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.
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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.