USU partnering with Snow College and CEU
USU will partner with the College of Eastern Utah and Snow College to bring greater educational opportunities to rural Utah.
This partnership will allow students at CEU and Snow to seamlessly move into several different four-year degree programs from USU without picking up and moving to Logan. USU regional sites like Tooele, Brigham City and the Uintah Basin campus will also be involved.
“These new partnerships open up opportunities for students who may have felt that they never had that opportunity previously,” USU Provost Raymond Coward said.
“If you look in the corporate world, the mode of the day is strategic partnerships, strategic alliances,” Brad Winn, provost at Snow, said.
He added that instead of working in isolation, institutions of higher education could communicate and work together on mutual projects.
Ronda Menlove, vice provost for regional campuses and distance education at USU, said the partnership is both unique and historic, and will provide great opportunities for the students of Snow and CEU. Menlove will coordinate the partnership.
“If Snow or CEU became a four-year institution, it would take a lifetime for them to become a research one university, and now they have those degrees available on their campuses,” she said.
An initial meeting was held March 28 and 29 in Logan where the big vision of the partnership and the benefits of it were discussed by parties representing the three schools and state officials.
Subsequent “mini-summits” will be held to discuss the different programs, which include education, business, natural resources, social work and engineering, Winn said. The first of these summits, which dealt with education, was held on Tuesday in Salt Lake City. Next week there will be a meeting to deal with the delivery of business programs, Menlove said.
Students will see changes immediately, Coward said. There will be courses available for Fall 2007, even though there are still some details to be finalized.
Winn is a bit more optimistic.
“We’re trying to get this thing off the ground quickly, and we’ll actually probably hire some faculty that will be ready to go this fall,” he said. “We want to show the Legislature they are getting a return on their investment, but we also want to open this up for students as quickly as we can.”
The investment the Legislature made came in the form of House Bill 185. The bill was passed in 2007 and allocates $5 million dollars to be shared among the schools to fund faculty salaries and other costs of implementing the partnership.
Although the details haven’t been ironed out, Coward said the programs at CEU and Snow will be delivered in much the same way they are in Logan, with a mix of on-site professors, adjuncts and media, like the Internet and broadcast classes.
“The first and primary goal is to provide an opportunity for students who are place-bound,” Coward said. These are students, who, for one reason or another, aren’t able to come to the main campus in Logan to pursue a four-year degree.
Michael King, vice president for academic affairs at CEU, said this partnership also has the potential to greatly affect the quality of life in these rural areas of Utah.
With more access to four-year programs, the hope is to increase the amount of residents in these areas with bachelor’s degrees. The counties that will be reached through this partnership have some of the lowest rates of bachelor’s degrees in the state, and Coward, Winn and King all agree on the importance of a bachelor’s degree in today’s working environment.
Having a population with more residents that hold bachelor’s degrees will draw companies that require a workforce with four-year degrees, Brad King, vice president of institutional advancement and student services at CEU, said.
Another positive effect is the outreach to rural areas of Utah. But this outreach is nothing new for USU.
“It absolutely embodies our history of more than 120 years, because we were created as the university that serves the entire state. And there are parts of our state that aren’t well served by higher education, and those are the places we’re forming these partnerships,” Coward said.
He said USU has been reaching out to rural Utah for a long time, but the partnership and the legislative support give USU the opportunity to expand its reputation in rural communities and serve those communities in a bigger and more comprehensive way.
“If you look at the mission of Utah State, it does have as part of its mission, this outreach – the land-grant mission – to make a difference beyond the locale there in Logan. So it fits very well,” Winn said.
The partnership also allows USU to expand its faculty ties and utilize the resources and expertise of the faculties at CEU and Snow.
“If we hire a faculty member with a particular expertise, though they may be physically situated in Ephraim, they’ll be able via the Internet to provide courses and expertise for students in Logan. As a consequence, the whole university gets bigger because we have more faculty expertise to call upon,” Coward said.
He added that the “airwaves go both ways.” So students in Logan will be able to have access to faculty with areas of expertise that are missing on the main campus, and this will allow students to get more out of their education.
USU is also right to assume there will be an increase in enrollment because of this partnership, Jenn Putnam, director of admissions at USU, said.
But it’s nothing new for CEU and Snow students to end up at USU.
“I would say that Utah State has been the No. 1 destination for student at College of Eastern Utah, even though there are a number of institutions much closer,” Brad King said.
Even with this history, Winn said he thinks students involved in the partnership would be more likely to transfer to USU.
King said he thinks they may be able to double the amount of degrees given in some of these programs.
Whatever the increase may be, it should help offset any losses USU will see with UVSC gaining university status, Putnam said. But there’s no way to know how large the losses or gains will be, she added.
But amid the positives, there will still be some challenges.
Coward said the main challenge will be coordinating advising, so students can take the courses they need to lead into their four-year degree while they are still working on their first two years at Snow or CEU.
And, even though USU will be physically on the same campus as Snow or CEU, they will still be different institutions, which could present some challenges, he said. Snow and CEU will retain their autonomy in the partnership.
The delivery of the course material may also present another challenge.
“If you’ve ever taken a distance ed. class, there’s a little different feel. You almost need somebody on-ground with enthusiasm and vision,” Winn said. “To really light a fire under a program, and to get more people involved, you need a very dynamic leader, or a dynamic teacher, to grow the program.”
There won’t be enough faculty to have a professor at every location, so video and online delivery will be important.
Coward said the improvements made to the Utah Education Network, which were funded by the Legislature this year, will be important for the partnership.
Putnam will also face the challenge of working with Snow and CEU on recruitment efforts. She said she has a meeting in May with Snow officials to talk about coordinating these efforts.
Putnam said it’s important to send a single, succinct message to establish the connection between USU, Snow and CEU. She said Snow and USU may also share some publications to further make the connection.
“We think everybody should be Aggies. Why would you want to be anything else?” Putnam said. “But we understand that it’s not always possible for everybody to come to main campus. So
if we can at least make them Aggies somewhere else, that would be wonderful.”
But despite these challenges, everyone seems excited about the possibilities the partnership creates.
Winn said it’s a “no-brainer,” and many are calling the partnership a “win-win situation.”
Now all the schools have to do is implement the programs.
“We’ll put the whole Rubik’s cube, or the whole puzzle, together with the resources of all five areas, with the sixth area being Logan. And we’ll try to stretch these dollars as far as we can,” Winn said.
-dabake@cc.usu.edu