IN SEARCH OF THE DATA YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO COLLECT: ELIMINATION OF EXTENDED GEOLOGY FIELD TRIPS AT PIMA COMMUNITY COLLEGE APPEARS TO HAVE ELIMINATED A SIGNIFICANT SOURCE OF ARIZONA GEOLOGY MAJOR STUDENT TRANSFERS

Colleges and universities often fail to track early student successes and causes for entry into various technical professions. Community colleges in particular are usually blind-sided in knowing how many and which of their graduates continue on into technical professions such as geology.

While many current geology majors in four-year higher education institutions began their geology exposure in community colleges, alumni associations and career-tracking schemes usually fail to recognize the role of community colleges in initiating an interest in geology. And across the board, the role of geology field trips in sparking an initial interest in geology is not assessed beyond anecdotal accounts usually collected long after the fact.

For more than 25 years Pima Community College (PCC) encouraged participation in overnight and extended travel geology field trips for entry level students that were quite popular and well-attended. Such trips clearly stimulated many participants to continue on into advanced geology courses, and to become geology majors at various four-year institutions.

Such excursions at PCC typically numbered 6-10 per year, and also eventually included up to a half-dozen spring break trips to overseas locations as diverse as China, Morocco, Turkey, and Tahiti. And over the course of several decades, typically 3-8 PCC students per year would continue on into geology programs at one of Arizona's three Universities or elsewhere..

In late 2005 an audit investigation into an ad hoc excursion and independent trip by some 12 students and faculty affiliated with PCC to examine the Indian Ocean Tsunami aftermath in Thailand during March of 2005 led to several ill-advised policy changes that now preclude any out-of-town or multi-day geology field trips by any Pima College students.

While there is no certifiable data as to what role previous field trips played in producing new geology majors from PCC, it is interesting to note that in the ensuing two years, no known Pima College transfer students have entered geology programs at any of Arizona's three four-year Universities.

Circumstantial evidence thus supports the view that the ill-advised elimination of out-of-town and extended duration geology field trips at Pima Community College has eliminated that institution as a source of geology majors for Arizona's four-year institutions of higher learning.