The 15 Community Colleges in Iowa are implementing a plan that will create a common numbering system for all their courses. Gene Gardener, the chair of the board of the Iowa Association of Community College Trustees, says it’ll give them a common link between each of the schools.He says it will take the mystery out of the transfer process and will help employers understand from college to college what’s entailed in the various course offerings. Gardener says the process will be a lot of work and take some time to institute.He says they’re hopeful that the newly adopted system will be operational in all community colleges across the state in the arts and sciences divisions by 2004 and in the vocational-technical divisions by 2005. Once it’s done, Gardener says the courses that are alike at each college should be identified in the same way.He says with different instructors and different ways of teaching, they can’t guarantee every course will be exactly the same, but he says they’ll be pretty close. The enrollment numbers at community colleges in Iowa have increased significantly during the past decade. Credit enrollments for the fall term, 1993 totaled 56,074, as compared to 73,947 for the fall term of 2002.
