Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Texas Monthly

Diana Natalicio.

Article Excerpt
"If we can't compete for top-notch faculty who are going to do research, who are going to have doctoral students, who are active professionally, our undergraduate students will get an education, but it won't be the kind that will enable them to compete with their counterparts from universities considered to be cutting-edge."

Look ahead ten years and tell me how the University of Texas at El Paso will be different from what it is today.

I think the campus will be larger. We'll have more students at the graduate level, in particular, because we're increasing the number of doctoral programs--we have fourteen now, where fifteen years ago we had one. We're focused primarily on science and engineering in those programs because it reinforces our quest for research funding. At the undergraduate level, we'll still be undereducated as a region, so ten years out our commitment to access will be firm. We have to continue to try to provide opportunities for all the people who are showing up, primarily from Mexico, with very little in the way of art educational background. It's not their fault; they come from rural areas. If they're going to be a part of the future, we've got to educate them.

Your total enrollment is about 20,000 students now, and you're talking about an increase of 10,000. By when?

I would say 2020, approximately. Because of our population growth and Fort Bliss's growth. And graduate programs that attract people from outside the area.

Do you have enough space for that many more students?

What will change is the way in which we teach. A lot more will be done online and in hybrid formats, where people don't come to the campus every day, where they have meetings with faculty members but do a lot of their work online. We're also establishing a presence at Fort Bliss--

A satellite campus.

Exactly. Together with a community college, we're occupying space at the base. And because this is a very dispersed geographic area, we do a lot of our master's courses for teachers and a lot of our undergraduate courses for prospective teachers out in the Lower Valley, on the far east side of the city. We use a school building for that purpose on a community college campus.

Tell me about the kinds of kids who are enrolling. I want to understand the profile of a typical UTEP student--if there is such a thing--versus, say, a typical...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!