Delta College graduates will be receiving an updated diploma design after this semester, according to a report before the Board of Trustees at their April 20 meeting.
Vice President of Student Services Dr. Lonita Cordova said she worked with public relations marketing department members Alex Brietler and Tim Huynh to redesign Delta graduates’ diplomas following negative feedback on social media.
Cordova said that the feedback they got was that the diplomas didn’t look as official as most degrees and diplomas.
“As we did a little bit of exploration we realized that the font that is a part of Delta College branding is newer and progressive. There were students that were wanting to see some of the Old English on the degree,” Cordova said.
The new design will combine Old English in combination with the newer text from Delta’s branding standards.
The design team is also looking to put foil over the Delta College seal to look more like an official seal.
On Feb. 5, Delta graduate Vivienne Aguilar posted a picture on Delta’s Facebook group page showing the old degree design she expected to receive compared to the newly designed degree she did receive.
“I’m shocked that my high school diploma was so much more elaborate. The look of my AA degrees are unsightly and official. I worked for years to get these. There’s no embossed seal, it’s printed on plastic looking paper, and the logo is highlighter yellow. The fonts look too similar to the ones I’ve used for research papers,” Aguilar wrote.
Aguilar received many supporting comments on her post, while some others said that even if the diploma wasn’t the same as they used to be, they’re still happy to have received one at all.
In response, Aguilar said that earning a college degree is difficult and not everyone does it.
“I didn’t work as hard as I did for only myself. I did it to break barriers in my family and community. When I showed my family my diplomas (most with backgrounds in media/print/marketing/graphing design/visual arts) I received less than enthusiastic responses. None of them are eager to have this on a display […] I can’t express how invalidated this makes the last three years of my life feel,” she wrote.
In a recent interview with The Collegian, Aguilar said she worries that Delta isn’t going to get the recognition it should for being a really good educational public service, adding that a diploma is a sign of professionalism and looking at the degrees and them not being professional doesn’t make her feel, nor does it look like she earned it. Rather, it looks like something that could’ve been printed by anybody.
“It kind of makes every final and every test and every paper feel a little less important. My professors pushed me to be really rigorous in my studies and they put a lot of effort into everything that they did and so seeing the final diploma have little to no effort behind it is super discouraging to my process and to my time at Delta,” Aguilar said.
She said that she doesn’t look at her diploma because that type of visual doesn’t remind her of anything that she actually went through.
“It just reminds me that Delta, at the end of the day, is a business and that that’s what they wanted to push out. That was a product for them. It wasn’t something enjoyable for them because I can’t imagine anybody being proud of that,” Aguilar said.
Cordova said that the design team is working on making the diplomas more agreeable to students.
“We’re working on a folder to give to students. The nice leather folder with the embossed San Joaquin Delta College that the degrees will be able to be housed in. That was our way of ensuring that our students were happy and felt as though they had that traditional, as well as a little bit of progressive flavor in their degree.”