After the long troubles that NJCU has had with its money, the college is now finally getting the chance to recover from the major financial crisis it had.
Known as “retiring” or “discontinuing” classes, sunsetting classes has been an ongoing issue at NJCU, so although there has been time to adjust, it doesn’t make this move any less devastating. By sunsetting a class, you are removing opportunities to venture into certain careers. In addition, it can become unfair when you take into consideration classes you have to work towards before registering, as they are not made available for freshmen.
To give a clearer picture of this problem, interviews have been gathered at departments such as the Visual Arts building, regarding some of the cut classes.
“I ran into problems where I was not able to register for courses like UX Design for the last semester,” says Natalia Pretko. “I was thinking ‘Oh, I’m gonna wait maybe next semester, they’re gonna offer it then’ and that’s already been going on for four semesters”, Pretko added.
When asked if she was the only one who experienced this problem, she said that everyone in the Visual Arts major has experienced the same problem. When asked what it is they do in the face of this problem, their answer wasn’t exactly optimistic.
“What we usually do is we just sit and wait, hoping like ‘Oh we get the classes next semester’ and we never get it,” says Ellen Quinn.
Many of the students who come to NJCU usually have something already in mind, so to have that plan shut down well ahead in their education can be a barrier. When presented with this issue, students are usually forced to postpone graduation in hopes of these courses coming back. Students are expecting to take these courses considering they paid tuition.
While it is inconvenient that this happens, the students and professors I was speaking to were not content with just sitting and waiting and they were willing to take action. The students over at visual arts are petitioning for these classes to come back and are actively campaigning to get signatures.
The people over at the Music Department realize the problems cut classes can bring to a student’s overall education and are looking for ways to bring them back in one form or another so that at the very least, they can graduate having gotten what they came for. Seeing these efforts, hopefully, all the students who came to this college get their money’s worth and don’t feel like they’ve been cheated out of the education they were promised.
There is, however, another issue that is made worse regarding the sunset classes and it exists throughout NJCU’s many departments. Although certain classes aren’t available anymore, they are still being advertised on NJCU’s website. There was a case of this being an issue in the art department when an anonymous student told me about a class that she had an interest in. She found out about it through NJCU’s website and took classes here in hopes of taking it. However, as the semester went on, this student found out it was no longer available.
Another instance of misleading classes was found in the Music Department however, the faculty behind the department has been quick to fix many of the advertised classes, and now they feel students won’t be misled as they were before.
The false advertising of classes on NJCU’s website is an ongoing problem and needs to be resolved to prevent the future interference of students’ education.
