Quincy College

Quincy College

Seal of Quincy College
Former names	College Courses, Inc. (1956–1958), Quincy Junior College (1958–1990)
Type	Public
Established	1958
President	Peter H Tsaffaras
Students	3,932
Location	Quincy, Massachusetts, United States 42°15′11″N 71°00′11″W / 42.253005°N 71.003177°W / 42.253005; -71.003177Coordinates: 42°15′11″N 71°00′11″W / 42.253005°N 71.003177°W / 42.253005; -71.003177
Campus	Suburban
Website	www.quincycollege.edu

Quincy College (QC) is a public junior college located in Quincy, Massachusetts. It is an open admission commuter school that offers associate's degrees and certificate programs in professional fields of study. Founded in 1958, Quincy College is a two-year, municipally affiliated college serving approximately 4,000 students at campuses located in Quincy and Plymouth, Massachusetts.

History

During the mid-1950s, demand for higher education on the South Shore, and Quincy in particular, led to the creation of the Citizen’s Committee appointed to study the feasibility of establishing a community college. This committee recommended that a community college should exist and as early as 1956, the first college-level courses were offered.

The school's first classes were offered at the Coddington Elementary School in 1956 as College Courses, Inc.,^[1] after a committee was created to establish a new community college and Timothy L. Smith, historian and professor at the Eastern Nazarene College (ENC), was named its first director. It was sponsored by the Quincy School Department and used faculty from Eastern Nazarene.^[2] Another ENC history professor, Charles W. Akers, became its first full-time director and transformed it into a junior college in 1958,^[3] naming it Quincy Junior College (QJC) when it was first given power to grant associate's degrees in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.^[2]

In May 1957, College Courses, Inc., a non-profit charitable organization, was officially formed to help further higher education on the South Shore. In the Fall of that same year, the first freshman class began at what will later be known as Quincy College.

Less than five years later, Quincy College was empowered to award the Associate in Arts and the Associate in Science degrees. It gained accreditation from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) in 1980.^[4]

Quincy College is one of the last municipally owned colleges in the USA.^[5] In 1991, the school founded the Plymouth campus located thirty minutes south of Quincy in downtown Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Presidents

Campus

The main campus and bookstore is in the neighborhood of Quincy Center, with another satellite campus in Plymouth, MA.^[6][7][8] The school does not have residential facilities, as it is a commuter school.

Organization

Quincy College operates under the auspices of the City of Quincy. The college is unusual in this respect, as it is the only one of Massachusetts' 16 community colleges to be run by a city, rather than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.^[9] It is one of only two colleges in the United States organized this way.^[10] Until the 1990s, it was run by the Quincy School Committee, but now has its own governing board.^[10]

Academics

The college confers 32 Associate degrees and 15 certificates of completion in a wide variety of studies.^[11] Quincy College operates an articulation agreement with Cambridge College for four-year baccalaureate degrees and with Excelsior College for online learning.^[12] It is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC).^[13] The school is an open enrollment institution,^[14] meaning that it accepts all students with a high school diploma or equivalent to matriculate, regardless of academic abilities, without selectivity. In 2007, there were 3,932 students enrolled.^[15]

Notable persons

Alumnus Bruce Ayers has been a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives since 1998.

Notes and references

External links

• Official website

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