A study of the attitudes and opinions of full-time faculty at three Texas community colleges on the addition of the baccalaureate degree to their traditional mission.

The purpose of this study is to find out what are the attitudes and opinions of full-time faculty, at traditional community colleges in Texas who have recently added baccalaureate degree programs, on the effect of adding new degree programs, especially baccalaureate degrees, to the overall, intended mission of the institution. The data will be collected through an online Likert-scaled survey that will be distributed via e-mail to all full-time faculty members at the three Texas community colleges that currently offer Baccalaureate degrees. The study will utilize exploratory factor analysis in order to determine any underlying factors influencing attitudes and opinions. These data will be looked at through the lenses of Globalization Theory (Levin, 2001) and the concept of mission creep (Levin, 2004). After the data was collected, factor analysis was used to reduce the information into five factor variables which were called: 1) Perceived baccalaureate program need, 2) Baccalaureate Program duplication within commuting distance, 3) Traditional community college mission change, 4) Community / student Baccalaureate need, and 5) Baccalaureate Program duplication within the community. These five new factor variables were the dependent variables and MANOVA was used to test the correlation with the aforementioned independent variables. The study concluded that only the independent variable “Types of classes currently taught” had a significant relationship for the factor variables 1) Perceived baccalaureate program need, and 2) Baccalaureate Program duplication within commuting distance.