UA News

The newly-designated college will be responsible for improving the UA's reach beyond the Tucson area.

The most recent college to be designated at The University of Arizona will work to boost access, online enrollments and collaborations throughout the campus and around the state.

On July 1, the UA’s Continuing Education and Academic Outreach became the Outreach College.

The Outreach College will remain devoted to some of the UA’s long-held values, such as student access and expanding the University’s reach beyond Tucson, said Michael Proctor, UA senior associate vice president for outreach and international programs.

The college is also responsible for coordinating the UA’s distance learning component and also oversees the Evening & Weekend Campus, professional development, independent study, continuing education and programs for children and senior members of the community.

The name change will also put the college in a better position to collaborate more effectively with other UA units and off-campus partners to introduce new programs and services, Proctor said. “In the past, we’ve never had strategies around connecting the University like this,” he said.

The Outreach College, he added, will work to become a sustainable and “compelling” unit and would be able to strengthen the UA’s land grant mission with particular attention paid to “accessibility, adaptability and sustainability.”

The Outreach College is structured somewhat like the Honors College. Such units are non-degree-granting divisions. They do not offer their own courses and, instead, partner with other units on campus. The Outreach College serves to facilitate efforts by other UA departments to offer courses and programs that lead to credits, certificates and degrees.

The interest for such support “just seems to keep growing,” said Mary Staugaard, associate director of credit programs for the Outreach College, a role that encompasses outreach, distance learning and evening and weekend courses.

“It’s really exciting,” Staugaard said. “We hope to keep offering more and more and, in particular, begin to offer certificate and degree completion programs.”

Those plans are already in the works, she said, adding that the UA’s nursing program is offering graduate-level courses online this fall and that other units are also beginning to increase their Web-based offerings.

Becoming designated as a college is part of a larger effort.

The University named Eugene G. Sander vice president for outreach and placed a number of units under his purview – including UA South, International Affairs, Cooperative Extension and the Outreach College.

One of the Outreach College’s major initiatives over the next five years will be to increase the number of students enrolled in online and evening courses while increasing the number of students who complete degrees, said David E. Cox, the college’s dean. “The goal, and part of the reason for the name change, is so that we can help the other colleges to make their distance, credit outreach and weekend programs more visible both internally and to the public,” Cox said.

“One of the charges of the Outreach College is to help departments to increase their enrollments in these other kinds of ways,” said Cox, who is also associate dean of the UA’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Cox noted that the college is heavily focused on non-traditional students and community members. Among its offerings are Arizona Youth University, a summer program for children and teenagers, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, or OLLI, which targets the aging population. Elderhostel is another program offering educational programming to people 55 years old and older.

The proposal UA officials drafted in support of the name change noted that the Outreach College “is uniquely poised to be a major force in both outreach and enrollment growth for The University of Arizona,” and also said the change should enable the college to become more organized and systematic.

The document also noted that the college “is committed to helping the University reach a more diverse student body, meet the land grant mission, enhance enrollment and return critical resources to University departments, colleges and administration.”

Such efforts have a long history at the UA. As Arizona’s land grant institution, the UA’s role has been to ensure that the entire state is able to participate in the educational opportunities the University offers, particularly in the mechanical and agricultural areas.

“We have a statewide responsibility,” Cox said. “The UA is not just a residential, traditional 8 to 5 campus.”