumped on the opportunity. After over 12 meandering years at this whole college thing, I wanted out--no administrative hiccups, no "sorry, but you never did XYZ" bullcrap. The whole point of seeking out a GE certification was to tie SJSU's hands and to leave them no option but to graduate me with minimal fuss.

After a few queries (culminating in about January of this year), the SJSU records folks eventually told me that Mission had sent a partial certification (instead of the full cert I had applied for) and that I should therefore take the matter up with them. So I did. Over the course of the next several months, I made repeated trips to Mission College and finally broke through in June of this year, spending considerable time with the articulation officer there trying to iron this mess out. It turns out that they have an unpublished (as far as I can tell) procedure on file that states that they will not certify GE area A3 if the class was from out-of-state.

Had I known that earlier, I would've bitten the bullet and retaken English 1B, done the papers and all, and moved on with my life. But it seems as though it might not have mattered anyway. I finally got a look at the partial GE certification (I'd never seen it before this point), and it didn't match MySJSU. Areas A3, C2, and C3 did not match the cert whatsoever. What had been "the other guy's problem" was now clearly SJSU weaseling out of a legal obligation somehow. Speaking with folks at SJSU again, the following hypotheses were raised:

1. The fact that it was a partial certification may have altered the outcome.
2. The fact that it has out-of-state (or passthrough) classes on it may be at issue.

So the folks at Mission decided to grant me a full certification after hearing my tale of woe and by having enough documentation on my Engl 1B equivalent from ASU thrown their way. And I did more research. After reviewing the relevant CSU executive orders and California State Code (with a LARGE grain of salt that I am NOT a lawyer and the following should not be construed as legal advice), my conclusions are that:

1. Partial certifications behave essentially as a group of subject-area certifications, with each subject area certification behaving approximately as a "mini" full certification whose scope is one GE area. SJSU has (in my eminently non-binding opinion) no legal reason to alter the areas covered by the certification for partial vs complete reasons. Hypothesis #1, if this was the cause, is bogus.
2. While the relevant executive order explicitly allows community colleges to do pass-through certification of courses from other "eligible institutions," which may or may not include out-of-state schools (it's a bit ambiguous in that regard).

Let's let that last statement sink in for a second. Depending on what "eligible" means, a CSU may be able to flatly refuse a GE certification based on a fairly arbitrary determination of "eligible." CalTech might not be "eligible," nor Harvard nor MIT (much less Arizona State) for the purposes of a GE cert. Sorry, but if you ran out of money for your private or out-of-state school, or took correspondence classes while serving in the military, or you had to move at some point, then you're stuck. California's community colleges may be mistaken in thinking that the GE cert is an iron-clad contract, and if so the cert is a pointless exercise in paperwork. I say "pointless" because:

• If you're taking all your classes at a school that grants certs (or a set of schools that all do them), they articulate automatically without the cert (such classes are already listed on http://artic.sjsu.edu).
• If you take any of your GE-fulfilling classes at a "non-eligible" school (which could be taken to mean almost anything), the CSU may be able to ignore the cert, since the certifying school was non-conformant to the terms of the contract.

If this is true, then it's actually worse than pointless. The GE cert is silently worthless, creates a false sense of security and damages the student's chances of ever graduating (would YOU want to continue with school if you found out at the last minute that you had to take 30+ hours of freshman and sophomore-level classes all over again?).

Removing the discretion of these schools to certify anything that reasonably fulfills GE requirements would castrate the certification process and I sincerely hope that this is not the case. I keep praying that someone made a mistake on my records and that I am an isolated incident, but I can't help but wonder why it has taken so long to correct, why nobody in evaluations seems to be talking, and why I have a nagging feeling that I've touched a nerve. I know for sure that a less conscientious (or at least less stubborn) student would have either rolled over and taken the extra classes or would have simply dropped out.

I should at this point cut the melodrama a bit and put things into perspective. Depending on how I read the report on MySJSU, my case may have as little as one class at issue. While it is true that this may mean an extra semester for me (remembering that I work full time and am in school only part time), it's a drop in the proverbial bucket. Add to that the fact that I now have engaged the SJSU advising department, the ombudsperson, the Mission College articulation officer, and a number of people whose titles currently escape me and it seems that I'm making much ado about nothing. If it turns out that this was all a mistake, I'll look rather silly except for the facts that:

• Nobody has been able to fix it thusfar, and if there is no fix, then
• Nobody has been able to figure out what happened, nor if there is any rhyme or reason to this process, and
• This process has been completely opaque. Since it directly affects when (or even if) someone graduates, the luxury of bureaucratic obfuscation is inappropriate here, and
• Other schools make decisions and advise their students based on a blind (and perhaps inaccurate) understanding of this process.

If the CSUs can ignore GE certs for any reason, the community colleges and other schools that participate in the program MUST know what those reasons are or risk casting their students into an administrative nightmare. If the CSUs can't ignore such certs, then their records departments MUST follow policy and let those GE certifications stand. At risk is the college career of anyone who transfers from out-of-state or from most private schools to a CSU via a community college or other GE-certifying institution.