JACC Advisers Survival Guide

our night news writing students (the class usually enrolls about 30) are there because the course fulfills the English composition requirement.

That's a lot of extra students.

Before you get overly excited about this, please understand something.

There are different levels of general education requirements for each degree being sought and for each transfer institution being considered.

There are general ed requirements for your college, for the CSU system, for the UC system and for other universities. So, while our college recognizes our news writing course as fulfilling the English composition requirement for the A.A. degree, most transfer universities do NOT recognize it as such. It's generally useful only for those who do NOT plan on transferring (your cosmetology students, auto mechanics and other more traditional vocational education students). Fortunately, though, you've got a lot of these students on your campus, so make sure that they get a flier explaining this and see if they don't start signing up for your classes.

The mass media course generally meets a social science or critical thinking requirement for the Associate of Arts degree, although its placement in the general education curriculum varies from college to college. Find out what general education requirement your mass media course fulfills and make sure you promote that fact in all of your fliers and other promotional materials. Again, if it does not fulfill any general ed requirement on your campus, find out what needs to be done to make this happen.

In addition to these, the newspaper production course is part of the basic community college journalism teacher's load. The amount of the teaching load this responsibility represents varies from as little as one class among the five needed for most full-time loads to as much as a full-time position without any other teaching responsibility. You can try to make a case for more release-time hours to advise the paper, but perhaps a better way to go is to increase the number of courses in your curriculum that are production related. This is a more creative way of forcing your administrators to pay you for advising without getting into the entire release-time debate.

To cite a few examples: * At El Camino, we linked our newspaper and magazine production classes to a non-credit tutorial laboratory. Most of your college's foreign 12