Gateway Community College President Paul Broadie and SCSU President Joe Bertolino.
Gateway Community College students interested in pursuing a four-year bachelor’s degree can can now take select courses taught by Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) faculty for free at Gateway’s downtown campus, thanks to a newly bolstered local higher ed partnership.
Gateway President Paul Broadie and SCSU President Joe Bertolino announced the new SCSU@GCC collaboration Monday during a “Meet The Presidents” presser held in the Gateway cafeteria at Church Street and George Street.
Monday morning’s “Meet The Presidents” event at Gateway.
Broadie, who is also president of Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, explained to a circle of two dozen local community college undergrads that, starting next fall, students working on earning their associate’s degree at Gateway will be able to take an introduction to public health class and an education class called “Teachers, Schools, and Society,” as taught by SCSU faculty on Gateway’s campus.
They will be able to take those classes for free and use credit earned towards the completion of a four-year degree at SCSU, if they choose to move on to SCSU after graduating from Gateway.
Broadie and Bertolino.
“We want to make sure this is a seamless pipeline,” Broadie said, so that students who start their higher education paths at Gateway will be able to finish at Southern. Broadie said that Housatonic and SCSU are embarking on the exact same partnership.
Bertolino added that all of this will cost Gateway students exactly nothing. That’s $3,600 worth of savings, considering the cost that those community college students would have to pay today in order to take those two Southern classes.
“If you’re on the fence” about attending Southern after graduating from Gateway or Housatonic, he said, “come up the street first and visit.”
This isn’t the first time that Broadie’s and Bertolino’s schools have joined hands to ease community college students’ transition from associate’s degree to bachelor’s degree programs.
Gateway students can live on Southern’s campus for the same price SCSU students pay in room and board, SCSU Associate Vice President of Enrollment Terricita Sass said. She said roughly 700 onetime Gateway students currently study at SCSU, having already graduated or transferred from the community college.
Monica Maldonado.
Monica Maldonado, a third-year Gateway student in the school’s environmental science and toxicology program, asked the presidents how they chose education and public health as the first two courses eligible in this program.
Broadie said that the two schools launched a pilot version of this program last summer, and selected the education and public health classes for eligibility based on feedback from the 30 students who participated in that pilot. As students participating in the program grows, he said, so too will the number and variety of eligible classes.
Bertolino, Broadie, and Bryant Barcey.
Bryant Barcey, a second-year Gateway student in the human services associate’s degree program, said he wants to be a social worker. While the two courses currently available through this new Gateway-Southern partnership aren’t necessarily in his field of study, he is very interested in moving on to Southern after graduating from Gateway because of the former’s heralded social worker program.
“To be the best you’ve got to go to the best,” he said.
Caitlyn Cruz, Broadie, and Bertolino.
And Caitlyn Cruz, a second-year mechanical engineering student at Gateway, said she she’ll be keeping her eye on which courses are added to this new program. “They may not have something I’m looking into right now,” she said. But once the two schools add some engineering classes to the program, she’ll be ready to register.
Go to http://more.southernct.edu/scsu-gcc/ to learn more about the new Gateway-Southern partnership.