Two public community colleges and a state university have formed an alliance to increase educational opportunities and help students succeed and earn a certificate or degree.
College of the Ouachitas in Malvern, National Park College in Hot Springs and Henderson State University in Arkadelphia announced the Southern Arkansas Regional Alliance on Wednesday during a news conference with Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Arkansas Department of Higher Education Director Maria Markham.
The alliance will increase collaboration between the three schools in many ways, including sharing resources and aligning curriculum and course-numbering systems, which would ease student transfers between the schools, according to the agreement.
The schools have worked together in the past. Henderson State, with an enrollment of 3,567, has a campus in downtown Hot Springs in partnership with National Park College, and the two schools feed transfer students into the four-year university. The new alliance -- about two years in the making -- goes a step further, said Glen Jones, president of Henderson State.
"Whereas the other partnerships are really agreements to send students and to receive students, this is really about, number one, making certain that we have the right systems in place to receive transfer students and to help them persist to completion," he said. "Number two, leveraging our resources to better serve our communities. So now we're working together on economic development initiatives for our collective chambers and workforce development groups."
"And number three, we're also a resource to the state now. As the state is recruiting business and industry to south Arkansas, we begin to think about what education needs exist, what needs will have to be met and how we can work together to create that, as opposed to having three entities moving in three separate directions."
The alliance comes as the state has taken on a goal to raise the 38.8 percent of adult Arkansans who have a technical certificate or a degree to 60 percent by 2025. It also comes as the governor and legislators have called on higher-education institutions to be more accountable, raise degree completions and become more efficient.
On Wednesday, Hutchinson applauded the schools' leaders for voluntarily forming the alliance.
State Sen. Bill Sample, R-Hot Springs, said the agreement allows the school to spend money without duplicating services.
"This day and time -- with our short budgets and everything else like that -- that is so important to student success, that they have the opportunity to get what they need," he said. "And I'm really proud because we can have all these kids educated, and they don't have to go far from home."
The alliance is not an affiliation or a merger, nor will it lead to job losses or hiring freezes at the institutions. The partnership will not affect the purchasing power of the Cooperative Purchasing Network, a group of public community colleges and universities that uses its numbers to get lower rates for products, such as learning-management systems, said Bill Stovall, executive director of Arkansas Community Colleges, which is an association of community colleges and manages the purchasing network.
The alliance also could feed students from the three schools into businesses in the region, spurring economic development, the agreement states.
For example, Shandong Sun Paper Industry Joint Stock Co. of China is planning a $1.3 billion project near Arkadelphia. About 4 in 5 of the 250 jobs it will create will require training with a technical emphasis, said Steve Rook, president of College of the Ouachitas.
The 1,328-student Malvern college could tweak its advanced-manufacturing program to better suit the company's needs, he said, but the alliance would allow all three schools bring their strengths to the table to serve the industry.
"Sun Paper can come in and not worry about turf or who's going to fight or how it's going to be," said John Hogan, president of National Park College. "They're going to get a collaborative face that is speaking with one voice that is worried about how they can make more money."
The schools' leaders are first focusing alignments in health care and in the needs of business and industry, Jones of Henderson State said, adding that they expect technological opportunities, too.
Student transfers -- a part of the 2,934-student National Park College's eight high-priority objectives to increase the success of students and degree completion -- also play into workforce considerations, Hogan said.
"Transfer is a big issue in terms of measuring our success and bringing earning power -- or keeping earning power -- in Garland County so these graduates earn more money and have better jobs, and employers have a wealthier group of folks to pick from," he said.
The agreement will facilitate the transfer of not only general-education courses but also degree-program courses, College of the Ouachitas' Rook said.
Also as a part of the agreement, the three leaders will look into using jointly appointed faculty, collaborating on student advising, developing guidelines for high school students who are enrolled in college-level course work in the member institutions and using a single system to provide data on participation and completion.
"We thought working together, we could accomplish far more than we could working individually," Henderson State's Jones said. "And if we're willing to remove traditional barriers of turf and traditional ways of thinking about things and put our students first -- and our communities first and our state first -- we thought we could accomplish many great things together. We're looking forward to advancing this initiative and doing some great things that will advance our students, our communities, but also the state of Arkansas."
Metro on 01/05/2017