Amanda Smith
Lantern Staff
Most would agree that college should ideally be as inexpensive and easy as possible. With Butler’s new Pathways curriculum, this will be made reachable for all freshmen enrolled in the Fall 2018 semester and those semesters following if the system works according to plan.
According to Vice President of Academics Lori Winningham, Guided Pathways are intended to provide students with more purposeful and efficient paths to certificate/degree completion and seamless transfer. This, in theory, should make the college experience cheaper and give students a better understanding of their intended major.
“The ultimate goal [of Pathways] is to create a clear, direct plan for students to follow and to ultimately improve student degree completion rates,” Winningham said.
After students have decided on a major through Guided Pathways, they will enter Major Pathways to guide them towards their degree. According to Winningham, Butler’s Major Pathways is a personalized major program of study of relevant academic coursework that creates a clear roadmap to a degree, certification or career within two years.
With this program, MetaMajors were also developed. MetaMajors are academic programs related by coursework or career fields. They offer common course requirements and allow for early exploration, which can help students narrow down their choice of pathway.
Each MetaMajor is correlated with its own Pathway. For example, freshman Ashley Masters is intending to major in nursing, so she was placed in the Pathway Engaging in Health Sciences to guide her towards that degree.
“The intentions for the Pathways programs, I think, are very well thought,” Masters said. “I think that they give students the ability to gain knowledge on the ideas of other job opportunities in that specific field. They also give students a sense of comfort in knowing that there’s numerous ways in being able to successfully complete your intended major.”
As Masters expressed, the program was well thought out. According to Associate Professor of English Cory Teubner, the process to implement Pathways took the school about two years. They looked at national changes and research provided by other schools, Odessa College in Texas in particular, who had already implemented the program and remodeled it to fit Butler the best.
According to the Community College Research Center, other schools across the nation that have adopted Pathways have seen an increase in the amount of college credits students have been earning their first year and an increase in the completion of the number of courses in a program. These improvements suggest a future increase in graduation rates for those schools that use Pathways.
“I think that students are really lucky to be at a school like Butler that is really taking seriously innovations in a field that promise to make this be what they hope it will be, and that is a route to prosperity for our students,” Teubner said.
