By Liliana Marquez
Four departments of studies from East Los Angeles College faced a Program Viability Review last month to determine if the programs offered to students needed to be discontinued or improved.
According to ELAC’s official website, a total of seven degrees and 11 certificates from the Business, Art, Life Sciences and Architecture departments were under review.
The review was designed to take a decision on whether the programs need modification, improvement, maintenance or discontinuation.
The Insurance Property and Casualty degree and certificate along with the Microcomputer Programming Specialist certificate from the Business department are still being reviewed and are in danger of being discontinued.
The Business Department Chair Faramarz Larizadeh said that there are no students under these programs, therefore no one will be affected.
“These programs are archived by the department due to the lack of interest/enrollment of students. By discontinuing these programs we will be able to offer more courses in other disciplines. There are currently no students under these programs,” Larizadeh said.
The rest of the programs were removed from the review. Some of them will face modifications to the requirements for their courses. The modifications are to appear in the upcoming new version of the college catalog.
“There are some programs that will face changes in degree/certificates requirements. Courses that we have not offered for a certain period of time due to the low enrollment will be substituted with similar, but more popular and up-to-date courses,” Larizadeh said.
With this changes it will be easier for students to earn their certificates or degrees and complete their requirements, because they will not have to apply for a course substitution for the course that are not being offered.
“Students who are currently in these programs will not be directly affected from these changes. They may be benefited when they have to make decisions on which courses they have to take, instead of courses that have not been offered,” Larizadeh said.
The degrees and certificates maintained with curriculum revision or program modifications for the Business department are:
Business degrees:
- Business Management
- Computer Science Information Technology
- Marketing
Business certificates:
- Accounting
- Business Management
- Computer Science Information Technology Programming
- Marketing
- Computer Science Information Technology Microcomputers
From the Architecture department only the Architecture degree and certificate will face changes.
For the Art department only a degree and two certificates face a change in one of their classes for the Multimedia degree and the Multimedia Level I and II certificates.
Regarding this, Art Department Chair Linda Kallan said, “The class that was archived, because it is no longer relevant, was taken off of one of the certificates and replaced with another course deemed necessary for the field to which the certificate is offered,” Kallan said.
As for the Life Sciences department, the Medical Assisting degree (option 3), Medical Assistant certificate (Option 3) and HIT Coding Specialist will continue under some changes.
This kind of reviews happen when a course required to complete the certificate program or degree is archived because is no longer relevant.
ELAC with the help of the Academic Senate makes an analysis of the educational programs to make sure that the college’s resources are used in a proper way to serve its students and community.