A typical week for James Singewald looks like this: Learn about the history of residential schools in your Indigenous studies class. Give it a fresh coat of paint at Southeast Alaska Independent Living, a nonprofit serving people with disabilities. Make breakfast for a classmate who is celebrating a birthday. Meet with your professor on Zoom to discuss your academic plans. Attend student government meetings. Swim in the sea while it snows.
That's an experience the leaders of a new nonprofit two-year liberal arts higher education program in Sitka, Alaska, hope will soon be available to more young people like Singewald. It's like a higher education experience. The first official group of 20 students will enroll at Outer Coast this fall. Outer Coast is an ambitious university with campuses located on islands in the southeastern part of the state, also known as the Alaskan Panhandle.
It is unusual to open a new university these days, when established universities are increasingly likely to close. At least 30 colleges will close in 2023, according to an analysis by the Association of State Higher Education Executive Officers.
But the 21-year-old Singewald, who grew up in California, just south of Glacier Bay National Park and west of the Tongass, sought out the kind of life she's living now, studying history, literature and ecology. I think there are many young people who are. National forest.
“The students are really great. I think everyone comes to a program like this for a similar reason: They're looking for something different,” Singewald says. “And they're really excited to learn and go on an intense journey.”
The intensity of Outer Coast also comes from the friction of the future overcoming the past.
The new program operates at the former Sheldon Jackson campus. It was a religious boarding school and later a university, both of which are now closed. The school was founded to educate Alaska Native students as part of a “deeply assimilationist institution,” said Yedikqua Dionne Brady. -Howard is Tlingit and grew up in Sitka.
Brady Howard, a former social studies teacher at the city's public boarding high school, currently serves as Outer Coast Native Studies chair, where students study Alaska Native literature, beadwork and Tlingit language. . She said she joined the faculty because she was interested in the opportunity to be part of an institution that is “actively working to take back what has been taken away from our people for decades.”
“Tlingit language is spoken in that space. Aspects of Tlingit culture and other Indigenous cultures are taught in that space. Tlingit stories and other Indigenous stories are read in that space, It’s trusted,” she says. “And it's very powerful.”
This new program, focused on building a close-knit community, inspiring student service, and disrupting Western norms, is in some ways an island. But Outer Coast doesn't have to be an outlier in higher education, believes executive director Brayden Sweeney-Taylor.
He said the model is still seeking full accreditation, so it cannot officially call itself a “university,” but it is similar to other relatively remote areas of the United States that are higher education “deserts.” But he thinks it can work, he explains, “Students feel like they have to leave their backgrounds and communities to get ahead.”
But Sitka is far from a higher education desert. The city of about 8,000 people already has a university, but its vision for the future of learning is quite different from the Outer Coast.
different visions
The University of Alaska Southeast has three campuses, in the words of Paul Craft, “situated between the Pacific Ocean and Canada, separated by hundreds of miles of glaciers.” He is the director of the Sitka school. The district was a community college before being integrated into the state university system.
For the past 30 years, the University of Alaska Southeast at Sitka has prioritized distance learning, especially in the sciences. The move to distance learning was a challenge for institutions to remain relevant and reach more students, given their geographic isolation, long before that model became popular in broader higher education. “It happened when we were looking for an easy way to do it,” Kraft explains.
After all, he says, Sitka can only be accessed by plane or boat, and ferries don't come very often.
Alaska has a lower college graduation rate than other states. Only about one-third of the state's high school class of 2022 enrolled in secondary school within a year of graduation, according to the Alaska Secondary Education Commission.
One reason, Kraft said, is that people in Alaska can find jobs that provide a decent living without requiring a college degree.
“You can come out of high school and make six figures working in the oil fields, working in mines, working as a deckhand on a fishing boat,” he says. “They can have jobs and careers that are doing very well financially, but having a college degree doesn’t give them a return on that investment.”
So the university's Sitka branch turned to programs focused on workforce training. Students who study on campus tend to take career and technical courses in subjects such as welding, scientific diving, and aquaculture. The majority of students are learning online (80% do not live in Sitka, according to Kraft), and most are in two-year programs. Health management training is also popular.
“People who are active online do so because it fits into their busy lives,” Kraft says.
In contrast, Outercoast offers in-person liberal arts courses taught in a small-group seminar format. The curriculum focuses on themes that are locally important to Sitka. For example, all students are required to study Tlingit.
Outercoast's model, which has been in the works for nearly a decade, is intended to allow students to earn an associate's degree and then transfer to a four-year university to earn a bachelor's degree. The university was founded a century ago by banking and power company tycoon L.L. Nunn, and was inspired by Deep Springs College, a small two-year private school in California that emphasized physical labor and student autonomy as well as academics. are getting rations. Outer His Coast's Executive Director Sweeney Taylor is a Deep Springs graduate and previously worked as an instructor at Deep Springs.
Outercoast aims to start each academic year with 20 new students, and this small group provides the kind of intimate experiences that Singewald appreciates, such as eating banana bread while discussing books in professors' homes. It gives me a learning opportunity, but I don't think I'm likely to get it on my own. At a big university.
“Meeting with a faculty member and actually researching and asking questions that you might have been embarrassed to ask in the middle of class or that you hadn’t even thought about until class started, it’s just so accessible and so encouraging.” It's also easy to say, 'It's over,''' Singewald says. “It's not just about coming and leaving to absorb this knowledge, it's more personal. We build intellectual relationships where we can exchange ideas and encourage each other's thinking. I think that’s what I like about it.”
Outer Coast students also work in community organizations, putting in many hours at local fish hatcheries, animal shelters, cemeteries, nursing homes, and more. Students are responsible for cooking, cleaning, and keeping the program functioning through a system of committee autonomy that makes decisions about enrollment, curriculum, and faculty. The program requires students to spend approximately 20 hours a week in service and labor.
“I think an Outercoast education ultimately allows students to feel like they are contributing to something bigger than themselves,” Sweeney-Taylor said.
To measure whether Outercoast is meeting its goals, leaders use administrative data and surveys to track student success over time and improve outcomes in academics, degree completion, career advancement, and community engagement. We plan to consider indicators related to participation.
Sweeney-Taylor said there are plans to compare the performance of students who attend Outer Coast with those who choose not to attend or are waitlisted.
“When Outer Coast students experience greater success and meaning in their education, career, community, and life in general compared to their peers, we know we are achieving our goals and fulfilling our mission.” Sweeney Taylor said in an email.
special partner
Like higher education across the country, Alaska's universities are suffering from a “post-COVID-19 hangover,” with more students skeptical about whether a college degree is worth the cost. says Kraft.
Two post-secondary options in Sitka represent extreme examples of how higher education will evolve post-pandemic. Will tomorrow's students flock to the convenience of affordable online learning? Or will they crave deeply physical, interpersonal, residential experiences and will pay for them?
Although tuition at the University of Alaska Southeast is relatively affordable, the university still grapples with what Kraft calls a “narrative” in which most students who attend college graduate with “terrible debt.” . Meanwhile, the cost to attend Outer Coast this fall is expected to be approximately $45,000. (The program says it meets students' demonstrated financial needs.) Sweeney-Taylor said half of Outercoast's operating income comes from tuition, and the other half comes from philanthropy. I predict that. Outercoast reports that it has raised more than $3 million from individuals and foundations to date.
Both institutions aim to serve more students from Alaska. More than half of the state's high school class of 2022 who pursued higher education went on to college outside the state.
Brady Howard, Outer Coast Indigenous Studies chair, says when it comes time for many high school seniors to choose a college, it's common for them to want to experience a new way of life. To them, a campus in the Lower 48 may seem very appealing.
But the realities of living far away can be disorienting.
“Having taught at a predominantly Native American boarding school for 23 years, I respect their decision, but when former students go to large institutions outside of Alaska, I feel that the “I've seen people struggle with being in the minority,” she says. “For a significant number of them, being cut off from home will be very distressing.”
While Outercoast hopes to attract students from a variety of backgrounds, the program is designed to “reach out to Alaskan students, especially Alaska Native students and rural Alaskan students, where opportunities for higher education are really limited.” “We're really focused on reaching out,” Sweeney-Taylor said. ”
At the University of Alaska Southeast at Sitka, about 28 percent of students are from Alaska, and “we want to build on that,” Kraft added. “Our registration must reflect the communities in which we live.”
Because the models are so different, leaders at both universities insist they are not competing for the same students.
In fact, Outercoast is pursuing accreditation as an independent institution, and the program has established a relationship with the University of Alaska Southeast, through which Outercoast is currently able to offer credit-bearing classes. It becomes like this.
“This is a good neighborhood, and we have enough space for multiple institutions,” Craft said of Sitka's secondary schools.