Category: Editorial

While tuition costs are rising, professors’ salaries are lowering. Colleges and Universities do this by using adjuncts to teach more and more courses. At Del Mar College, for the 2022-23 academic year, out of 707 professors, 389 of them taught adjunctly, or part time. This number is more than half of the whole professor population at DMC. Now, while the majority of DMC staff consist of adjunct members, they certainly don’t receive the treatment to reflect this. In fact, they hardly receive any. Adjunct staff members receive no benefits, are severely underpaid, have less job security, and usually have reduced…

What’s something that’s so undervalued yet so valuable at the same time? Something that expands your personal horizon further than you ever could have possibly imagined, and increases your self-worth indefinitely? Your education is something that many would argue is one of your strongest personal assets, one that can separate you from the major sea of people our world consists of. But why is that? Why should education be so valued? What underlying factors truly separate educated people from the rest? For starters, the average salary rates of educated individuals only increase with time. Analyzing the annual rates, the national…

Del Mar College has recently taken a unique approach to its social media communication strategy by incorporating memes and humor into its content on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter. While humor can be an entertaining and a popular way to connect with students online, as an educational institution, it is vital to ensure that messaging is respectful and appropriate to avoid any potential negative impact on the community. Del Mar College recently made a comment on a local news page regarding an article about a woman who suffered from food poisoning at a seafood restaurant. When one gets…

Online classes and thus online testing had been around for years before the start of the pandemic and provide a valuable option for those who require the flexibility of the more self-paced environment. Online courses then grew to become ubiquitous when Del Mar College went into lockdown during 2020 due to the pandemic. Everyone had to take them, as in-person classes were either rare or simply non-existent for many courses. Today, most courses have at least one class provided in-person while still maintaining their online option. Though many of them, despite having returned to holding instructing face-to-face, have continued many…

Anyone who has lived in Corpus Christi for the past half decade is all too familiar with the city’s water problems. If it is not some industrial spill or sanitizer shortage causing a citywide water boil, it is instead Texas’ famous weather engaging the city’s drought contingency plan. In fact, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center, Nueces County has not had a single twelve-month period without some level of abnormal dryness since April 2005. As of March 14, most of Nueces County has been in a state of severe drought according to the NDMC, and Corpus Christi is once…

For college students across the country, spring break is fast approaching. For some of us, it cannot come fast enough. With spring break comes all the staples: going to the beach, trips to the cities, and for some, alcohol consumption.  The combination of alcohol and travel is a particularly dangerous one, having claimed the lives of 1,029 Texans across 25,261 drunk-driving crashes in 2021 alone, according to the Texas Department of Transportation. That is one DWI related death every 8.5 hours. These incidents peak during holiday season and break periods, such as spring break and Memorial Day weekend. Only a…

The City Council is the primary legislative body of the city of Corpus Christi. The mayor and eight council members who make up the council guide local policy and make decisions that affect every city resident in both the short and long term, Del Mar students and staff included. In a county with an average voter turnout of 41.81% and where council seats are commonly uncompetitive, the value of residents being able to comment and voice their concerns to the council cannot be overstated. If voters cannot mobilize to hold local officials accountable at the ballot box, then they must…

When observing birth control inequalities, the spotlight shines on the difficulties that child-bearing people go through to prevent pregnancy while ignoring a big problem assigned males face. Most birth control is meant to be taken by the child-bearing person and contains hormones that may lead to side effects such as weight gain, acne and mood swings. The imbalance of what assigned females go through versus males regarding birth control gets its much deserved outrage regularly. The lack of options for male birth control continues to be overlooked.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2022, there are…

Textbooks Editorial Board Del Mar College and other community colleges have a well-earned reputation for offering affordable higher education and training. To many, they are a saving grace and a life-changing opportunity. They make credible education accessible during a time when four-year universities have become an ever-distant dream for economically disadvantaged communities, and those who do make it are faced with the threat of lifelong debt. Yet despite this promise of accessibility and affordability, community colleges have yet to reach the full potential of that promise. While it can be difficult to make changes to tuition costs due to having…

Beginning or returning to college can be a nerve-wracking experience. The idea is that college advisers are available to assist throughout the whole process and provide advice on which courses a student should and should not take. This idea can be misleading, especially when you get further into your degree plan and find yourself having to take different classes because the classes previously taken don’t fit into your major. When it comes to registering for courses, incorrect information is a significant challenge that discourages students about college. At the start of our academic careers, the advising meetings we attend may…