‘A Triumph of Bureaucracy’: How One University Is Converting From Quarters to Semesters

On a sunny September morning in 2014, Tomás D. Morales, president of the California State University at San Bernardino, welcomed hundreds of students, faculty, and staff to his annual convocation address. He listed the university’s latest accomplishments, goals, and even a new pilot shuttle service. But what stood out to the campus community was Morales’s official call for the university to convert from a quarter to a semester system — a critical step, he called it at the time.

The conversion had been brought up before. In May 2013, the university hosted an open forum for students to ask Timothy P. White, chancellor of Cal State, about the conversion. But no plans were officially drawn up.

Morales’s announcement made it official for San Bernardino that fall, and nearly five years later, the campus is at the epicenter of this major transition. It is one of the last six Cal State campuses to adopt the semester calendar, after three years of planning and anticipating. The process, administrators say, is complex, requiring continual committee meetings and collaboration across departments. It’s also costly — at least $40 million was spent across the six campuses, reports EdSource, a multimedia platform that focuses on education in the state. On top of that, the San Bernardino campus set for itself a strict deadline for the fall of 2020.

Nationwide, a small number of four-year institutions — about 5 percent — run on the quarter system. As more states seek to standardize their institutions’ academic calendars, that number may well get even smaller. Here’s how one institution is making the transition.

Curriculum as the Foundation

Tom Provenzano, a professor of theatre arts, directs Bernardino’s curriculum committee — a role that, in the heat of the calendar transition, has nearly overtaken his teaching life. The system has been pushing for this move for as long as he can remember, he said, but the university didn’t always have the resources to make it happen. “I see it as a triumph of bureaucracy, the way we’re working,” he said.

Establishing a new curriculum is the first step in the process, said Craig R. Seal, dean of undergraduate studies. Students on the quarter system take shorter classes that are typically 10 weeks long, and they usually register for new courses three to four times in one academic year. In a semester system, students will register twice a year for courses that are longer, lasting about 15 weeks.

That change requires a revamped curriculum, which San Bernardino will finalize this fall, before it can begin advising students on how to academically anticipate 2020.

Overhauling a curriculum opens the door to bigger, broader changes. Departments could submit revised course plans under a semester time line or take the opportunity to innovate, developing new courses and teaching strategies, Provenzano said.

The campus approached restructuring its curriculum through a three-step process. It created tiers to identify which programs would be the simplest to convert, starting with the smaller graduate programs, followed by the undergraduate departments, and finally overhauling general-education requirements.

The CSU system is also pushing campuses to establish consistent general-education requirements, which presented challenges for San Bernardino as it reworked its programs. “There were a lot of conversations about what should be in general education, and if that aligns with our campus values,” Seal said.

But the biggest challenge, he said, is getting buy-in from the faculty. “Of course, no one is completely happy with everything,” he said. “But I keep reminding people that we have to start teaching this in the fall of 2020. We have no choice.”

A concern of the faculty is that majors appear to have been sized down, according to Provenzano. Fewer academic periods means fewer courses, although the number of hours of instruction would be similar, Seal said. Completing a major is contingent upon the number of credits a student accumulates, and Provenzano is worried that students, and even some faculty members, feel like they are “losing out” on the number of courses with semesters.

“But the biggest driver in all of this is making sure that students are graduating in a timely manner,” he said. “We want to help students finish without stumbling in the middle of the transition.”

Critical Advisement

San Bernardino has hired several professional advisers and brought in additional faculty members to help students chart their academic paths, Seal said. The university has created general one-year roadmaps for the transition year, the academic year 2019-20, before the official conversion.

“They help our freshmen and transfer students identify which courses they should get out of the way before we go into conversion,” he said. That way, first-year students at the university in fall 2019 will be put on a uniform path that is already mapped out for them for the transition year.

The advising team also focused on students who are scheduled to graduate before the fall of 2020. “The goal is to get those students out if you can, especially if it makes sense for them to graduate prior so that it becomes less complicated,” Seal said.

With the curriculum in place, the next step is to finish a credit-conversion guide, which will make it easier for advisers to outline students’ course plans. The guide shows how a student’s existing academic record on the quarter system will translate to a semester calendar.

In a way, it’s beneficial that San Bernardino is one of the last campuses to convert, said Grace King, the university’s project director overseeing the change. It allows the leadership team to learn from the mistakes or anticipate the obstacles that other universities have experienced, and work to mitigate the results of the transition.

The advising team, Seal said, has traveled to at least two other campuses, and San Bernardino worked closely with the consulting team hired by CSU to work with the converting campuses.

“We’ve learned early on that it’s important to set up the roadmaps,” Seal said. “We had to have the curriculum and the course conversion guide done early enough because some of our sister schools didn’t have that.”

Anticipate and Adapt

In the last decade, the California State system and the University System of Ohio have required their campuses to shift from quarters to semesters, in an effort to standardize the academic calendar. Among California’s community colleges, 109 of 112 are on the semester system, according to San Bernardino’s conversion project web page.

And while the transition makes sense logistically, the process is lengthy and requires a lot of bureaucratic legwork, said Steven Fink, associate executive dean for curriculum and instruction at Ohio State University who oversaw its conversion to the semester system. “I think everybody has to customize the process somewhat to their own culture and environment, but it’s helpful to learn from other institutions,” he said.

San Bernardino administrators did not specify what problems they are anticipating after the conversion is complete.

But enrollment and graduation rates tend to change, Fink said. Leading up to its conversion, Ohio State saw a rise of students planning to graduate and a decline in enrollment shortly after. Ohio State analyzed the transition at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where, officials said, the institution returned to a steady state in enrollment and graduation within three years.

It takes a few years for the university to become acclimated to the changes, Fink said. They’re not always welcomed. Provenzano, who is overseeing the curriculum change at San Bernardino, said that some faculty members felt “under siege.” “What we’re trying to do is give support to faculty, especially those who are not completely on board with it,” he said.

While standardizing the academic calendar might prove especially useful for state universities, even years after Ohio State’s transition, the end result isn’t always neat or simple. Administrators have to anticipate and adapt, Fink said, paying special attention to the programs most affected.

“There are pros and cons to both calendar systems,” he said. “Some professors and programs benefited more, and some perceived they were hurt by it.”

Follow Terry Nguyen on Twitter at @terrygtnguyen, or email her at terry.nguyen@chronicle.com.