Published Mar 29, 2024 by https://www.edsurge.com/rebecca-koenig The University of Alaska Southeast has three campuses planted on “the tongue of land that is in between the Pacific Ocean and Canada, separated by hundreds of miles of glaciers,” as Paul Kraft describes it. He’s the director of the Sitka location, which used to be a community college before it was consolidated into the state university system.
For the past three decades, the University of Alaska Southeast at Sitka has prioritized distance education, especially in the sciences. The move to remote instruction — long before that model caught on in higher ed more broadly — came about as the institution searched for a way to stay relevant and accessible to more students given its geographic isolation, Kraft explains.
Alaska has a low college graduation rate compared to other states. Only about a third of the state’s high school class of 2022 were enrolled in postsecondary education within a year following graduation, according to the Alaska Commission on Postsecondary Education.
One reason why, according to Kraft, is that in Alaska, people can find occupations that offer a decent living without requiring a college degree.
“You can leave high school and work on the oil field, or work in a mine, or work as a deckhand on a fishing vessel, and make six figures,” he says. “They have available to them vocations or careers where they do very well financially — while having a college degree, there is not a return on that investment.”
So the Sitka branch of the university has leaned into programs that emphasize workforce training. Students who study on campus tend to come for career and tech courses, learning about, for example, welding, or scientific diving, or aquaculture. The majority of students study online — Kraft says 80 percent don’t live in Sitka — mostly in two-year programs. Health care training is popular.
|