FLATE’s
mission includes providing meaningful career and educational pathways for the
advanced manufacturing industry sectors. This includes the entire spectrum from
introducing young children to “making” to post baccalaureate STEM degrees, with
our sweet spot the middle of the spectrum where we find high school students,
post-secondary students in 2-year technical programs and/or technical
institutions. As educators, we know the
value of education for both personal and professional growth and always
encourage students to consider continuing their education to support that
growth. Obviously, it becomes easier to
do this when we have smooth pathways that optimizes both their education and
their experiences.
To this
end, we developed credentialed-based articulations to the A.S. Engineering
Technology (A.S.E.T.) to give full credit for a number of credentials thereby
accelerating the time completion. This
pathway model has been adopted in many disciplines and at many college across
the nation. Now in 2017 I am excited to
share the work done at Daytona State College (DSC) to establish a statewide
articulation for all A.S.E.T. graduate in any of the 10 specializations at over
20 state and community colleges to the B.S. Engineering Technology (B.S.E.T.)
that will go into effect early in 2018. This sounds like a “no-brainer” because
there are many smooth “2+2” Associate of Arts (A.A.) to Bachelors of Arts or
Science (B.A. or B.S.) degree. However,
technical degrees for which the main focus is prepare students to enter
specific technical jobs upon completion not necessarily to continue to a
bachelor’s degree. Additionally, there
are critical criteria that must be met for baccalaureate degrees that are set
by institutional accrediting agencies, state governing boards, and
discipline-specific accrediting organizations (in the case for Engineering and
Engineering Technology, that organization is ABET (http://www.abet.org/). These degree attributes
are not inherent with in our community of 20+ state and community colleges
offering various combinations of A.S.E.T. specializations using over one
hundred academic courses. Defining an agreement that would accommodate all variations
truly represents a work of both art and engineering.
The
A.S.E.T. is a 60-credit hour degree with 15 hours of general education and 18
hours of introductory level technical courses and 27 hours of more advanced
technical course. The B.S.E.T. will require a total of 128 hours,
including all 60 earned in the A.S.E.T. To make this possible the degree
allows courses taken within the ASET to be used to fulfill General Education
and lower level technical requirements of the BSET degree. Also many ASET
degrees have flexibility to allow students to meet specific lower level
requirements of the BSET degree such as Math and Science. With good advising
students that have the long term goal of pursuing a Bachelor’s degree can do so
without requiring excess hours or classes.
An
additional challenge, and perhaps magic for (for those of us who live in
education domain is the fact that the B.S.E.T. at DSC can be taken remotely
with online and hybrid courses. The
hybrid courses have four options for completing the hands-on lab exercises: 1)
Complete the exercises at Daytona State in the college labs; 2) Purchase a lab
kit for the course sold through the Daytona State bookstore; 3) arrange to do the
lab portions at the local A.S.E.T. degree-offering state or community colleges;
or 4) arrange to complete the lab activities at a workplace with a designated
proctor. This generates many degrees of
freedom for students but all of these options support efficient pathways to the
B.S.E.T. degree.
Although
several A.S.E.T. programs in Florida already have defined specific articulation
agreements with the B.S.E.T., the new statewide agreement will allow all
students who have earned their A.S.E.T. degree in Florida to continue their ET
education seamlessly at DSC. The B.S.E.T. is ABET accredited, which
allows students to pursue continued education in graduate programs and
professional licensure.
Interested
in the B.S.E.T. degree, please contact Dr. Ron Eaglin at Daytona State College
(eaglinr@daytonastate.edu). If you want
to learn more about the A.S.E.T., contact Dr. Marilyn Barger, Executive
Director FLATE (mbarger@hccfl.edu) or
visit our ET Degree colleges webpage on www.madeinflorida.org
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