West Virginia Executive Fall 2019 | Page 46

Dr. Sarah Armstrong Tucker Chancellor, West Virginia Community & Technical College System, and Interim Chancellor, West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission WVE: Tell us about your background in education and which experiences prepared you for your current roles. SAT: My background is in research, and I’ve spent a number of years researching higher education, college completion, which barriers students face when they hit college and whether or not we can stop some of those barriers from blocking their paths. I also looked at access in education—who has access to educa- tion and who does not and how we can provide access to those who do not, particularly for rural students. Through that, I got into some policy work. Eventually I became vice chancellor of the CTCSWV and then was named chancellor. Now I am serving in a dual role as chancellor of both the CTCSWV and interim chancellor of the WVHEPC. WVE: What are your responsibilities in this dual role? SAT: We have nine community and technical colleges and 10 public, four-year institutions in West Virginia that are located throughout the state. As far as the community colleges are concerned, we coordinate a lot of joint work between the institutions. We also facilitate a number of workforce initia- tives with those institutions. With the four-year institutions, we do a lot of support around their academics as well, trying to make sure they have programs that are needed in the state. We also do a lot of work around student support services. WVE: What are the biggest challenges in higher education in West Virginia today? SAT: I don’t know that I would say it is the biggest chal- lenge, but we have a real retention problem in West Virginia. We can get students in the door, but we have a hard time keep- ing them there. We need to figure out why that is. We also have a college matriculation problem. Forty-five percent of recent high school graduates don’t go to college, and that just does not match up with what the economy needs in West Virginia or in the nation. So where is that 45 percent of students going? I think we are also seeing an increasing number of social and emotional issues with our students, and K-12 has seen that too. We recently added someone to our staff to help our insti- tutions deal with the behavioral health issues we are seeing. We have students who have significant food insecurities. Many of our colleges have started food banks to help those students. We have students who have been touched by the opioid crisis, and there are also a lot of issues around that. We are seeing those things trickle down into higher education, and we are trying to deal with them. 44 WEST VIRGINIA EXECUTIVE WVE: What are your goals for the 2019-2020 school year? SAT: One of my goals is to work more collaboratively with K-12. We need to work better together to help solve some of these problems. We have been siloed a lot in the state of West Virginia, and Dr. Paine and I do not think that is very smart. We are trying to change that and make sure our staffs work together on solving some of these problems. A major issue we are facing in West Virginia is teacher education. We don’t have enough qualified math teachers, so how do we incentivize that? I think in this coming year we are going to focus a lot on that so hopefully we can change the face of education. We are going to push hard on the open educational resources (OER) initiative this year. You can see when you look at the beginning cohort of students that start in the fall, there are a number of them that drop off when they have to purchase books because they cannot afford them. These artificial bar- riers are just that—artificial. We can change them if we want to. They don’t have to be hard stops for our students. The OER initiative will essentially eliminate the burden of astronomically priced textbooks and replace them with free or nearly free online materials for instruction. Instead of buying an expen- sive textbook, the instructor would have a free online resource for the students to use. For example, if you have an economics textbook that costs $400 and there are 100 students in the class, if the instructor chooses to use an OER rather than the textbook, you just saved your students $40,000. WVE: Tell us about your close working relationship with Dr. Paine. SAT: We think similarly about education, and we want the same things for our students. We want our students to be suc- cessful, and we want our state to be successful. I think those common ground things have helped us build a really positive working relationship. As he and I would just sort of sit and spitball about education, we realized we were working on the same things. There was a lot of overlap between what he was doing and what I was doing and what our systems of educa- tion needed, and it didn’t make sense for us to work on them independently. We both have terrific staff who are very smart who are working hard on these issues, sometimes together and sometimes not, and we need to elevate that work and make sure people are working together.