The Action Task Force, the group charged with “finding” $8 million in the University’s budget, has made 16 new recommendations to President Steve Morgan.
With the hope of creating a more efficient institution, the ATF identified strategies representing significant institutional savings and ways to increase revenue. They say these strategies will also better serve the needs of ULV’s students by ensuring La Verne’s ability to continue to deliver high quality education.
The recommendations were presented in an open forum for faculty held last week in La Fetra Hall. One recommendation was to bring more international students to La Verne.
“The ATF recently looked at our book enrollment, particularly in the undergraduate arena,” Morgan said. “We do not have a high international student enrollment. We’ve learned from programs across the campus that there certainly are international students interested in enrolling at the University of La Verne.
“ULV wants to bring 50 international students (a year) and if there were room they would like to enroll 60 students,” he added. “Jeff Nonemaker, the former academic dean in Athens is on our campus now and part of his portfolio is the recruitment of international students.”
Professor of Education Peggy Redman said she supports ULV’s recruitment of international students.
“I’m supportive of this because I think it strengthens a campus when international students bring diverse perspectives to campus life and the academic world,” Redman said.
Morgan added that the University needs help in recruiting international students.
“I think that the ATF is very clear that it may take additional resources to recruit these extra students,” Morgan said. It may not be something that we can just add on to the portfolio of what we already have here.”
“This year the number of transfer student’s was nearly 136. The ATF feels that they could bring in additional students and accommodate those transfer students,” he added.
ULV has been working to improve articulation agreements with neighboring community colleges.
“The trend I believe I’m seeing for independent institutions particularly is that more students are going to community colleges for their first two years and then transferring to a four year independent school,” Morgan said.
Transfer students do not require as much financial aid from the institution because the University is only financing two years of cost rather than four.
“We’ve also found that we could look at the transcripts and see that they have been successful already at the college level so there are a lot of reasons that transfer students have been good for La Verne,” Morgan said.
In another recommendation, the ATF plans to change the number of required units for all majors and make it 60 units. It will be difficult for some departments to meet this requirement.
“Many of the majors, especially in the arts and sciences are down in the 40s,” Morgan said.
Director of Office of Instructional Technology and Research Support Jay Jones said that scheduling and space is a problem not financial aid.
“We want to provide our students with solid theoretical and applied training and we need the flexibility to give our students the specific courses our students are required to have to be competitive in graduate school,” Jones said.
“If we go to four-hour classes it creates difficulties in providing the breath and depth of course work necessary in some disciplines,” he added “The bottom line is we need to focus on the mission which is to provide our students with the highest quality education and the values needed to use it wisely and constructively.” He added.
Vitoria Drost can be reached at vitoriadrost@hotmail.com.
