You don't really need an associates in CS foundations, since all the "CS" part of CS is upper level (except for the most advanced students who start elite Bachelors universities with 1-2 years of university coursework from high school). Just take some basic liberal arts math and intro programming during your AA, then you are ready to apply for CS Backelors program.
> Just take some basic liberal arts math and intro programming during your AA, then you are ready to apply for CS Bachelors program. You don't really need an associates in CS foundations
Well, you can say the same for pretty much every curriculum ever: "we don't need a named degree, just have students figure out what courses they need to take".
Concretely, here's what happens in practice. A student does not know what to take and tells their counselor they are interested in transferring into a four-year CS degree.
So student then ends up in:
- standard college prep courses (Algebra, Calc, and liberal artsy stuff), and
- some totally random stuff for the CS part. Might be programming. Might be VBA (won't transfer) or Java (might transfer). Might be a CISCO prep course. Who knows! And unless the student knows and fights, they end up wasting time.
Making a separate track that's explicitly "pre-college CS" avoids this confusion. And after all, part of the value add of a formal education is that someone who knows what you need to know organizes the curriculum for you.
So what you say is true, but there are still strong advantages for both the student and the institution to having a separate, explicit pre-college track.
