Cortland Standard .net

By SARAH VABER
Staff Reporter
svaber@cortlandstandard.net
DRYDEN — Tompkins Cortland Community College and SUNY Cortland are finalizing an agreement to allow students at one college the opportunity to take study-abroad classes through the other college, according to TC3.
By sharing resources, students at both colleges can take part in courses their home college may not be able to offer due to a lack of student interest at that institution, said Walter Poland, TC3’s vice president for global affairs.
The agreement will also resolve issues of transferring credits for the study-abroad courses from one institution to the other, Poland said.
In addition, it lets students use financial aid to help fund their study-abroad courses from the other college, Poland said. Without the agreement, Poland said it would be difficult for a student to show how the course at another college would count toward their degree — a necessary step in order to use the aid for a study-abroad course.
A TC3 assistant nursing professor who has been teaching at a clinic in Nicaragua for seven years as part of a study-abroad course, Paula Moore, said she is “excited” about the cooperation.
The SUNY Cortland students will add new perspectives on the trips and help keep the study-abroad programs viable, Moore said. She noted TC3 needs at least eight students to run a course and cannot always fill the slots.
While on study-abroad trips, students build deep relationships with each other and become friends with people from different cultures, realizing that people from a foreign country are very similar to themselves, she said.
“Without a doubt, their sense of the world is bigger and smaller all at the same time,” Moore said.
An agreement between the colleges may be finalized by the end of the semester so that students can utilize both colleges’ programs in the upcoming academic year, Poland said.
The colleges are reviewing a draft agreement with their financial departments and are discussing if there needs to be a transfer of fees from one institution to another when students take classes through the other college, Poland said.
SUNY Cortland has expressed interest in sending students to Italy through TC3’s short-term Italian cuisine and culture course after the agreement is finalized, he said.
The colleges first started talking six to eight months ago about the agreement, Poland said. The agreement was a response to faculty and students at the colleges who have had interesting study-abroad course ideas, but were not always able to generate enough student interest at their own college, Poland said.
Before the talks began, two TC3 students opted to pay out of pocket to take a SUNY Cortland study-abroad course in Thailand, Poland said, noting TC3 did not have enough interest to try tooffer its own, similar course.
The agreement also allows the colleges to start new study-abroad courses that would only have enough interest from the combined student bodies to run, Poland said.
“We haven’t gotten to that point, but this structure allows for that to happen,” he said.
There are many more offerings through SUNY Cortland than TC3, as the four-year college is more than twice the size of the community college and has been offering study-abroad programs for many more years, he said.
SUNY Cortland offers35 different study-abroad courses in locales such as Argentina, Tanzania and Vietnam, according to the college’s website, cortland.edu.
TC3 has five courses scheduled for the upcoming year, according to its website, tc3.edu. Three of those courses are taught in countries SUNY Cortland does not offer classes in: Nicaragua, Colombia and Italy.
Comments on the agreement were not available Monday from SUNY Cortland.