What would you tell the Provost of Charter Oak State College?

[studyingfortests]

I applied three different times, a few years apart, at various points where I planned (but aborted) to complete my degree. The last time, I directly compared against TESU. Not only had COSC stripped away a bunch of alt credit options, they added more gen ed requirements or changed which of my credits they would accept between the different admissions cycles.

Some time after I chose TESU over COSC, they sent an email and offered to pay me and a handful of other students $150 each a year or two ago to be part of a focus group which was composed of folks who considered COSC and didn't enroll. In my focus group, there were apparently several of us who were familiar with degree hacking, and this and siimilar forums.

As I remember, we all gave similar feedback:

- The school used to have lots of options for alt credit (SDC, portfolio, Excelsior exams, etc).They gutted a substantial portion of what they would accept.

-- They have far more detaiied and picky general ed requirements than their competitors (they refused to accept a lot of my credits, didn't apply a bunch of the ones I had to the actual genera ed requirements. Both TESU and Excelsior were far more generous

-- On the whole, everything about dealing with admissions since Bob Frederick retired seems more bureaucratic and less responsive.

-- In my case, the difference between COSC of 10 years ago and now was night and day. It was (and I may have actually said this in the focus group) as they had gone out of their way to actively drive away students like me (and other degreeforum readers) who were looking for flexible degree completion.

-- In my case, on two separate admissions cycles, I was assigned Orchid Deer Dalomba as my admissions person. She was worthless. Took weeks to respond to emails, and in two cases, I responded minutes after her response, and it *still* took weeks. The first time, Bob Frdericks was still there, and he interceded and took over my case personally and solved my issues. The second time, he was gone, and I was stuck with Orchid. Her slow and ineffective responses alone would have been enough to drive my interest elsewhere, but combined with that and the extremely restrictive current credit transfer polcies made the school a no-go.

Quite frankly, I used to recommend COSC to folks. It had a great reputation for personal service and friendly policies. It is like they literally said "How can we make our program completely unattractive to students interested in rapid completion, alt-credit degrees."
They could not have been more successful if they had been actively trying.

I have since sent four students (colleagues of mine) to TESU, where I would have recommended COSC years ago. These students all competed degrees at TESU and went on to masters degrees. I'm sure hundreds or thousands of others have made the same choice.