College residency requirements

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by anngriffin777, Jul 18, 2014.

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  1. anngriffin777

    anngriffin777 New Member

    Most colleges have a 25% residency requirements. Do a 120 credit bachelor's degree and 30 credits have to be completed at the school. We know the exceptions are the Big 3 (Excelsior, TESC, and Charter Oak), and Athabasca, and maybe Empire State College.

    Who came up with these residency requirements? Does the school decide this, the Department of Education, or the accrediting agency? I was just curious about this, so I thought I'd ask.

    I wish more colleges would let you test out of most of your degree and/or transfer in 95% of your credits from other schools, and pay them a fair lump sum of money. It sure would be cheaper for the students. On the other hand, this may cause a big upset in education.:suspect:
     
  2. Jonathan Whatley

    Jonathan Whatley Well-Known Member

    I don't know the original history, but some accreditors stipulate these requirements, and many schools stipulate these requirements even if their accreditor does not. Examples of the first: SACS and the DETC both have 25% residency requirements for undergraduate degrees, 50% for graduate degrees. Examples of the second: Obviously, most of the schools who share the same regional accreditors as the Big Three and Athabasca have more conventional residency requirements.

    Empire State requires 32 sh out of 128 for a bachelor's, 24 out of 64 for an associate's, be completed at Empire State. Empire State is classed close to the Big Three because they have Big-Three-like flexibility as to credits outside that residency requirement. IIRC there are a few other outlier schools here and there with degree-completion programs that require 24 sh or so.
     
  3. jumbodog

    jumbodog New Member

    If I recall my history of education class correctly (been a long time) the initial impetus for the residency requirements came from the days when "distance education" was done with stamps (anyone remember those?) and letters and were called "correspondence schools". Their purpose was to ensure in part that the people who were doing the correspondence were genuine (and not a proxy) as well as to improve the perceived quality of the education through the use of group-work (hence the reason there residencies are usually done as cohorts).

    Whether such requirements have any validity today is an interesting question. I do know that some RA colleges do not have any residency requirement at all.
     

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