TODAY at Minnesota State Mankato is published in May, August and January and mailed to 90,000 alumni and friends. The mission of TODAY is to entertain, inform and connect readers to campus.
Fall 2006
Volume 8 Issue 1
There are a number of ways to enhance the value of your Minnesota State University, Mankato diploma. You can have it framed in gold. You can become a celebrity. Or you can simply watch in the year ahead as Minnesota State Mankato continues its steady, consistent progress toward becoming an entirely new caliber of institution.
After decades, Minnesota State Mankato for the first time is on track to offer doctorate degrees, a move that does plenty to enhance the prestige of the university, the caliber of the faculty, the experience for students and the value of that diploma. Until recently, state law allowed only the University of Minnesota to offer doctoral degrees. State colleges and universities, by contrast, could offer programs only as high as the master's and specialist degrees.
Things have changed. In spring of 2005, bills were successfully passed in both the Minnesota House and Senate allowing state universities to offer applied doctoral programs in six different areas. (Compared to Ph.D.s, applied doctorates are more hands-on degrees with graduates going directly into the field of study, such as nursing or psychology.Ph.D. graduates generally return to the classroom to teach.)
The areas in which state universities can now offer doctoral programs are nursing, audiology, psychology, education, physical therapy and business. Minnesota State Mankato is now developing plans to offer doctorates in three of those programs: Education (an Ed.D., Doctor of Education), Nursing (DNP, Doctor of Nursing Practice) and Psychology (Psy.D., Doctor of Psychology).
It's going to mean several years of work—creating curriculum; building faculty; developing course names, numbers and syllabi; defining the capstone experience; and, ultimately, designing an approval process similar to the accreditation the University just received from the Higher Learning Commission. But it's also going to mean a new milestone and an overall sense of higher esteem for those associated with it.
"From the University's standpoint, this is the last stage in our evolution," said Scott Olson, vice president for academic affairs. "This is the growing up. When you begin offering doctoral programs, that's the last, greatest step you can take."
Those steps, all uphill, began in 1968 when Mankato State College commissioned a study to examine the feasibility of offering doctorates. After extensive internal studies, consultants determined that the College could and should offer applied doctoral programs, and they recommended as much to the State College Board.
The Board approved the proposal, but the Higher Education Committee balked, saying the measure was too costly. Some hopes were raised for doctorates when Mankato State College became Mankato State University in 1975, but the state law remained unchanged.
Now, more than thirty years later, the ability to offer doctorate programs is as significant a step as that transformation from one college to a university overseeing several distinct colleges—from a narrow focus to a universal one.
The credit is widespread, from the early days of MSC President James Nickerson pushing the idea, to the determination of President Richard Davenport, who, as provost at Central Michigan University, oversaw a similar transition.
"I do think President Davenport had unique success because he spoke from a certain authority," Olson said. "He was able to get the Legislature excited about it in a way that hadn't been ignited in the state before." Adding doctorates to an already wide swath of offerings—from welding certificates to MBAs, MFAs and specialty degrees—probably wasn't a top priority for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System, Olson said. "But it was a high priority with President Davenport."
Olson said it was about time the Legislature saw beyond a Gophers-only brand of higher education in Minnesota.
"Until recently, the University of Minnesota has been able to persuade the Legislature that it has exclusive rights to all terminal degree programs," Olson said. "And I think what maybe has changed is the Legislature has realized that Minnesota is very behind the times on this."
Olson jokes that in Minnesota, everybody's a Gopher. But that isn't the case in Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin or other states where doctorates are available at more than one public institution.
"The reason is that most other states have a more robust higher education system, and there isn't just a monopoly of one kind of education or another," he said. "[In Minnesota,] there's just been this lock on it, and I think the Legislature just finally said ‘you know, higher education would probably benefit from a little competition, a little expansion.'"
It was in March 2005 that System Chancellor James McCormick received notice that a proposal to allow state universities to offer applied doctoral programs was included in the House Higher Education Finance omnibus bill. The companion bill, sponsored by Sen. John Hottinger of St. Peter, was included in the Senate's Higher Education omnibus bill. Two months later, the Legislature authorized the six programs.
It isn't just Minnesota's education needs that will be addressed by applied doctorates. Minnesota State Mankato's milestone comes just in time to help meet a near crisis in the state's health care system.
Because of nursing retirement rates, aging baby boomers and a shortage of programs to train students for nursing, the Minnesota Department of Health projected several years ago that by 2008, Minnesota will have 7,000 vacancies in nursing.
That's why nursing will be one of the first doctorates offered at Minnesota State. "There's an impending health care crisis and the University of Minnesota and others just aren't able to produce enough," Olson said.
The goal is to have the DNP and the Counseling and Student Personnel Ed.D. degree programs up and running by fall of 2007. (The DNP will be conducted as a consortium with three other System institutions: Winona State, Metro State and Moorhead.) The counseling degree is also seen as a priority in terms of meeting the state's needs.
"Particularly in rural areas, kids are coming to school with more and more complicating factors, and there just aren't enough counselors out there to help kids be successful in schools," Olson said.
What this development means overall to Minnesotans, Olson adds, is simple and powerful: "More nurses. More school counselors. More healthy people. More kids being successful in school. It's just keeping for Minnesota the high quality of life, the high standard of living that it enjoys."
An even broader benefit—beyond the pride factor and the contributions to the state's immediate needs—has to do with the atmosphere of learning that will be enhanced on campus.
"The whole idea that knowledge is out there to be discovered and we are, all of us, in the process of being learners—that will seep out of these doctoral programs and it'll permeate the whole culture of the institution," Olson said.
Olson envisions a University where faculty and students are increasingly interested in a mode of learning that's far beyond the one-way street of students as receptacles. "Rather, we're together in a process of discovery," Olson said.
"A lot of people think our mission is teaching," he added. "It isn't teaching, it's learning. Some people say that's just semantics. It isn't semantics. Sure, teaching goes on. But our value to the state of Minnesota is not limited to the fact that some students are sitting in classrooms and we're telling them things. It's that we're learning things that are of value to the state."
Whether it's the Force Science Center taking roles in criminal trials and investigations around the world or the national reputation of Minnesota State Mankato's theater, creative writing, experiential education or other signature programs, the University has long established itself as a world-class institution. Heightening that profile even further was one of Fernando Delgado's missions as the head of graduate studies.
As a liaison between the University and the System, Delgado was in the position of seeing decades' worth of work come to fruition. The issue, he said, was to assure all involved—from the politicians to the community leaders—that Minnesota State Mankato was poised to make the move to offering doctoral degrees.
Now that that part of his job is complete—he has since taken a job at Hamline University—Delgado said Minnesota State Mankato will soon find itself in an entirely new status.
"It begins a path that puts us in a different class of institution," Delgado said. When Minnesota State Mankato is in the full swing of offering doctoral programs, the University will no longer be ranked with those that provide master's degrees, but with doctoral institutions. This means, Delgado said, a higher caliber of faculty and students drawn by the prestige and reputation the University will enjoy world-wide.
Although it took a few decades, getting the law changed to approve the doctoral programs was just the beginning. That approval triggers the process of creating a new curriculum, which is where the University finds itself today.
After that process comes a series of permissions, beginning with evaluations by both Minnesota State Mankato and the System Chancellor's office. If that office signs off, then representatives of the Higher Learning Commission visit campus to evaluate the proposed programs and report their findings to the HLC. This, Olson said, will likely happen in January or February.
"Let's just say we have an ambitious timeline before us," he said. "The goal that was laid out was to have the [nursing and counseling] programs up and running by fall of '07, and we've only had the authorizing legislation for one year. That is really fast. It would be like if, all of a sudden, Toyota decided it wanted to make airplanes. We don't make doctoral programs. It's a very different kind of thing. But I'm optimistic that we'll get the curriculum done and the Higher Learning Commission and the office of the chancellor will bless it. We've been getting good signs on that, and we think we're doing this just right."
Olson points at the MBAs and MFAs currently available at Minnesota State Mankato. "The fact that we did them and did them so well, you can see the quality's there," he said. "Those demonstrate the fact that we know what we're doing with these terminal degrees."
It's been a long wait for Claire Faust. The Mankato resident and retired vice president of administration services was chairman of the committee that worked on the 1968 proposal. "That was the first of several attempts," Faust said. "Any after that didn't get as far as that."
Faust, who was Mankato State College's education administration chairman, said he's pleased over the designation, particularly since educational administration has its share of immediate crises.
"Administration is a tough job because of the funding factors and the regulations they throw at you," said Faust. "It's probably the loneliest job in the world, and we need people well-prepared. That's why we need a doctoral program."
For Faust, it was heartbreaking to have worked so hard on the initial proposals and to get approval all along the way, only to be denied by the Legislature. The 2005 legislation has him elated.
As for faculty, many current members can teach in a doctoral program, and some who need additional credentials will pursue them, Olson said.
"We also know we're probably going to have to invest in new positions in some of these doctoral areas and hire some new people who will come in ready to focus on the doctoral program." Some of those new positions will be fully endowed faculty chairs, for which the University is planning to seek private funding.
While Ph.D.s were mentioned back in Faust's day, Olson said it's not the mission right now.
"The need for those is not as great as the need for nurses, school counselors or school psychologists," Olson said.
And as for those who already hold Minnesota State Mankato diplomas—the 100,000 alumni in Minnesota and around the globe—they can take a great amount of pride in being part of an already wellregarded university about to become even more prestigious.
"We want to make sure that their association with us, that their diploma from here, is worth more and more over time, not less and less," Olson said of alumni. "We want that thing to be like gold, or a Steinway piano.
"We believe that when we do things like the Center of Excellence in Manufacturing and Engineering, or the Teacher Center collaboratively up in the Twin Cities, or theatre, writing … these things are giving us a national and international reputation, and the doctorates are going to do that, too. So that ongoing sense of the institution being a vibrant, relevant, important place that keeps investing in its alumni even after they're gone from here, that's what I hope they take from this."
Joe Tougas is editor of Static, southern Minnesota's arts and culture magazine. Recently he was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship to complete his first novel.
