In many community colleges, faculty and administrators are uneasy about combining transfer-level courses with career preparation; they often contend that transfer courses should be free of any specific context in order to "maintain the integrity of the discipline." As one college catalog states,
General education is not specific application, techniques, or technology. General education is ideas, belief, knowledge, theories, skills and values, and thus transcends any single discipline, any single religion, or any single culture.In addition, faculty point to the intransigence of transfer agreements as a constraint on adaptation, with the result that only 3% of those responding to our survey described incorporating career preparation into transfer-level courses. Conversely, several colleges have retained traditional course outcomes and, thus, articulation with four-year colleges while at the same time they adapt texts, learning activities, and student assessment methods in creative, hybrid courses. These rare instances offer examples of how such integration can take place, and clarify that such integration can uphold the academic level of such courses at the same time students are guided in connecting knowledge and its uses. The following examples demonstrate that rigor, integration, and application are not mutually exclusive.