One university, multiple campuses. That’s the message Georgia State University President Dr. Mark Becker gave to Georgia Perimeter and Georgia State audiences listening during the town hall meetings held Jan. 13 at both GPC Dunwoody and Georgia State. 

Becker; Rob Watts, GPC’s interim president; and Shelley Nickel, the University System of Georgia’s vice chancellor for planning and implementation, answered questions in the moderated town halls. Ingrid Thompson-Sellers, GPC’s interim vice president for academics, moderated the Georgia Perimeter meeting.

The USG Board of Regents approved a motion to consolidate the two colleges on Jan. 6.

Among the details known so far:

--The new institution, to be known as Georgia State and headed by Becker, is anticipated to be a two-tier system, with separate admission requirements and different tuitions for students in the two-year associate degree program and the four-year bachelor’s degree program.

--GPC’s athletics program, including all recruiting for basketball, baseball, softball, soccer and tennis, has been suspended.

--Current GPC faculty members will retain their tenure and rank in the move but are unlikely to see their salaries increase.

The following is an edited transcript of the GPC town hall held at Dunwoody Campus. To see a recorded version of the GPC event, visit /gpcnewsroomarchive/townhall

How can we be sure that the access mission of GPC will not be lost in this transition?

Rob Watts: Georgia Perimeter College has played an access mission—being the college for people who otherwise wouldn’t or couldn’t be in college—for 50 years this year. 50 years. For the next 50 years, as part of Georgia State University, we will be playing an access mission role. That will not be lost in this process.

Let me personalize that further: [University System of Georgia] Chancellor Huckaby started at a two-year college, Young Harris College. And the first job he had, after he got his graduate degree at Georgia State University, was registrar at Gordon College, a two-year access institution. He is passionately committed to the access mission in the university system. Vice Chancellor Nickel is also well acquainted with the access mission and is absolutely committed to preserving that in this consolidation. And Dr. Becker started college at a community college. And he is personally committed to the access mission.

I have worked with access colleges since 1986. One thing you can be assured of in this process—and I will ask my colleagues to confirm that as well—is that we will not lose the access mission in this consolidation. We will continue to serve the kind of students that we have always served. 

Shelley Nickel: Well I would just say that the Board of Regents is also committed to preserving the access mission. It serves a great need for both our students and the communities that we serve throughout metro Atlanta and throughout our state. So I think you can rest assured that it will not be disrupted during this consolidation.

Dr. Mark Becker: I will go even further than that and say that both for Georgia State University historically, this [access] is critically important and for me personally, it is an important part of my life since 1976 when I enrolled in community college. … Throughout my life there have been different touchpoints. … As a graduate student at Penn State University in 1980 … I [taught] introductory statistics as a graduate teaching assistant… [and] many of the students in my classroom had come to the research campus having started at two-year campuses spread throughout the state of Pennsylvania.It is a model that has been around for decades and has been very successful.

And then more recently, starting in 2004, when I became the provost at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia—again, at a research campus university—we had four two-year access colleges where students could start … and [then] transfer, whether it was to the main campus or to another four-year institution within the state. So it is a model I know well … it is a model that has worked very well in my professional experience, as well as my personal experience. …

It is a model that has been extremely important to Georgia State. I think many of you know that many students who start at a Georgia Perimeter College campus—be it for academic reasons, financial reasons or personal reasons—transfer to Georgia State University.

To put it in simple numbers, every fall, approximately 1,300 students transfer from a Georgia Perimeter College campus to Georgia State University. And we have the data, and I can tell you that students who have started their educations at GPC and have transferred to Georgia State … have done as well as those who have started with us as freshmen. We know that the quality [of students from GPC] is very high.

Vice Chancellor Nickel, can you please tell us the timeline for the consolidation?

Nickel: This is our sixth consolidation … and through six consolidations we have learned quite a bit. They typically take about 18 months … and part of that is guided by SACS accreditations … SACS only meets twice a year, and a prospectus (this is one of the first things that you all will start working on) will most likely go to SACS by Oct. 1, to meet their deadline for next December’s meeting where they will give approval, hopefully, to the consolidation plan.

So [GPC] students will probably, after that time on, not register as a new Georgia State student until fall of 2016. So that is typically the timeline that we have followed. And I expect this one to probably follow that same timeline.

President Becker, how will students, faculty, staff and the community be involved in the consolidation?

Becker: This consolidation, as Shelley noted, is not the first in the University System’s history. There is a general structure and process in the system we have used in the past … and that we expect we will be using with this one. … There will be an implementation study, [with] representatives from faculty, staff, students, administrators from Georgia Perimeter College and Georgia State University, that will guide the overall process. But then there will be many committees … because there are all different dimensions of administrative functions and academic functions that will need to be addressed in some way, shape or form. Some will be simple, others may be more challenging. But that is the process, and importantly, you will be able to follow this via one website: consolidation.gsu.edu, where you will be able to track the process of the implementation committee. …

Watts: I talked to the president of Kennesaw [State University] last Friday: he said they had 81 working groups of 10 to 12 people apiece working on all of these issues, academic and administrative. So there will be a chance for hundreds of people to be involved in this before it is all over. I talked to Dr. Azziz at the medical college [Georgia Regents University] yesterday, and he said they had 75 working groups … [with] 600 or 700 people involved in that process. So unless you hide in your office, it is going to be hard not to have a part in this process.

What will be the structure of the new institution?

Becker: That remains to be worked out through the implementation committee. I think that the mindset I have for that is: Georgia State, one university, multiple campuses … and what happens on each campus will be specific to that campus. Downtown will continue to be a highly selective premier research university, [and] we would have the access campuses … [offering] associate and certificate programs as they do now. And then we also have, for example, already up in Alpharetta a GPC campus and a Georgia State campus [that] now becomes a Georgia State campus that already offers both associate and baccalaureate programs.

So this gives us a platform of multiple campuses from which we can not only be successful as we have already been as two separate institutions, but also can envision new and different opportunities. For example, in addition to operating downtown and in Alpharetta, Georgia State now operates a center—or a campus, if you will—in Buckhead where we do professional master’s programs in business. So this gives us the opportunity [or] the platform to look at what else might we do… what else might be possible that will best serve the students and the people of this metro region.

Nickel: One of the things that the [USG] Board [of Regents] has asked President Becker to lead is developing a mission for the new institution. And that will come before the board in a couple of months, and the mission of the new institution will really guide what the structure will be of the new institution: what academic programs will be housed where, what kind of functionality needs to be in place, what kind of people and employees you need to get the mission done. So that will really guide the process for the future of the new GSU.

What factors will be weighed in considering whether GPC’s campuses will remain open?

Nickel: When the chancellor talks about consolidation, he talks about looking at the University System as a whole and really positioning it so that it can better serve students in the state of Georgia. So looking at how we are structured currently—physical structure—is something that we will also be looking at. … Data will inform those decisions … [which] will conform to the new mission. What will this new institution need in terms of physical assets in order to get the job done … to serve students and the communities that we currently serve throughout metro Atlanta. So there are no hard and fast rules to that, but we will certainly be looking at how we are currently configured throughout the city.

What will current and future GPC students gain by this consolidation?

Watts: I think students will have more pathways to getting their bachelor degrees and higher degrees than they do now. They will feel a part of Georgia State University right from their first day. And it will be very easy and seamless to move into their junior and senior programs from our freshman and sophomore programs. As everybody knows—you read the newspapers—we need more college graduates in Georgia. We need more students to complete associate degrees and to complete bachelor degrees. And I think, with the great models for student success that Georgia State has piloted over the past few years and has gotten a national reputation for, it will mean more degrees for more of our students in the future… it is only positive for them.

Becker: It gets back to supporting that access mission. Five years ago, Georgia State started working on what is its current strategic plan [and] four years ago we adopted that plan. The first goal of the strategic plan is to establish a national model demonstrating that students from all backgrounds can be successful at high rates.

This was basically driven by recognizing at Georgia State that our graduation rates of a decade ago were lower than they should be. They may not be lower than similar institutions of other urban universities, but we considered them to be unacceptably low as a university community. And we committed to basically developing new programs, new innovations, pilot programs. We have done a lot of experiments; we don’t just assume we always know the answers. … As President Watts has said, we have gotten a lot of national attention: in December, at a White House summit on college opportunity and success, we were singled out by President Obama for the work we have done; we have been singled out by the Gates foundation for the work we have done. … We have done a lot, and we have learned a lot, but we are nowhere near being done. And the opportunity here, to take what we have learned, working with the faculty, staff, students at Georgia Perimeter College… is to … put in place programs … that are going to greatly increase the percentage of students who stay in school and get a degree.

That is a serious goal. It used to be at Georgia State, if you were a first-time, full-time freshman, you had about a one-in-three chance of graduating. Now that [chance] is better than one in two. We intend to go higher. Likewise, I would hope that through this consolidation, building on the experience that we have, building on the talent that exists within what is GPC today, that Georgia State can continue, as one university, to innovate and provide more pathways to success for students.

Nickel: I would just add that the Board of Regents is highly invested in the Complete College Georgia initiative that Gov. [Nathan] Deal has advanced. The goal is for 60 percent of Georgia students to have a credential, meaning a certificate, an associate degree or a bachelor degree, by 2020. We are currently at about 42 percent, so there is a long way for us to go. But the success that Georgia State has had recently is proving that there are ways to move that needle, and I think that was one of the most compelling reasons that the board thought that this was a consolidation that would really make a difference to Georgians’ lives.

Will GPC students’ tuition remain equivalent to that at other state colleges?

Nickel: The Board of Regents does, as you know, approve tuition. A plan will come forward from the consolidation implementation committee, and … most likely—[from] what we have seen in other consolidations, the access-mission [or] associate-degree students will continue to have a tuition that is similar to the state colleges. And the Georgia State students… seeking baccalaureate degrees will have a different not only admissions process, but also tuition and fees schedule. So it will likely look very similar to what it currently is. … Most likely, there will be two different paths for admission and for tuition.

Watts: I will only add to what Shelley said: the board and the USG chancellor have been very committed to keeping college affordable over the past few years. Since Chancellor Huckaby has been there, I think we have only had two-and-a-half percent tuition increases each of the last three years for our students. Affordability is very much on their radar, and I don’t expect that to go off of the board’s radar; Shelley, do you agree? (Nickel nods).

Becker: … It used to be that all the research universities had the same tuition and fee structure for baccalaureate degrees. The board deviated from that [in GSU’s case], and actually that was very important to us because at  Georgia State, we know that students are seven times more likely to leave Georgia State for financial reasons than academic reasons. … So our tuition increases and our fees have actually grown much slower than rates at the other research institutions in the state. They have grown … in ways that allow us to continue building an excellent, outstanding university… but while being very mindful that we have to be very judicious [in] making very difficult decisions and maintain the affordability for our students.

How will the consolidation change admission requirements for GPC students?

Watts: Shelley just addressed that:  two tiers of admission requirements … for associate-degree-seeking students and … for baccalaureate-degree-seeking students at the downtown campus. We will have to work through exactly what those are, but I would not expect them to be much different than they are now.

Nickel: We already have done this. The University of North Georgia has associate-degree students that are admitted as associate-degree-seeking students; they pay and are admitted under a different academic standard, and they also pay a different tuition rate as opposed to the students who are in baccalaureate programs. So we will probably see a similar thing here.

Will the rank and tenure earned by faculty at GPC be honored at the new institution?

Nicole: Historically, that is what we have done. We have not had any issues taking tenure away from anyone.

Watts: I would expect that to be the same in this situation.

Moderator: Will faculty holding a master's degree as their highest degree be required to obtain a Ph.D.?

Becker: No, if they are faculty in rank and already have their tenure or whatever. It will be a question of what are the hiring practices going forward, [but for] those who already have a position and have a master's degree, that is not going to change.

Nickel: There [will be] a committee formed that will actually look at the mission of the new institution, and the promotion and tenure policies will likely be changed to mirror that mission. So I can’t say exactly what that will be, but it will follow the mission. And in another [consolidation] case, we have taken some exceptions to the board and asked them to waive the policy, for terminal degrees, needing a terminal degree to be on a tenure track. Similar things may happen in this consolidation.

Becker: When I was provost at the University of South Carolina—again, we had four two-year access campuses and one main campus that was the highly selective research university—the promotion-to-tenure standards on the access campuses were different than they were at the main campus. Likewise, you [can] expect something like that here: the promotion and tenure standards are going to be written to what is appropriate for the job, not to the name of the university.

If layoffs are going to occur, will they only involve Georgia Perimeter College employees? Also, what factors will be involved in layoffs?

Watts: As Shelley has said previously, this is a chance for us to re-imagine what we do all across the board. This is not trying to put two existing institutions together with a Velcro strip or something. This is a chance to look at all of our operations and see what we need to support them … [and] the new mission. There probably will be some administrative savings; there should be—the institution does not need two presidents—and I know which one is going to win! (Laughter).

So there are already savings there, and there will be some other opportunities for adminstration savings as well. We are trying to make sure we are as efficient as possible, in achieving the new mission. But these working teams will work through those, issue by issue, department by department, function by function, until they come up with what the best model is. And I would expect that over time there will be some changes at the existing Georgia State University, [along with] some changes at the existing GPC. All of the changes won’t just be at GPC. Is that your understanding, Shelley?

Nickel: That’s right. And what we have done, and what we will ask the presidents to do, is once the mission has been established, the organizational structure will be developed to best meet that mission. So you will come up with an organizational structure to help meet the mission, and then eventually you will populate the organizational structure with names of people who will be in those positions.

And I am a big proponent of making sure the presidents will use a process—that … will be very transparent—on how people are going to be put in places where they are most appropriate to helping the university meet its mission. If there are people who are displaced through consolidation—which we have seen some in the other consolidations—they will be given preferential treatment throughout the system in positions that are available. … There also will be opportunities, [such as] if you have been in a position for a long time and haven’t interviewed in 15 years for a new job, we will help you; the system offices will be available to help you. And another thing I might add, the [Human Resources] functions at GPC and Georgia State are highly functioning organizations and are very skilled in change management. They will also be available to help people understand: how do I fit in this new university, what is my role and how can I be the best employee that I can be at the new university?

Becker: I am not going to contradict any of that; I agree with all. As we look at this, this is the new Georgia State. This isn’t keeping Georgia State as it is, and we aren’t just going to, as Rob said, take a Velcro strip and tag on another institution. As the chancellor has said to all three of us, everything is on the table and we have to look at it all: organizationally, what is the right mix, the right talent mix to get to where we want to go and what is that mission statement and vision statement.

The other part I want to say is [that] unfortunately for all of us, we have lived through the great recession… and at Georgia State, as at most places, there were some layoffs. But we used the process, using a very high-functioning HR team, by which people who were no longer going to work at Georgia State University at some point during that deficit/recession … were given support … so that they could go out and find new employment whether in the system or elsewhere. And we got very high marks for that; we would expect to be able to draw on the same talent and expertise again should that be necessary.

Most of us here at GPC realize that our lower graduation rates in part reflect our service to students who (a) plan to transfer instead of graduating, (b) work full-time and take longer to graduate and/or (c), are first-generation college students. What will change with the consolidation?

Watts: We know that of our graduating class of about 2000 students last May … it took them on average eight semesters to graduate. Many of them coming in [need] learning support [courses] and need some extra time. We have the highest part-time percentage of students in the university system: only 37 percent of our students go full-time, 63 percent [are] part time.

But we have an investment in trying to get more students to take a larger load, to get them through quickly because time is the enemy to getting a degree. The longer a student stays in school, the more likely a student is to drop out. So we hope that with some of the new Georgia State models, that we will be able to get some of our students to move on much more quickly to their two-year degree and into Georgia State and finish their four-year degree, rather than ending up—after two, three, four or five years—without a college credential at all.

Becker: I will actually touch on part of that. First of all, they don’t have to continue at Georgia State. If a student wants to transfer from Georgia Perimeter to UGA or Kennesaw or Georgia Southern or Princeton University or Harvard, they still retain that. They will be a Georgia State student, but even students who start as freshmen transfer. We hope they stay with Georgia State [and] we hope they graduate from Georgia State, but students [will] not lose any opportunity to transfer through this consolidation.

This is our student population: we are over one-third first-generation students at Georgia State University, [and] when we measure graduation rates for first time, full-time freshmen, we measure in six years as our graduation rate because the overwhelming majority of Georgia State students start working while they go to school. I think it would be accurate to say—and this is a guess, but it is accurate, I believe, based on everything I have heard and seen for six years now—that probably over 80 percent of our students work 20 or more hours per week.

So the issues that are being raised … are not new questions for us. … As we have taken up this goal of basically demonstrating that you can do much better than you have been doing historically, we refused to accept those as reasons to accept the lower rates that we have had. What we have shown is that through some of the interventions that we have made—whether it be in student advising, peer tutoring, financial counseling, bundling of programs depending on the student’s situation—that we have reduced the time to a degree [and] therefore we have reduced the cost of getting a degree. There are things that can be done, even for students that are either first-generation or are working substantial numbers of hours while they are still in school. We do not have to accept low graduation rates.

In fact, it is a disservice to the students to use that as a crutch and say, well, of course we have low rates. We can do better [and] we have shown we can … with our first-time, full-time population. We have every expectation as an institution that all of us are committed to doing that for the students who choose to start their education in an associate or two-year program.

Nickel: The last thing we really want is for a student to take a couple of classes and have paid that money or gone into debt in order to get those classes, and not have any credential whatsoever. Because what we know is: the more credentials you have, the more your career is going to grow. And the more education you have, the more opportunities are available to you. So we certainly want to instill in students the desire to have a credential, and we also want to instill in everybody who works at a university that it is our job to help those students be successful and become credentialed in some manner.

Are reports in the media that Georgia Perimeter College has a budget shortfall, accurate?

Watts: I want to separate two things that sometimes have not been clear in the newspaper. The college’s budget is balanced. The last audit was perfect, we are spending within our means, SACS is happy with us and they have removed the financial warning. We absolutely do not have financial problems this year at all; if we had financial problems this year, I would have shared those with the college.

We are facing a significant financial challenge for the future, though, based on an enrollment decline a couple of years ago. The way the budget works in the University System is that enrollment drives funding, but there is a lag of a couple of years before it drives the money. We had an enrollment reduction a couple of years ago; we have now turned that around and we are headed back up this year, which we will get credit for at some point. But … in the fiscal year that begins July 1, [funding will be based on] the reduced enrollment two years ago. … Vice Chancellor Nickel did a great presentation to the Board of Regents about a year and a half ago about the enrollment situation in the University System. In the fall of 2012, 19 of the 35 colleges were down in enrollment. We were one of those. In fall of 2013, I think 15 or 16 of the 31 colleges were down in enrollment, and we were one of those.

There are a lot of reasons for that enrollment decrease: system changes in learning support requirements—that’s big for us. At one point of the college, we had 5400 learning support students; this fall, we had 2400. So because of those new admission requirements for learning support, we have 3000 fewer students. There have been changes in the Pell grants and the HOPE grants. Colleges like this are countercyclical with the economy, too: spikes when there is a recession, and then enrollment softens when there is a recovery.

As Shelley mentioned in her presentation, this is a challenge for us starting July 1. We are going to have to work our way through that challenge. We don’t know exactly what the magnitude of the challenge will be; we kind of know what the upper limit is, but the governor hasn’t presented his budget yet, the Legislature hasn’t passed a budget yet, the board hasn’t adopted a budget yet—it will in April, presumably. But we do have a significant challenge that we are going to have to confront starting July 1, and we hope that part of the way we solve this is through the consolidation process. Through finding some efficiencies [and] ways of doing business better, we will be able to save some money and offset part of that budget decrease. I want to separate the two things. The college’s budget is balanced. It is being managed well by Mr. Stark and Ms. Hickey on the financial side; our audit is a flawless audit this year [and] we are not in any trouble with anybody. But we do have an upcoming challenge starting July 1 with the new fiscal year, and part of these discussions is confronting that challenge.

Becker: …When higher education is funded in the state of Georgia, it is a formula that is based on enrollment… But [the system] does not follow every single student in terms of how they allocate those dollars. [If they did], the institutions that had declines over these few years would have had much more dramatic budget cuts than what has happened so far. … The other side is that those institutions that have grown have not gotten all the dollars they would have if it had been tied [strictly] on a student-by-student basis. … The board does modulate to some degree so that things are not riding like a roller coaster. …

The other part is, there is yet another future on the horizon and that is [that] there have been recommendations on moving the funding model for the state of Georgia from an enrollment-based system to what has been called “performance funding.” Tennessee was one of the pioneers of this. … The funding would actually be tied to producing graduates, not to having “butts in seats.” As a way of driving the Complete College Georgia vision, you would get more financial credit, if you will, for graduating a student as opposed to having students drop out. … We do not get know how that is going to be operational, we don’t yet know what that is going to mean for our budgets, because we haven’t lived through the first cycle of that, but that is out there on the horizon as well.

What will happen to GPC's athletic programs? Should we continue to recruit student-athletes for GPC's sports programs?

Watts: This is one of those questions that I felt could not wait. And so I have already taken some action. Yesterday, I met with the athletic director. My office and the athletic director’s office have been inundated with phone calls from parents of students who have been recruited right now to play for us next year. We felt we could not be unfair to the students and their parents, because we could not look them in the eye and say, we will have a team two years from now. And we cannot be fair to a student athlete if that student athlete is not going to get a chance to play.

So, as of yesterday, I have suspended recruiting for next year for sports. That is what the athletic director thought was the best idea, as a way to be truthful to student athletes and the parents, to say we are not recruiting students right now.

We have 47 student-athlete sophomores who will be graduating. And this year we have about 86 student athletes on scholarship who are freshmen right now in the eight sports that we play. Those 86 will get a letter from me by the end of the week saying that we will honor … if they want to stay with us, their scholarship through their eligibility. If they want to stay and complete their degree, no matter what happens in the future … their scholarship is good. Or, if they do not want to deal with uncertainty, if they want to go off and play someplace else, we will release them so … they will not have to sit out a year and they can play immediately. Coach [athletic director Alfred] Barney estimates that of the 86 scholarship athletes right now that we have that are freshmen, he thinks about 70 will be recruited away to play at other places. Some of that recruitment is already going on right now, since the announcement was out. As you might expect, some people are already looking at some of our really good college athletes. Georgia State may or may not be interested in some of our college athletes: We had a former GPC basketball player play against Georgia State for Troy the other night who…

Becker: scored 31 points! (Laughter).

Watts: continuing: So maybe Georgia State will recruit some of these student athletes. But I did not feel like, given that their student lives are at stake and those students are making decisions to sign with colleges and universities right now, that I could … tell them there would be a team here for them to play for two years from now. So we have suspended recruiting right now.

Becker: This is exactly what happened when the Southern Poly and Kennesaw consolidation was announced. The other point is: those of you who follow college football may be aware that the University of Alabama-Birmingham decided they would discontinue football, [so] their student athletes are all going through a similar process. I believe we have enrolled about five of them at Georgia State… which is to point out that every time something like this is announced, all the coaches are out looking to see whether or not there is a student athlete at an institution—in this case, GPC—who would fit into his or her program.

Tuition has been mentioned. But what will happen to student fees? How will they be calculated?

Watts: The Board of Regents has to pass student fees in the same way the board has to pass tuition. The same process: they look at that each April and pass tuition and fees both for the next fall. I would expect the process to be normal, and I would expect the student fees for associate-degree students to be appropriate to what the mission is. We won’t know what the specific fees will be until probably a year from now or at least some months from now, but again, I think there will be two tiers: our students will pay a lower fee amount and a lower tuition amount, and it will be appropriate to the mission of the institution.

Nickel: And I would just add that the chancellor is really committed to affordability for students. So I think if you looked at the increases in both tuition and fees since Chancellor Huckaby has been chancellor, you’ll see that they have really slowed in the amounts of increases. And he is very aware of that, and I don’t expect that to change.

What will happen to our transfer admission guarantee—or TAG—programs?

Watts: Certainly it will be part of the discussion for the future, but as Dr. Becker has said, Georgia State wants to make it possible for its students—associate degree or baccalaureate students—to move on to whatever institutions they want to move on to. Georgia State doesn’t have every single program. There are students who will come to the associate-degree programs and want to study engineering at Georgia Tech or move on to the University of Georgia. Or go to Princeton or Harvard or any other institution.

And so, it is in Georgia State’s interest, as it has been in our interest, to have close relationships with other institutions to make it easy to move on, and I would expect that to be the case. Higher education has changed now. When I went to college—I am a little older than Dr. Becker; I went to college in 1970—when I walked across the stage four years later, most of the students had started at Tallahassee, at Florida State, the same year I did. Now I think nationally fewer than 50 percent of students get their bachelor degrees from where they started. Higher education is a very mobile market now. And so we need to keep pathways open for students to move on wherever they want to move on. We just want them to move on someplace, to get that degree and not stop.

Becker: I will put some data behind that: first off, of the undergraduates currently at Georgia State, over half of them started somewhere other than with us as first-time, full-time freshmen. Georgia Perimeter College, year in and year out, has sent us more transfer students than any other institution, by a long degree. Georgia Perimeter students have done better than students transferring from just about any other institution also. So that is very positive. On the other hand, we know that the students who start at Georgia State have a better than one-in-two chance of graduating at Georgia State. We actually know that of the students who started at Georgia State six years ago, three out of four of them have graduated from college—in round numbers, that is two from us and one from someplace else.

There was a story in the New York Times, sometime during the early part of the 2000s, that actually reported that the typical student in America today attends three institutions before he or she graduates college. So the transfer articulation agreements need to be in place. … The goal is that the students, wherever they start, get the support to be successful, whether it is graduating here with an associate degree, Georgia State with a bachelor degree or somewhere else. That is what we are in the business of doing.

Will salaries increase now that we are now part of the tier 1 institutions?

Watts: … Salaries will be appropriate to the position of the job and the mission, and so, I expect that there will still to be some differences on salary, depending on what the position is and what the mission of that position is. Salaries won’t automatically increase or decrease; salaries will be paid to whatever the job is: what the marketplace is in metro Atlanta and what the position requires.

Becker: The same question came up with North Georgia/Gainesville State [consolidation]. It was good question: Gainesville State [was] a two-year access college, so would their salaries immediately be changed to be more commensurate with North Georgia? The answer is: the Gainesville state [access] mission is still the Gainesville state mission, and in general salaries did not change much, if at all.

What happens to the proposed four-year degree programs at GPC: health informatics and sign language/interpreting?

Watts: There have been two new four-year programs approved for us by the Board of Regents and by SACS. Both programs are still needed in some way, shape or form for the future. [Regarding] sign language/interpreting, the reason a bachelor’s degree was approved … is that you now need a bachelor’s degree if you’re going to take the test for the registry for interpreters for the deaf. … [Interpreters] have to be on that list to be a sign language interpreter in the public schools, so a four-year degree was absolutely necessary in sign language interpreting. I think we are one of two or three programs in the whole state—Valdosta State may be the only other one. We serve the North Georgia area in sign language interpreting, so we will need to do that in the future.

Health informatics was approved by the board at the same time … principally because of the field, but also to find more pathways for pre-nursing students who don’t get into nursing programs but who want to get into another health field. … We are going to have to look at the details of how those programs are implemented. We are certainly moving forward with those. But those programs will require SACS follow-up visits … and we are going to be doing a substantive change prospectus for this consolidation. So we will have to have our academic folks sit down together and figure out how all of this fits together. And I am not sure how it all fits together right now. … Both degree programs are still needed … but we are going to have to work through with SACS and Georgia State and make sure we do this right, in a way that makes sense for the institution going forward.

Becker: And I would say, there is synergy there, because we have launched a pilot of a health informatics bachelor-degree program that is enrolling hundreds of students. Atlanta is either number 2 or number 1 in the country for this field: tremendous job opportunities, good paying jobs, not nearly enough skilled workforce. That is a focus of both institutions, as well as the system, the governor, the leadership. So the key here is not just focus on these two programs … but [look at] what makes sense for the future. Are there going to be other opportunities? Almost certainly there will be. Not everything will be figured out in implementation. When we create one university, certainly there is an opportunity not only to consider these two and take those programs to the marketplace, … [but] also look far out into the future to see what else might be possible to do.

Once the institutions are consolidated, will undocumented students continue to be allowed to enroll?

Nickel: I will answer this. The board policy will likely remain the same: which is that students that are undocumented will have access to the Georgia Perimeter College campuses, but they will not have access to the Georgia State downtown campus. There are five institutions throughout our system where that is the case. We will see whether that is changed, but the current policy is what we anticipate going into the consolidation.

Will faculty members with the same degrees be paid the same amount?

Watts: I tried to answer that previously: obviously salaries will be set according to the position that is being offered and the mission where the position is, and salaries will follow those positions. It won’t be pegged automatically to any kind of degrees.

Becker: The salary is pegged to the position, not to the credential.

Can an associate-degree student attend classes downtown and vice versa?

Becker: It would have to be [on] an exception basis, because the downtown campus is going to continue to be a highly selective baccalaureate, master’s and doctoral educational institution. We do have part-time non-degree students. We would have to look at (a), the capacity to host those and (b), how any change would fit with what is our existing practice. In the main, we are not bringing associate degrees downtown.

Watts: I think there is a real potential for our online program to pick up some Georgia State students, some baccalaureate-degree students, to take some class work through our online program. So I think we are going to see a spike in the online campus as a result of this consolidation.

Becker: The [online campus] is another example of the advantages of one institution, multiple campuses. Right now the state of Georgia … [has] a common core curriculum for baccalaureate degrees. And so the courses that are online at Georgia State or University of Georgia or elsewhere [are the same.]

Right now, the Georgia State student downtown who wants to use those courses toward their degree has to basically enroll at GPC under a separate registration and then have that course transferred into Georgia State. So I think you are exactly right, we are opening up to 25,000 undergraduates. The implementation committee will work through how this will work, but I think it creates great new opportunities for all the students.

What will happen to our grant-funded programs already in place?

Watts: We will have to look at them one at a time. Grant-funded programs … have to [be] operated … as the funder wanted them to be operated, so we will have to make sure that we are in sync with what the intent of the grant is. Our two grant offices will work together to make that transition as seamless as possible. … [We’ll] have to [look at] one grant at a time, and there won’t just be a one size fits all with that.

Becker: Other institutions that have gone through this [consolidation] had many committees [dealing with] specific parts: this will be one of the specific parts. … It will be transferring the grants one at a time, but it is not going to be an overwhelming process. I have been around this sort of thing for a long time.

Will class sizes—and who teaches classes—at GPC change?

Watts: I would not expect that the GPC brand—it is not just a brand, but the cultural ethos—will change. The reality is we try to provide our students with smaller classes so they can excel and succeed, and I would expect that to be the same in the future. Right now we have an average class size… [of] 22 or so, somewhere in that region, and I don’t expect to see a difference of that in the future. Obviously our academic [leaders] will be working together and analyzing class sizes and everything else about the academic program. But that is one of the qualities we are known for: the high academic quality and small classes. We don’t have many of these kinds of spaces (he gestures toward the auditorium) for large lecture hall classes. They don’t exist on the campus. They don’t exist on the campus for a reason: because we want classes to be 20, 25, 30, 35; we don’t want them to be 300 students. That has been our history, and I don’t see that changing.

How do I get appointed to the consolidation team?

Watts: Dr. Becker and I will be appointing, with input from Vice Chancellor Nickel, [this team].  Please make your interest known to me. The steering committee is going to be reasonably small because we need to operate, and you can’t do that with hundreds of people. But just keep in mind there will be somewhere in the area of 75 to 80 working teams: there’ll be lots of chances for participation in this process even if you are not selected … at the steering-committee level. At the working level—the people actually doing the work—there will be lots of chances for participation.

Will the teaching load change to four-four?

Watts: Teaching load is a question for the academic people to discuss and we have a long-standing teaching load of 5/4 now. I have been committed to that teaching load during the two times that I have been here [as interim president]. But as [Ms. Nickel] said, everything is on the table to be talked about. The academic folks will certainly talk about it. But I wouldn’t expect right now the teaching load is going to be vastly different than it is right now for our faculty.

Will our English as a Second Language program continue with GPC’s lower tuition rates?

Watts: As Ms. Nickel said previously, the tuition rate is set by the board and we will have to see where that goes in the future, but there can be a lower tuition for associate-degree students than for baccalaureate students. Georgia State has an English as a Second Language program [that] is a different model than we have, and we certainly want to get our [ESL] people together to talk about that in the future. But I would expect for our access-center, associate-degree English as a Second Language students, that their tuition to be the same as other students.

Becker: I would only add, and this is just for English as a Second Language, there are not only different models but a different student population. A large percentage—I don’t know the exact percentage of students in our program—are students coming to the U.S. for graduate study, and one of the conditions of getting into their master’s or doctoral programs are certain English language proficiencies. [That] is a little different population from what Georgia Perimeter College has.

How will consolidation affect GPC’s nursing program?

Watts: We have a very large associate-degree nursing program at Georgia Perimeter College and, like our ESL program, it has a good reputation in the system, in the Southeast and in the nation. … Georgia State has a baccalaureate degree and a graduate degree … all the way to a doctoral program. I think our health sciences people have already had their first conversations. … We will see what the relationship is, but I would expect that both the system and the state need associate-degree nurses into the future, and they need baccalaureate-degree nurses. This will give some of our nursing students a chance to move on more easily and quickly and get their baccalaureate degree at Georgia State.

Becker: The demand continues to be great. … There are models around the country where students complete an associate degree in nursing and are in the workforce, but then [participate in] an online baccalaureate nursing program. … This is an opportunity to take advantage of the strength and experience of the online platform here as well as our experience with baccalaureate programs. Again, you have to look to the opportunities to be able to meet the demand and provide the opportunities that we have not been able to provide or just haven’t done as two separate institutions.

What will happen to Georgia Perimeter College’s incumbent student government members?

Watts: The Student Government Association members will continue this year, and then they will talk with their colleagues and there will be a working team of students as part of the process of how student government will look in the future. But our student government leaders will continue to lead this year; I am meeting with them on the 30th of this month … and we’ll be talking about consolidation and other things. Campuses will need student leadership, whatever form it is. All of our campuses will continue to need student leadership, and so there will be opportunities for students to serve in leadership positions. What those positions are called, I don’t know—the students will settle that over time themselves. But students will still need to be involved at the associate-degree level as well as the baccalaureate level.

Becker: There will be some way, shape or form for representation: we just have to work through those details.

It was said that tenure would be honored, but was not said if rank would be honored for faculty members.

Watts: It’s a rank question (laughter). I think at all the other consolidations rank and tenure have been honored, and I would not anticipate anything different in this consolidation—is that correct?

Nickel: That’s correct.

Final comments from the panelists?

Becker: Just to reiterate the point that I hope I have been able to make several times: as the chancellor told us, everything is on the table. One university, multiple campuses gives us opportunities to find not only ways to do what we already do better, but also look to the future. Again, this plays out over a long period of time. [Our goal is] to basically create the best model that this country could have.

At Georgia State, we have been committed to being a premier urban research university. Now as we expand Georgia State University to multiple campuses, we will continue with our downtown campus to drive that premier urban university model. But then, demonstrating our commitment that students from all academic backgrounds can be successful and at high rates, we have an opportunity to do together something that the president of the United States, the governor of the state, the people who basically know what’s happening in higher education and [do it] right. What has happened here is basically something that nobody has done before, and it is better than it was—and that’s what’s good for students, and that is why we are in education.

Nickel: my message to you is to take advantage of this opportunity and get involved in the creation of a new university. It is the chance of a lifetime to put your mark on higher education in the state of Georgia. And really, the outcome is to change people’s lives. I think that is something you are all committed to, or you wouldn’t be in higher education. So take the opportunity now to really leave a positive mark.

Watts: Very few of us in higher education and very few of us in the university system get a chance to create something new in our careers. It is a once-in-a-career opportunity. Mostly, we inherit something: we try to improve it, round the margins or tweak it and make it a little bit better for the next generation.

But this is a chance to create something that the University System doesn’t have. And the people in this room and the people who were streaming it or will see later on in our GPC Newsroom have the chance to be on the ground floor of that. To re-imagine it. Not take for granted the things we have done in the past, but to re-imagine it for the future. This is a tremendous opportunity to create something new, and not very many of us get that opportunity.

So it is exciting to me personally—exciting for the institution—and we certainly look forward to working with Dr. Becker and the folks at Georgia State in making sure we implement the chancellor’s vision of a research university that doesn’t lose its access mission. Thank you very much.