The closing of the Aviation Department at SCSU has stirred emotions among students, faculty, and members of the surrounding community.
When the decision to end the program was made in December of 2010, questions began to rise pertaining to the 135 students already enrolled in the program.
According to John Palmer, Associate Provost, Organizational Development and Faculty Relations at SCSU, students were informed of the decision and were urged to take aviation classes as soon as possible, as certain classes would begin to become unavailable with each passing semester.
Each student was then given a “teach-out” plan that would map out the remainder of their education within the aviation department. “We will, in accordance with their plan, try to help them get through to the graduation point,” said SCSU Provost, Devinder M. Malhotra.
Palmer also explained that, though 135 seems to be a large number, it counts for all students who were notified of the closing, including students that are not currently enrolled but have taken at least one aviation class over the past two years. Along with that, he explained that the number will become increasingly smaller with each passing semester as more and more students graduate.
Because of the closing, students were also allowed to apply earlier than what is normally allowed so they could gain admittance to the aviation program as soon as possible.
“It was like taking at least two years of admissions to the program in one year,” said Palmer. “The administration didn’t do anything to artificially suppress, as it were, admission to the program. And that’s a good thing, because those are all people who will hopefully end up being satisfied with the educational experience that they receive.”
Although the University has prepared current aviation students to finish out the remainder of the program, questions continued to rise concerning one group of students in particular; those actively deployed in the military.
Normally, a student who enrolls at SCSU and is deployed before earning a degree can continue classes upon their return. This posed a problem for deployed aviation students, as aviation classes would most likely no longer be offered by the time they returned home.
However, Malhotra and Palmer said that the University will take steps to ensure that those students are able to follow their teach-out plan and fully complete their education.
“They are deployed. It’s not their fault they cannot execute the plan,” said Malhotra“We will work with those students and see what classes they need, and we will work with the existing faculty and try to create some arrangements with the same learning outcomes can be delivered to them.”
Palmer explained that the specifics of the deployed students remaining education depends on different factors, such as their specific major, when they will return, which classes they completed before they were deployed, and what the student did while they were deployed.
What aviation students do while they are deployed is key, because there is a possibility that they could receive credit for their courses based on their activities. Palmer also noted that the University would potentially partner with the community to help the students complete their education.
“If they’re in the Pro-flight, intending to be pilots, there are places locally that teach flight,” said Palmer. “So we may, for example, no longer teach a certain kind of ground school, but there are ground schools that are taught that aren’t for credit. What we would do is work with the ground school to place the student, and what we would do is give them credit for that activity.”
The decision to close the aviation department was, according to Malhotra, one that was carefully made.
He explained that, because the amount of funding given to SCSU from the state was shrinking, so was its budget. Because of this, the University wasn’t able to continue providing all of its current programs, which brought on the process of strategic planning and program appraisal.
As a part of this process, programs were organized into categories; one of them containing programs would be suspended or closed. 32 programs were chosen to be suspended or closed, and the aviation department was one of them.
Malhotra said that, although there’s hope that the closing of these programs will create room for new development to occur, the University recognizes that the change has caused inconvenience for students, both current and potential,
“Whenever we cut a program, that is a deduction of programs in our portfolio and a deduction of choices for the students,” said Malhotra. “We didn’t take this decision lightly.”
