The University of Alaska Southeast could end up losing its School of Education and School of Management under proposed changes discussed at the University of Alaska Board of Regents meeting held in Juneau last week.
The discussion was part of answering the question, “How do we meet Alaska’s needs for higher education with fewer resources from the state?” University of Alaska President Jim Johnsen said during his presentation at the meeting.
“Each one of our universities has its unique strengths in meeting the state’s needs,” he said. “At the same time we can’t be everything to everyone. We’ve got to focus on priorities and make choices. We all realize our cost structures are too high here and, I believe, our administration too large, and so we’ve really got to streamline, economize and try to put as much of our resource as possible into our core academic programs and services.”
Johnsen calls the method of streamlining and economizing Strategic Pathways, a framework to systematically review all of the University of Alaska’s programs and bring recommendations to the board. At the meeting, Johnsen reviewed phase one of Strategic Pathways, which included looking deeply at all three schools of management and all three schools of education.
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Besides a School of Education and a School of Management, UAS also operates a School of Arts and Sciences and a School of Career Education. Each of the schools has its own dean, except the School of Career Education, which has an executive dean.
The schools of education at the University of Alaska Anchorage, University of Alaska Fairbanks and UAS collectively enroll more than 1,500 students and produce in excess of 500 baccalaureate, licensure and master’s degree recipients in a wide variety of specialties annually, according to Johnsen’s presentation.
“Yet school districts hire just 240 Alaskans of the 800 new teachers hired each year in the state,” he said. “Rural teacher annual turning is 50 percent.”
Johnsen proposed one dean over one school of education at one university, with specialties delivered through programs and faculty at all three universities. Which university that would be is unknown. Johnsen also wants to phase out the Bachelor of Education program. He plans to task a team to build an implementation plan for the Board of Regents to review and make a decision on in November.
UAS Chancellor Rick Caulfield said he’d like the school of education to be at UAS, but “we recognize the president’s putting in motion a process here and there are many voices across the entire state,” he said during an interview after the presentation and board discussion. “What’s clear to me is that the Board of Regents want to see a single dean for a single school where there’s accountability, so that the ambitious goal that the president set for Alaska — and that is producing 90 percent of the teachers by 2025 who are Alaskans who are highly qualified — can be met. I think the sense of the board, as I understood it, is they see this as the pathway to get there.”
Caulfield said UAS has a long history of providing quality programs in education, especially through its Master of Arts in Teaching, or MAT. The program allows a student to earn a Bachelors degree in a particular discipline, like English or Math, and then get a fifth-year Masters of Arts in Teaching. The fifth year includes pedagogy as well as extensive experience working in classrooms under the supervision of a teacher.
“I think the MAT program, as it’s constituted and as we’ve been delivering at UAS, is pretty much in line with what the board said that they wanted and what the president had said he wanted, and so I’m cautiously optimistic about the fate of the MAT,” UAS Vice Chancellor for Administration Michael Ciri said on the phone Monday.
“But I’m not clear, we don’t know yet — where will those degrees be running out of and, in fact, would those be UAS degrees or would they be something different? Until the working group meets and does its work, I really don’t know.”
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For the schools of management, Johnsen said all three collectively enroll more than 2,700 students and produce almost 600 baccalaureate, licensure, and master’s degree recipients in a wide variety of specialties.
Johnsen proposed having two deans over two schools of management at UAA and UAF with programs delivered from faculty at three universities.
That means UAS would lose its School of Management, folding its faculty and programs into UAS’s School of Arts and Sciences. It also means losing a dean position.
While the administrative structure will change, Caulfield said the important thing is the fact that UAS would continue to offer the quality online degree programs Bachelors of Business Administration and Masters of Public Administration.
He said students who take these online degree programs are from all over the state.
“There are so many small business owners and entrepreneurs in communities large and small that UAS will continue to fill an important niche there even as UAA and UAF continue to offer BBA focusing on the face-to-face and then online Masters of Business Administration in Fairbanks,” Caulfield said.
Johnsen wants to see implementation of the new schools of management structure by academic year 2018.
• Contact reporter Lisa Phu at 523-2246 or lisa.phu@juneauempire.com.
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