Respect helps connect community college to university.

Community colleges nurture students. Universities generate scholarship. Even when they're set in the same community, they often seem to operate in two separate worlds.

Metropolitan Community College in Omaha NE and the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) created a joint program for teacher preparation that can serve as a model for bridging the gap. Both schools benefit. So do their students, and the community gains a larger pool of teacher graduates. Women are by far the most interested in teaching elementary and middle school.

At the University of Nebraska's conference on Women in Educational Leadership in Lincoln in October, UNO associate professor Dr. Phyllis Adcock and Metro professor Kathy Halverson-Rigatuso described the collaborative program. Both teach the basic course in Human Growth and Learning for prospective teachers.

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Some students are more comfortable starting at a community college than at a university. But after those first two years, it can be hard to move. The university is big and overwhelming, and classes can be impersonal.

Even worse, all their community college credits may not transfer. For community college students studying early childhood education, three-quarters of the classes are specialized and only one-quarter are general. But for university students, the curriculum is half general education and half in the specialty. "A four-year institution is not going to want to grant a degree to someone who hasn't taken their core courses there," Halverson-Rigatuso told WIHE.

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