Faculty Senate concerned about college website misleading students

Lisa Black, president of Faculty Senate, reacts to news from English Chair Mike Burton on losing credit hours to St. Philip’s College because of a difficult registration process at this college, Wednesday in Room 120 of the visual arts center. Robert Limon

Faculty senate expresses concerns with the new career finder tab on the Alamo Colleges’ website. Issues range from innacurate statistitcs on career oppurtunities within the city and a search engine that mistakes department programs such as social work for sociology. Photo by Robert Limon

Council looking for more involvement with campus carry.

By Wally Perez

gperez239@student.alamo.edu

The career finder tool found on the Alamo Colleges website caused a commotion during the end of the Faculty Senate meeting Feb. 3.

Mike Burton, English, reading and education chair, voiced issues with the website before the meeting adjourned, and it came as a surprise to some members how inaccurate the statistics and data are on the second step of the three-step tool.

Tammy Perez, professor of Spanish, discusses with faculty senate how their meetings should be run according to Robert’s Rules of Order. Equal representation of each department was a point made by student development Professor Julie Engel. Photo by Robert Limon

The career finder tool allows students who are interested in attending this college to search careers, collect information and help get them interested in enrolling in one of the six AlamoInstitutes while making sure it’s a real possibility for them.

The problem with the career finder resides in the second step: planning your career.

Students have the ability to search for a profession and a handful of career options and pathways that the AlamoInstitutes provide.

It supplies information on local job openings, job demand and annual wage ranges. The only problem is that these statistics seem to be widely skewed to the average student, Burton said.

Faculty Senate President Lisa Black searched the sociology field and located a career as a sociology teacher, but found the results baffling.

According to the website, statistics show that there are 11,427 local job openings, a 13 percent demand for this position and an annual wage range of $26,627-$115,532 when looking at the profession of a sociology teacher.

“These numbers could possibly be accurate, but it doesn’t show you the steps to get there,” Black said.

“You can’t expect a student to really think that they can graduate and make a high of $100,000 immediately,” she said. “It basically skips 15 steps on how to get to that point and it’s misleading.”

The website needs to be shut down. It’s going to kill us if it isn’t fixed, it went up in December and already has a lot of problems, she said.

Black plans on mentioning the issue at the next Super Senate meeting Friday.

In other news, English Professor Mariano Aguilar discussed the campus carry law.

Campus carry takes effect in fall 2016 for four-year universities and fall 2017 for two-year colleges.

This college has a task force which is putting together information on what other colleges such as the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“The district seems to be taking more of a wait-and-see attitude to see how the four-year institutions handle it,” Aguilar said. “But while we wait, we need to find a way to get ourselves represented on the district committee.”

Aguilar noted that President Robert Vela mentioned on KSYM Jan. 29 that “our” lawyers are looking into it, which Aguilar assumed meant district lawyers.

Aguilar said, “I don’t think he knows much more than we do.”

Burton also discussed an issue regarding contact hours at this college.

If a student’s home campus is St. Philip’s College, but they take courses at this college, St. Philip’s is the one who gets reimbursed for the courses from the state rather than this college.

“From what I heard, these course credits always go to your home campus no matter where you take them,” Burton said. “It’s seems like the credits are being stolen.”

The council will be investigating the situation.