CONSTRUCTION EDUCATION OVERVIEW
Joseph Marbach President Georgian Court University
it liberates the student from the requirement that they be on campus, something which could be helpful for a host of reasons. Moving forward, educators believe, higher education will be adopting a hybrid approach to learning, in which both routes will be opened to students. This has the potential to be one of the success stories of the pandemic, as, over the last year, the quality of remote pedagogy has improved by leaps and bounds. New Jersey also has a state leadership that has a track record of working to reduce the financial burden higher education can put on its students and their families. The state has passed several measures aimed at increasing accessibility. In the 2018 state budget and coming into effect this year, as part of a plan to make community college free for all, the state allocated $50 million for tuition support for low-income students. Gov. Phil Murphy took it a step further in the 2020 budget, adding another $50 million to New Jersey’s outcomes-based funding scheme, which would mean that four-year public institutions could offer two years of tuition for free. New Jersey is poised to continue on this path of big spending: at $44 billion, its 2022 budget is its biggest yet. Up to $75 million of the money is being earmarked for school construction and building maintenance, especially in underserved urban districts. The federal government is also playing its part in
How has Georgian Court University continued to grow despite last year’s challenges? What we’ve found is that we need to focus on some new markets and find nontraditional students. That comes back to our mission of serving the underserved. We saw growth even during the pandemic in two areas. One is with second-degree completers. In January, we launched an Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN) program. We already have over a hundred applications and they’re being reviewed now. We’ve had significant demand in that area and we think that’s going to increase as health workers are held in such high esteem. The other program that we’re launching in September is for students with intellectual disabilities. They are students who are not ready for a full college curriculum but they’re young adults and they’re ready for the college experience. We received a $2.5 million federal grant to run this program. We’re working with partners like the College of New Jersey, which has run a very successful program. We’re working alongside them to raise awareness of these young people who get through high school and there’s nothing for them to look forward to. . What would you say to critics who say that a college degree may not be as necessary anymore? In general, we just find that people with a college degree are far more successful in just about any measure you can come up with, whether it’s lifetime income or when the economy is bad. When it comes to other social indicators like who’s married, who’s happily married, generally, people with college degrees score higher in those areas. In some ways, we started to make education purely a commodity: What kind of job are you going to get? What’s the return on investment? At Georgian Court, we get high marks for return on investment and regularly moving people from a lower socio-economic status and into the middle class. But a college education should be more than that and that’s part of what we do at Georgian. We’re helping form individuals. www.capitalanalyticsassociates.com
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