Has Technology Made State Regional Universities Obsolete?
Student content and the evaluation of student assignments will be provided by Help Centers staffed by trained professionals (not graduate students). These Help Centers may be physically located at the University Centers. They may also be managed by the University Centers but be located offshore to provide more professional service at less cost. Freed from the need to deliver course content and daily learning support, the LSCs would then provide an overarching layer of face-to-face personal mentoring and in-person social networking opportunities in the broadest possible sense.
The physical location of the LSC functions will be distributed in relation to the field of training. The Health Careers functions might be housed in the locality's medical campus, if not in actual hospital buildings. Criminal Justice training could arrange space with or near the Police Department, State Trooper barracks or law courts. An expanded University Ranch would not be bolted on to the Agriculture/Ranching program as a special amenity; it would be the location of the Agriculture/Ranching program. In short, the LSC component units will be at or near the place where those in training could work directly with those currently practicing successfully in their chosen field. This will facilitate a deeper level of interpersonal bonding between those who are doing the job and the students who are providing real value at the workplace while they are learning to do the job.
This is very different from the short and artificially staged "practicums" currently offered to pre-service professionals, notably schoolteachers, who nationally have a 50 percent chance of dropping out of their new profession in the first five years. It makes no sense to have a student teaching experience that drives toward just one or two formally evaluated 40-minute demonstration lessons, for which the candidate takes many weeks to prepare overly elaborate materials that they will never have time to create when they are actually teaching. That is not the way the teaching profession really works. No one should ever graduate with a degree in a field of employment and then be shocked by what it is "really like" in their first weeks on the job.
In addition to a providing a physical footprint inside actual workplaces, thought must be given to avoid creating professional ghettos. Local LSC facilities may need to be built, acquired or leased to provide convenient venues for teams, clubs and events, as well as social space where students can engage in social activities that transcend professional lines. When the computer gamers and the literature majors get to meet on neutral ground, everybody benefits.
The University Center plus Learning Satellite Center model will be able to dispense with more than a few huge, expensive to maintain and unneeded physical campuses. There will be no need for the usual top-heavy phalanx of well-paid administrators which an SRU collects, as many administrative functions such as registration and financial aid could be handled more economically at a University Center connected electronically to individual students. Gone will be the days when entire offices are unavailable to students because the one person who knows how to get from point A to point B is taking lunch. In short, we must stop mimicking the governance of Iowa, where 99 tiny counties have parallel government hierarchies redundantly serving only 3 million people.
The LSCs will require a new class of support professionals gleaned from the ranks of best current practitioners. These individuals will not need formal academic research or publishing skills, nor the Ph.D. that (theoretically) attests to the presence of those skills. Instead they will be exemplary problem-solvers and accomplishers in their fields who have received some further training in how to support new career aspirants.
The goal of the University Center plus Learning Satellite Center model is to transfer agency back into the hands of the students, where it belongs. No longer will a self-appointed privileged group of professional academics with their arcane degrees and funny ceremonial robes be dictating to the rest of society what we all need to learn and how we need to learn it. Technology will be the great leveler and the marketplace will help individual students decide what choices are best.