Ranger AMARILLO COLLEGE’S NEWS SOURCE SINCE 1930
VOLUME 89 | ISSUE 7
January 31, 2019
Enrollment decreases By MARIA VALLES Staff Reporter
LAUREN EBBEN | The Ranger
Through new programs held in the greenhouse on the Washington Street Campus, incuding the recently approved bioltechnology degree, students can learn how to grow plants without soil.
New degrees approved By LAUREN EBBEN Staff Reporter
The Amarillo College board of regents has approved three new degree programs. The programs, approved Jan. 22, include two associate degrees in biotechnology and data science and an associate of applied science degree as a diesel transportation technician. Dr. Claudie Biggers, a biology professor who leads the grant that sparked this new degree, presented the biotechnology program to the board. This is the fourth degree introduced to the college as a part of the STEM Research Center grant and will allow students lab
research opportunities that they can take with them to university. While the program is new, Biggers said that the courses will remain much of the same as existing degree programs with only two new classes, BIOTECH 1414 and BIOTECH 1415, created for this degree. “The great thing about the program we put together is if they change their mind, a lot of the core is the same, so students just have to change their major course requirements,” Biggers said. Penelope Davis, chair of mathematics, presented the associate degree in data science. The degree was developed in response to requests from businesses in the community.
“It incorporates the needs of our community for students to be ready to go with an associate degree to interpret the massive amounts of data that technology is bringing to us daily,” Davis said. The degree is created out of existing courses, with a few courses brought back from inventory. Jerry Terry, the department chair for logistic and transportation, spoke about the associates of applied science degree as a diesel transportation technician. Terry described the degree as a “perfect marriage between two well-established programs,” using existing classes in the logistics training program and the
diesel technology program to complete it. These shared classes make the process more versatile. Rather than a step-by-step process, students will be allowed to jump around in-between each of the two programs. “Our students that want to be owner-operators someday would benefit greatly from this program if they can service and repair their own trucks,” Terry said. In addition to these three degree plans, the board also reviewed an update on the master plan, an improvement planning project that looks over the college’s programs, buildings and space and equipment use.
Amarillo College enrollment rates are falling. The total number of students enrolled has decreased by 600, or about 6 percent, compared to this time last year, according to Robert Austin, vice president of enrollment management. This decline could become a disaster if enrollment continues to drop in the next three or four years, Austin said. “I have some theories about why students might have reenrolled at lower rates this spring and one of the things we think might be at work here is that jobs are so plentiful here in this general area,” Austin, said. “People are making more than they ever made before.” AC staff members are taking action and working hard to get as many students back in classes, said Austin. “We have folks here in the office that are making outbound calls to approximately 1,400 students who applied to start for the spring semester who are not currently enrolled.” College officials are also trying to contact former students who have not returned this semester. “We will be encouraging them to consider getting registered,” Austin said. Instructors said they are disappointed to see empty classrooms. “We are trying to maintain the class size for 24 students and having less than that is disappointing,” Nadia Suleiman, a biology instructor, said. Austin said enrollment is expected to increase for the second eight weeks of this spring semester.
State budget proposal shows increase for AC By STEVI BRESHEARS
Editor in Chief
Preliminary proposals for the new Texas state budget show an increase for Amarillo College funding and AC officials are reaching out to state lawmakers as the legislative session gets underway. President Russell Lowery-Hart and several regents recently made a trip to Austin. “Our regents really were the advocates, and they were remarkable in their ability to tell the AC story to advocate for our faculty, staff and students,” Lowery-Hart said. “They did an exceptionally good job advocating for our community and its college.” According to the Texas Association of Community Colleges, the three policy priorities for the current
legislative session are boosting community college funding, broadening access to dual credit and securing more funds for workforce education. “The only proposed legislation that’s out yet is the budget, proposed budgets by both the House and the Senate,” legislative chair Anette Carlisle said. “They both support community colleges.” The initially-proposed budgets show a funding increase for AC. “The initial budget proposal is bigger than any budget we’ve had from the state in a decade,” Lowery-Hart said. “Our initial legislative agenda was to go down and ask for more funding and ask for more grants in workforce and even ask for some funding for dual credit. After we saw the initial budget,
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The TACC has recommended a plan that would expand the opportunity for dual credit to more students in Texas. The statewide goal is for at least 30 percent of high school graduates to have earned at least 12 dual credit hours by 2030. “The concern we have with dual credit across the state is that some communities and their colleges, because they have such a huge tax base, —Dr. Russell Lowery-Hart, don’t charge anything for Amarllo College president dual credit. Then, you have some schools that charge the full tuition and fees our legislative agenda is simply rate that any student would to ask them to maintain the pay, and we’re in the middle budget that they’ve proposed,” because our dual credit pays he said. “If they maintain the about half of what a typical budget that they’ve proposed, class would cost,” Lowerywe can manage the workplace Hart said. and dual credit concerns that “Across the state, there’s we have.”
Community colleges are the economic engine of our state.
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this real disparity in what communities can afford, so what we’re asking is for the state to kind of provide funding for the first 12-15 hours of every student’s dual credit pathway to provide some equity to what dual credit costs,” he said. Lowery-Hart also said that AC has some of its own goals for the session. “Our institutional goals are twofold: one is to remind legislators that community colleges are the economic engine of our state,” he said. “The second goal is to help legislators understand how innovative Amarillo College is being, so that they can see that higher ed is not stuck in ‘what was’ — we’re truly redefining higher education at Amarillo College and we want them to know we’re being innovative.”
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