New policy simplifies departure from USU
As part of an effort to track students who leave the university temporarily, Utah State University is implementing a new leave-of-absence policy this semester.
Advising and Transition Services Coordinator Rachel Lewis said the new policy, which she called a “process,” will waive the reapplication fee.
“We want to transition [students] out and back in as easily as possible,” she said.
Lewis said students who have approved leave of absence (anything documented) will receive a welcome-back letter, have the $35 application fee waived, and have the hold taken off of their accounts automatically.
Melissa Miller Kincart, assistant to the vice provost for Undergraduate Studies and Research, said approved leave includes any humanitarian service project, such as a church mission, the Peace Corps or military participation. Others include medical, family or financial constraints.
“They look at everything on a request-by-request basis,” Lewis said.
“They are really flexible giving leaves,” Kincart said. “Everyone has a different circumstance, and they consider that.”
Kincart said since there is such a large population of students who leave without telling the university why, it was decided a change needed to take place for students to re-enter the university more easily.
“There are students leaving and not letting USU know at all,” she said. “It’s easier to think about alternatives rather than completely exiting the university.”
She said there has been a process for leaving USU for about a year now, but students have not known about it. Part of revising the plan, she said, meant bringing various offices together and informing different areas of the university.
She said work is being done to get the procedure put into the next USU General Catalog, as well as on the university’s Web page index.
Lewis said she goes once a semester to the Logan LDS Institute to inform those in the mission preparation classes about how to go about leaving the university so the return can be as smooth a transition as possible.
Kincart said there is a plan being worked on for revising the network for students leaving the university, in addition to the change in re-entry. She said this semester’s change is the first of three changes. The other two, she said, will come during fall semester 2003.
The changes in re-entry were initiated in the Provost’s Office, Kincart said. She said the change will be worked through and, after a year, evaluated to see if it has been effective.
Lewis said she encourages all students to meet with their academic advisers regularly, especially if they plan on leaving the university temporarily.
“Meet with them, if not just to say, ‘Don’t shred my file while I’m gone,'” she said.
-emilieholmes@cc.usu.edu