WORCESTER — Students were left scrambling to find a new campus to call home when Becker College shut down this fall, after financial issues exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic forced the campus to close.
While the option to transfer to local universities was made available to the students, there was still an air of uncertainty while students were navigating the college ceasing its entire operations.
“We felt helpless because we didn’t know what to do next. As a nursing student, your credits are not guaranteed that they will transfer to another school,” said Josine Izabayo, a senior at Worcester State University.
More:Schools outline transfer agreements for displaced Becker College students
She said she tried applying for Fitchburg State University, but was denied because she was told the university could only accommodate freshmen, not students close to graduating as they could not properly evaluate their competency for the program.
“Worcester State came for our rescue,” Izabayo said.
Izabayo added that they were only notified two months before the campus closed down, leaving them with little time to apply for transfer.
“Their deadline had already passed, but they made an exception for us,” she said.
The curriculum was different between the two nursing programs, meaning that she and her other Becker classmates were required to take extra courses at Worcester State.
As inconvenient as the extra classes were, Izabayo said that one benefit was the change in price from the private tuition at Becker to the public tuition price at Worcester State, as well as the quality of the courses at Worcester State.
“Academic-wise, I will say Worcester State has given 100% in supporting us,” she said. “They’re trying to accommodate us in every way they can. The professor’s do really care about us and how things are going — they check in with us here and there.”
She said that at Becker, professors had been notified at the same time as students about the shutdown, leading to them not taking their teaching very seriously, or in some cases not showing up to teach at all.
“They were very ashamed, they didn’t want to show up to classes,” Izabayo recalled. “To us, they started acting as if they didn’t want to come but they didn’t want to have to answer to us.”
Although the experience was difficult for Izabayo, the transfer experience went more smoothly for Katelyn Chalupka, another senior nursing student who also transferred to Worcester State.
“I think anyone could have imagined that having your school shutdown when you’re a nursing major can be extremely stressful but they made it really easy for us,” Chalupka said.
She said that the campus shutting down was abrupt and that no one saw it coming but that the school did the best it could.
“They set up everything for us to transfer over and they made sure that we were all successful in where we were going, and they made sure to connect with each one of us,” Chalupka said. “We had emails regularly making sure that we had a transfer to somewhere to finish out our degrees.”
When the closure was first being discussed as a possibility, Chalupka said that the hope was that the two biggest majors, nursing and gaming, would at least remain.
“Our hope was that they were going to at least try and keep those two programs up and running,” she said. “Which would have been beneficial for nursing majors and the gamers to be able to finish out their program and not have to transfer and then we did get word that the school was closing for good.”
Chalupka said that Becker had an “amazing” nursing program, and that she finds the quality of the programs at each institution to be about equivalent to each other.
“All the professors are really caring, they want you to excel and I would agree that that’s how it was at Becker as well,” she said. “So, it really kind of is very similar.”
After Becker shut down, Clark University took over Becker’s nationally ranked video games program, offering positions to professors from Becker, which allowed gaming students to transition more easily into their new university.
Alona Yeganova, a senior studying game design, was one of those students.
“Before Becker, I was actually a QCC (Quinsigamond Community College) student who transferred into Becker,” Yeganova said. “When I transferred to Becker, I only was there for a year — and with that full year was just online.”
Yeganova said that it is difficult to compare Becker and Clark since she didn’t attend classes in-person at Becker, but that things have been good at Clark.
“Since Clark bought the Becker building, it does feel sort of maybe the heart of Becker is still there,” she said. “It’s just been a really nice experience, talking with other students who’ve also had an online experience. We want to meet people. We want to be with other students.”
Yeganova also said that she thinks the classes have transitioned well since becoming a part of Clark.
“In my studio class, it just feels like an ordinary studio class, but translated from online to real life,” she said. “We can interact more obviously, and presentations are easier to do and it’s just much nicer to be there in the classroom.”
Yeganova also said that while she has not participated in any herself, Game Jams, which is when students work on a game together, have created a more unified experience for students.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute presented an alternative transfer destination for students such as Katie Rifenburgh.
Rifenburgh, a senior studying interactive media and game development at WPI, said that while many of her friends decided to transfer to Clark, she chose to go to WPI due to the name recognition the university holds in the tech industry.
She also said attending WPI also opens opportunities for things like building connections and internships.
But watching her friends attend a different school and not being able to graduate from the same school together was hard, Rifenburgh said.
“Some of them only had a semester left, it was a lot easier just to finish up and not have any extra classes simply because of how Clark did everything buying out Becker’s stuff,” she said. “Some of my friends just wanted to follow some teachers and a lot of their teachers were going to Clark anyways, so they followed them.”
Transferring for her senior year to WPI was difficult as it was less time to get to know people and get involved with campus activities.
“Coming into a new college as a senior, I feel like it is a bit harder, or a bit different than it would be coming in as a sophomore,” Rifenburgh said. “I have less time here. I have less time to make friends. I have less time to like meld into the college experience here at WPI.”
However, since arriving at WPI, Rifenburgh said she feels like she has more free time since she only takes three courses per term.
“They are just as intense, time consuming but I feel like I have all this free time because I’m not sitting in class back to back to back,” she said. “Some days, with six classes, I had three classes in one day and I would go from one class, the next class and so on but now I have like, one class a day.”
While at Becker, Rifenburgh was also busy working as a resident assistant (RA) and admissions ambassador.
Rifenburgh said it was her role in admissions that gave her an idea that things were not going well at Becker when she and the other ambassadors were told they were not giving tours anymore.
“I worked in admissions, I was an RA, so there was always talks, there was always something that was happening, and getting told that, ‘Hey, we’re no longer doing tours, we don’t need as many admissions ambassadors, so you’re done working’… I was like ‘Okay cool.’ “
Rifenburgh said that other than being unable to graduate with her friends, being forced to transfer has not thrown a wrench into her plans.
“It definitely sucks not being able to have the same celebration as a majority of my friends walking down together, or sitting next to each other at graduation, or taking the big graduation photos with all your friends,” she said. “But now, if they’re on different dates, I can go celebrate them on their graduation, hopefully they can come celebrate me on mine, is what we’re hoping for.”
