Beginning in Fall 2025, all California Community Colleges are implementing a single pathway for transferring students called Cal-GETC, or California General Education Transfer Curriculum.
This won’t impact students that have enrolled prior to Fall 2025, as current students have catalog rights for the year they enrolled, nor will it affect students who enroll in the local General Education program who aren’t transferring to a four-year university or are just getting a local degree.
Currently, there are two paths transferring students can take, the California State University General Education pattern, CSU-GE, or the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum pattern, IGETC. Cal-GETC will be more similar to the IGETC pattern.
In October 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills into law, Assembly Bill 928 for the singular transfer pathway, and Assembly Bill 1111 requiring similar names, course descriptions and unit count for transferable courses across all 116 California Community Colleges called Common Course Numbering, or CCN.
Cal-GETC and CCN were created to make transferring easier and more efficient for both students and administrators, students won’t have to potentially retake classes and administrators have an easier time understanding what courses the transferring students have taken.
“I think it was due to confusion over which pattern to follow, and if students changed their mind and decided to go to the UC system versus CSU system, they ended up retaking courses, it was for all those reasons that legislation mandated this …” said Dr. Ginger Holden, Associate Vice President of Student Learning, Assessment, and Planning. “And it really is also an equity issue because it’s often hard for our disproportionately impacted students to navigate the whole college system, so only having one pathway now for general education for transfer makes it a lot easier for them to understand.”
A major change under Cal-GETC is public speaking, which will now be a requirement for all transferring students when previously it was only required by California State University, not University of California.
Additionally, under CCN, public speaking will be the same across all California Community Colleges, now called COMM C1000: Introduction to Public Speaking.
“A course description for public speaking will be different in the 116 community colleges, so there’s 116 different descriptions of it. So when taking transfer students, for admissions, something that’s really difficult is trying to figure out if it also matches our description for public speaking so that a student doesn’t have to retake it. They found this is the number one reason students end up retaking classes,” said Professor Kathleen Bruce, Vice President of Curriculum for Delta College’s Academic Senate. “So what they decided to do instead is they passed AB 1111, and the common course numbering sets a standard.”
Additional changes include a shift towards more theoretical courses as opposed to classes to learn practical, real world skills.
UCs were initially set up to be research institutes and more theory based, while CSUs would teach applied skills for the workforce.
The two current transfer patterns reflect that, IGETC has more theory courses, and CSU-GE has more applied learning classes. Under Cal-GETC, the courses will be almost entirely theoretical, following the UC structure.
“We [professors] had to make changes to the curriculum to meet the UC standard, and most of our students are going to CSUs, the vast majority, and they need that applied hands on, not just the theoretical,” said Communications Professor Dr. Steven Graham. “So when you’re looking at someone going into business, somebody who’s going to be a nurse, criminal justice, you want those folks really knowing how to communicate with people. In criminal justice, there’s a lot of issues in criminal justice, they don’t communicate really well. So now you got somebody out in criminal justice that hasn’t had the applied class on the training on how to do it, just the theoretical aspects of it, and now they go onto the job and they don’t know. That’s a bad outcome.”
The significance of implementing Cal-GETC still has yet to be seen. “I would assume… that further down the line, we’re going to lose some quality in the applied part. I think the applied part is more personable, so I think with the personable part they need more personable skills,” said Tish Patterson, transferring to CSU Stanislaus for Business Administration in the fall.
