Administrators still determined for new degrees despite budget cuts
Rachel Tanner
Issue date: 11/2/09 Section: DSC News
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About a year ago, the board of trustees put together a list of future degrees for DSC, and now they are working to make each degree a reality.
President Stephen Nadauld said : "[The list] has to be thought of as fluid and organic in the sense that we are constrained by resources. When we put the list together, we didn't realize how serious the cut in the budget from the state would be. That is putting us in a position of rethinking how aggressive we can be with these degrees."
Nadauld said the college is currently facing a 17 percent budget cut.
"We are trying not to let that big change derail us any more than necessary," he said. "It has definitely created a bigger challenge than we had originally anticipated. We put that [list] together as a road map. In the sense of traffic jams and slide offs, we've got a big slide-off traffic jam problem with the budget cut."
Nadauld said although the budget has slowed the process of degree approval, the board of trustees are not changing the list of degrees they want to pursue. Many degrees, such as the theater arts and psychology degrees, are very close to that approval stage.
Donna Dillingham-Evans, vice president of academic services, said the process for obtaining new degrees begins with submitting the program to the board of trustees. After it's approved by them, it gets submitted to the commissioner's office, and all the chief academic officers from college institutions in the state review the program. After that, it is submitted to the Program Review Committee, which is a subcommittee of the board of regents. That committee then decides if it goes to the regents as a whole.
"We can tell you when we submit [the degrees], but when the regents actually approve them, that's out of our control," she said.
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