Subject: RE: Transfer Modules - A Modest Proposal
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 15:39:02 -0800
From: "Terry Folen" (folent@mhcc.edu)
To: "Peter B Gilkey" (gilkey@darkwing.uoregon.edu)

I particularly like Kari's proposal of a Freshman and Sophomore Year Core. That seems to make the most sense and allows students a certain number of electives that could help lead them towards a major. (As aptly put by Shannon), if they take the module with basically nothing but Gen Ed courses that are unrelated to one another and with no major focus, we could bore them to tears, let alone what it would do to the persistence rates!!

I teach Health and Physical Education so what I am about to say can be taken as very self serving but I feel the need to say it anyway. The lack of any mention of Health and Physical Education in the module or specifically as a requirement in the AAOT I see as a grave error. The news has been covered with reports over the past couple of years warning of the threat of obesity to our nation as a whole and very specifically to Oregonians. In Oregon, (according to the Oregon Department of Human Services) 22% of Oregonians are obese and 60% are overweight based on the Body Mass Index scale. "Obesity is far and away Oregon's leading emerging health problem" according to Dr. Mel Kohn, the state epidemiologist. Kohn can reel off a list of weight-related illnesses that are on the rise: Type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, osteoporosis, heart disease, stroke, sleep apnea, asthma...it goes on and on. "The only bigger preventable killer in Oregon is tobacco," he adds "but obesity is gaining on it." Diabetes, for example, kills three times as many people in Oregon today as it did 15 years ago. Kaiser Permanente studies claim that obese people use 39% more health care resources and 100% more pharmaceuticals than people at or near their ideal weight. Oregon Dept. of Human Services says the state hosted 48,000 weight related hospitalizations in 2000. Cost: $730 million.(WW on-line, 1/14/04) OK, off my soap box, I'm "preaching to the choir", Mt. Hood DOES require HPE in our General Education Requirements for the AAOT.

If I understood the presentation yesterday correctly... with this proposed module in place (that could NOT be modified by our Community College) Mt. Hood would no longer be able to have the HPE requirement that we have seen fit to put into OUR General Education requirements(at least in the one year module.) However, Oregon State University, which does have an HPE requirement in their Bac Core would then add this requirement in as a student transferred to the 4 year University. So, the 4 year universities could continue their practice of modifying their Gen Ed. Requirements to reflect the values of education in their institutions but the Community Colleges would not have that ability.

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