College positive over SACS visit

    The Collegian applauds TCC's outstanding presentation to the SACS Reaffirmation and Accreditation Visiting team last week.
    We would also like to acknowledge the meticulous efforts of our leadership and staff members in the two-year preparation prior to last week's evaluation.
    TCC has long been a proud, accredited college, and we thank the team of devoted professionals who help us continue that tradition.
    People from the community trust TCC as the choice for their or their children's higher education.
    Growth in student enrollment remains strong, and the graduation rate for our students continues to rise.
    In a time when colleges and universities compromise their quality of education by increasingly replacing tenured staff with adjunct professors, TCC has maintained its full-time-versus-adjunct professor ratio at a fairly healthy rate.
    When institutions of higher education nationwide suffer declines in state funding, our college continues to keep its annual tuition increase on a much lower scale than many others.
    Our string of articulation agreements with four-year universities also gives TCC students more opportunities to pursue their higher education when they transfer or graduate.
    With respectable associate degree programs and small class-size philosophy, our administration continues to work for improving its students' abilities and potentials.
    We should be proud of our college, and preliminary results of the SACS evaluation prove just that.
    According to an unofficial report Friday, TCC received only a few recommendations and suggestions, and officials said the results were of little surprise.
    TCC is expected to receive a final draft from the committee in the coming weeks; then, it will be given a chance to improve on the recommendations. TCC officials said they have great confidence that the college will earn its reaccreditation.
    But the road ahead for TCC is far from smooth.
    If student enrollment continues to rise and funding from the state continues to decline, the administration will have to eliminate more class sections, enlarge class size and hire more adjunct instructors.
    All of these options can hurt the quality of education that the college takes pride in and its students depend on.
    In the coming months, lawmakers will decide TCC's state funding for the next two years. The senate will have to compromise its $80 million version, about the amount we got last time, with the house's $74 million version.
    In times like these, it is especially important for students to press our lawmakers for proper state funding that will address our enrollment growth.
    Improving the TCC community should not be a responsibility for the administration alone. Instead, we students should be more actively involved to help preserve our traditions and work with the administration to create a bright future for TCC.