ALVSCE Grapevine Previous Questions & Answers

QUESTION

There is a severe and ongoing mental health crisis on college campuses nation-wide. In my honest opinion the University and College's response to this crisis has been lackluster at best. The most I've seen is a two-day brain heath lecture series the Center for Buddhist Studies shared last week. The latest victim? Genevieve Comeau, who had been pursuing a Ph.D. from the Entomology & Insect Science Graduate Interdisciplinary Program was killed in a murder suicide by her partner
https://kvoa.com/news/local-news/2019/03/06/police-id-couple-in-apparent-murder-suicide-case/

The question is will the college and university continue to allow this crisis to continue or will they take definitive decisive action to address this crisis?
https://edsurgeindependent.com/the-kids-are-not-alright-the-mental-health-crisis-on-college-campuses-dee6cf1b2190

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4089

ANSWER: (Posted on 03/29/2019)

Thank you, your question is very important to Dean Burgess and he will answer it. First, though, a clarification: Genevieve, was an Entomology PhD candidate and was a homicide victim. The suspected perpetrator was not a UA student. TPD has not indicated that mental health was a factor in this case. After learning this tragic news, Dean Burgess shared info about counseling and support services in a message to all students and employees and provided local and national resources for those dealing with relationship abuse or domestic violence or are concerned about a loved one in this situation.

Heather Roberts-Wrenn
Assistant Director, Organizational Effectiveness
ALVSCE Division Business Services

From Dean Burgess:

“I appreciate your sentiments and recognize the issues. Regardless of the law, I feel we all share a moral responsibility and a duty of care in addressing mental illness. This is exactly why I brought these issues to everyone’s attention in the most recent CALS Update sent on 2/20 to every employee in the division, including some astounding statistics from UA’s Counseling & Psych Services (CAPS). I urged everyone then, and I reiterate now: reach out to CAPS if you are ever concerned about a student. I also discussed these issues on the 3/26/19 Dial the Dean with Natalynn Masters, UA Student Body President.

Our professional Academic Advisors are on the front-line with students about many issues and especially mental health. Because of this, they all receive training in problem identification and support. Most of our advisors have completed UA’s Question, Persuade, Respond (QPR) training. They make CAPS referrals for students and will even walk students over to Campus Health depending on the situation. Advisors follow up to check-in again with students who have raised mental health issues. They also reach out to students in academic probation (~8% of our undergraduates) and each student’s major advisor, and they meet with these students to understand what led to their current academic status and if they have the necessary resources to rectify the situation. They are developing and piloting data analysis tools to identify students who are at risk of dropping out.

CALS also has a small cohort of remarkable undergraduate students who are Peer Mentors called “CALS PALS.” All CALS PALS are trained by both CAPS and Life & Work Connections (LWC) counselors. They have proven themselves to be exceptional sources of support for other students going through the toughest of times and challenges. They are also advisors to me and other CALS administrators to improve what we do. I meet with CALS PALS routinely and did so just this week.

UA’s Dean of Students Office does wellness checks on students in UA residence halls if there is a concern raised to the Dean of Students Office (perhaps parents mention that their child hasn’t called in a while which is unusual, or advisors mention students are missing meetings, etc.). President Masters mentioned that as a dormitory RA she was trained as we train our professional advisors and CALS PALS.

At the University level, the new Strategic Plan also has initiatives that focus on student mental health including Pillar 1.4 and 4.2.

As you can see, we try to address mental health through many mechanisms currently. We can explore some of the additional specific recommendations from the Nature article you sent a link to such as building in more career development support, training for faculty and administration on identifying mental health needs and making referrals as needed, and training for faculty on mentoring and career development advice for graduate students since this is seen as correlated to better mental health. Heather Roberts-Wrenn will explore these further options to determine feasibility and potential implementation.

I believe that our mental health and that of our friends, loved ones and colleagues – yes, our society as a whole – is a responsibility for all of us. Mental illness is a problem we all must share the responsibility and accountability for identifying and working on. We are “the college and the university” and so as you say in your question, I agree with you that we cannot continue to allow a crisis to continue.

If you have ideas about what you can do and about what we can do, and how we can do these things, please contact me directly.

Regards,
Shane

QUESTION

Less than a year ago, the Confluence Knowledgebase was announced as the website to go to for employee resources. Now that this new Compass program has launched, what will happen to Knowledgebase? Why do we have Compass when we have Knowledgebase?

ANSWER: (Posted on 03/22/2019)

Thank you for your question! There are approximately 670 employees inside the Division of Agriculture, Life and Veterinary Sciences, and Cooperative Extension who don’t work within Cooperative Extension and therefore don’t have access to the Confluence Knowledgebase. We wanted to design an informational resource that would be accessible to everyone. Compass will likely have some overlap with the information posted to Knowledgebase – not unlike the overlap we see in the announcements shared through both Tuesday Morning Notes and the Weekly Bulletin. We also planned for Compass to be a public website so that people interested in applying for a position within the division could learn a little more about our organization as a workplace beforehand. (There are some reports and marketing resources accessible only to those with a NetID.) We’d encourage you to use both sites. Knowledgebase is a great place to have a conversation and has a wealth of information for the Extension community. Please let us know if you have any additional concerns or suggestions.

From: The Compass Project Team

Brian Berrellez, Manager, Business Analytics, Division Business Services
Mary Carroll, Administrative Associate, Division Business Services
Gavin Ng, Analyst, Data Solutions, Division Business Services
Heather Roberts-Wrenn, Assistant Director, Organizational Effectiveness, Division Business Services
Bethany Rutledge, Director of Administration and Communications, Office of the Vice President and Dean
Amy Soper, Specialist, Marketing / Communications, Career and Academic Services

QUESTION

How soon will Civitas be operational and is it worth the wait?

ANSWER: (Posted on 02/08/2019)

An excellent question which will have a disappointing answer. My understanding is that the UA is well down the road to cutting loose from its Civitas contract. To be replaced by what? Apparently they think they have sufficient internal analytics that they can create similarly helpful dashboards and metrics. I've not seen anything definitive yet.

I knew they were backpedaling from Civitas most of last fall. Indeed, this is probably one reason that Angela Baldasare left the university last spring and became a consultant/employee directly with Civitas. I'm still getting Civitas emails but directly from the company, not from the university (I think). I must be on a distribution list. So, I haven't been entirely sure of the depth of the relationship.

I will find out more.

To the question.... is it worth the wait? What's the alternative? We are plowing forward with our retention strategies, in partnership with the university. I'm not aware that this is holding up anything the academic units wish to do on their own, nor do I think they have an alternative decision-analytic program in mind that has been sitting on the sidelines. In my personal opinion, the Civitas product showed great promise as a signal of retention risk, but needed two things to be fully functional and readily useful for academic advisors: 1) easily accessible (or translatable) signals of when to intervene, and 2) much more development of suggested intervention messages. This may have required a UA-central infrastructure for making the translations and developing the messages because advisors simply don't have the time and bandwidth to master all this and do their regular jobs. If I had to guess, this was where the implementation ball was dropped and the relationship foundered.

*Response from Mike Staten, Associate Dean for Career and Academic Services

QUESTION

a few weeks ago sy sohmer abruptly resigned from a CALS position that paid $135,000. he was employed less than one year. $135,000 is more then double the salary of the nearest staff position of employees he supervised. how does the dean, and how does the college, justify that excessive salary? will the salary for this position be reevaluated in the future? you should consider bringing that egregious salary back down to earth - ideally redistributing some of that excess as overdue raises or merit bonus awards to underpaid employees of this particular division of CALS.

*This question was submitted by an anonymous user to the Classified Staff Anonymous Feedback webform. As there was no way to reply to the question via the original forum used to submit the question, it was decided we would publish the response here.

*ANSWER: (Posted on 04/06/2018)

Thank you for your input. I appreciate you taking the time to ask these questions. We do not have a mechanism to offer bonuses.

I'm sorry, I can't comment specifically on personnel matters. ABOR and UA policies prevent me from doing so.

*Response from Shane C. Burgess, Vice President and Dean

QUESTION

I recently expressed my concern about the minimum security in Forbes - Doors are not locked until after hours, even during the slow winter break and slower times of the year when students are not on campus. It is during these times we nearly every year, several times a year, experience thieves entering the building, and going through drawers and purses to find wallets. A number of us in my hallway have had their wallets stolen even when well-hidden from sight. These are opportunists who seem to know that our doors are open and that they can likely sneak in and steal items because there are not many people around in the halls who would notice they do not belong. The Dean told me he was looking into locking the doors at least during those slow times of the year. A number of us in the building have been affected in this way over the years, particularly the past five or so, and it seems the perpetrators know that we are good targets, because of this pattern. The headache and time required to put the contents of a wallet back together, is not something anyone should have to contend with because CALS does not update its security during these changing times. Today, except for replacing my UA ID card, which i will do Monday, i have finally replaced all my credit cards, medical cards, driver's license, opened new checking and savings account purchased new checks, received credit/debtit/ATM card replacements, etc. and have called all the companies to whom i have direct withdrawal for paying bills, autopay for prescriptions, subscriptions, and the like. It has been nearly 3 weeks since my wallet was stolen (Jan 2). I could have finished my APROL by now in the amount of time spent on this needless exercise. Many of us would like the Dean to address the new security plan for the building. Please thank him for his time, on my behalf and that of the folks in my lab, many who have been victims. One possibility would be to lock the south door/ground floor all of the time, because it is this door that leads directly to the floors/end of the building where most of the crimes have been committed, probably because of easy access to entry, low visibility, and easy escape.

The other door that would be a good candidate is the door on the second floor leading to the quad. The elevator is in this hallway too, so there are many escape routes. The rooms targeted have tended to be at that end of the hall - seriously, no one leaves their purses or wallets or anything of value in the open, except laptops, and we close the doors when we are not in the rooms.

Still this has not stopped these crimes. thanks for sharing this request to the Dean.

ANSWER: (Posted on 02/02/2018)

Thank you for your patience while I have been finding out how we can better secure the Forbes Building to deter theft, like the one you reported, during the winter session, at the end of the spring and fall semesters, and during the week before the spring and fall semesters begin.

Gayatri Vedantam, Faculty Council chair, didn’t identify any concerns from the faculty perspective. She commented that lab personnel cannot keep interior doors locked if they need to transport materials between rooms and are wearing gloves. However, I believe that in specific laboratory teams heightened security through locking internal doors could be achieved by using carts—this is routine practice in the biomedical laboratories I am used to where no one may be in a corridor or touch door handles while wearing gloves. I believe that such good practice should be routine as gloves may have dangerous chemicals.

We checked with Business Services, HR, UAPD and none raised any concerns but did request that if we were to lock external doors during business hours we inform building personnel by email and by posting signage. I examined locking all exterior doors during these quieter times of the year, and the problem is that FedEx, interviewees, people attending meetings in the building, student employees, etc. will need to be admitted and we’d need to identify people to be responsible for letting guests in—and work out how that person will know the people seeking admittance had legitimate business in the building. There is also always a risk that people will “tailgate” into the building behind others with keycards.

The main issue is student access. Forbes not only houses Career and Academic Services (CAS), but is the longest continually used building for teaching on campus (102 years). We must be especially sensitive to students needing to visit CAS advising especially for registration issues. Due to student activity during the week after finals and winter session, it would be a disservice to lock all exterior doors during business hours. CAS’ recommended that all exterior doors but the main western entrances be locked.

In summary, I am requesting of Facilities Management that all exterior doors to the Forbes Building, except the main western doors, be secured with keycard access, round the clock, during the winter session, the last week (“finals week”) of the spring and fall semesters, and the week before the spring and fall semesters, i.e.,

Second floor, north and south doors from the courtyard into the building
Ground floor, south-facing door between the Forbes and Marley buildings
Ground floor, door on north side of courtyard that accesses a stairwell to the first floor
Eastern doors into Forbes Building Lobby.

I will encourage all Forbes Building personnel to lock up their personal belongings and lock all interior doors when leaving a room without other colleagues present. I recommend that everyone follow good bio- and chemical-safety practice and keep laboratories locked, remove gloves when using door handles, and use carts to transport laboratory materials.

I will post this also on the website in response to your “grapevine” question.

Regards,

Shane C. Burgess

Vice President for Agriculture, Life and Veterinary Sciences, and Cooperative Extension

Dean, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Director, Arizona Experiment Station

QUESTION

We are aware that many units in CALS distribute Hatch funding to their faculty on a regular basis but in our unit, faculty do not receive these funds. Our unit head has told us that Hatch monies are spent in salaries only. but we know that some of these funds are equally distributed in other units and are used to support attendance to Multistate Projects meetings, research or in other faculty expenses. Furthermore, we have no idea what our teaching budget for our unit is. Or unit head does not offer funding for teaching either. We feel there is no transparency in our unit's finances. We have never seen a budget report. Yet, we are aware other HODs disclose the unit's annual budget. It would be great if CALS could standardize these procedures, making sure HODs provide an annual summary of the unit's budget and allocate funding for teaching and Hatch that is available to faculty in an equitable manner.

ANSWER (Posted on 12/18/2017):

Hatch Funding Grapevine Q&A Response

There is much confusion among faculty and staff about how federal capacity funds are used to support CALS and our research programs. This is understandable given both how convoluted this has become from the federal government down and how few (perhaps no) land grant universities communicate this well; regardless this is one of the reasons this question is so important.

The direct answer to this question is that Hatch funds are not distributed to faculty in any unit on a regular basis. USDA-NIFA capacity grant funding (colloquially referred to as Hatch funding) is provided to CALS due to our 1862 Land Grant institution affiliation. There are four research and four Extension programs, with approximately $2.5M allocated to research and $1.7M to Extension. These funds can only be distributed through approved federal capacity research projects, which is why we ask all CALS faculty to be part of a project.

For the $2.5M allocated to research, projects are developed in consultation with Unit Heads and submitted to the Office of the Associate Dean for Research, where they are finalized and submitted electronically to USDA NIFA. Alma Enciso in the CALS Research Office oversees all federal capacity research projects, with overall supervision by Sangita Pawar. Because large numbers of projects increase paperwork and time investment by everyone, with no extra benefit of return, over the past two years the CALS Research Office has worked with unit heads to reduce the total number of projects from 185 to approximately 80 today. Our ultimate goal is to have no more than 45 projects across CALS by 2019. This will reduce the work load by at least four-fold and save us on administrative costs so we can keep more money working in the academic units.

Using federal capacity funds is challenging because they must be matched with an equal amount of state funds. Faculty salary is the most effective and efficient way to meet the match. Faculty salary freed up through this offset reverts to the College budget where it is used to strategically fund faculty hires and startup costs. A small percentage (less than 5%) of the federal capacity funds are used for capital, operational, and faculty travel expenses if 1) approved by the Associate Dean for Research, 2) allowed under the different rules for one of the four research and four Extension program grants, and 3) an expense match is possible.

Additionally, ~$0.5M of the Federal Capacity funds received annually for research is retained by the Associate Dean for Research for strategic investment in faculty via startup packages, bridge funding, and equipment supporting our research mission.

So, not only are CALS units heads not distributing Hatch funds to their faculty on a regular basis, doing so is not actually possible because for the most part federal capacity funds are centrally controlled and distributed. There is one exception: the Animal Health program Hatch funds, provided currently to the School of Animal and Comparative Biomedical Sciences to cover costs related to the additional costs of maintaining production research animals.

The perception that federal capacity funds are distributed to faculty may have arisen because historically the School of Plant Sciences director chose to allocate $2,000 to every faculty member who was named on a federal capacity project. It is important to emphasize that School funds, and not the federal capacity (Hatch) funds, are distributed. To ensure full transparency, Plant Sciences will create a written policy and document it on their website. It’s possible that a similar voluntary distribution is happening in other units. Please ask your unit head what is happening in your unit.

The $1.7M of Federal Capacity Funds allocated to Extension is distributed as follows:

Most fed funds for Extension are used to pay segments of faculty salaries.
In the past, Extension funds were distributed as some operational funds, which was a mix of state and fed monies, among academic units in a general formula fashion of $X/FTE.
The units had the discretion of how those funds were distributed and the funds were not always transferred directly to the faculty member.
Units had variable transfer "formulas" or mechanisms.
Most academic units in CALS returned a lot of this funding to the college through the process of budged reductions that were occurring every year from 2002-2012, with major cuts taking place ~ 2008-2012.
Specific questions regarding the management of funds within academic units should be addressed to the unit heads.

Fundamentally this question is, of course, related to the principle of unit budget transparency, which is the Dean’s expectation college-wide. Unit heads must share full financial information regularly and routinely.

Since the spring of 2013, units have been required to prepare all fund budgets on a quarterly basis. These budgets are posted to the CALS Business Services website. The college “red-green” budget is shared twice annually at the state of the college presentations.

Accessing quarterly reports:

From this website, click the link Historical All Funds.
Select Departmental Quarterly All Funds. Then select Continue.
You will be prompted to enter your UA NetID and password.
Select the fiscal year, quarter, and unit you want to look at.

QUESTION

I'm curious if there are efforts in place to strive for consistency in evaluations across CALS departments, such as faculty from various units could be on annual evaluation committees in other units?

ANSWER (Posted on 11/21/2017):

This is a very important question, and one that has recently been brought up by the PTR Committee. Because the unit head directly responsible for any given faculty member has the most complete picture of their performance, and each unit head is inherently different, not to mention the differences in disciplines, there will always be some variability in evaluations. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to gain some standardization and commonalities in evaluations though. I formally asked the Cardon Academy for Teaching Excellence to propose processes for ensuring greater equity as part of my overall focus on equitable workload distribution within our enterprise. They have drafted a proposal that is under central administrative review.

For the TR faculty, the associate deans and I compare numerical scores with the performance data we have. Of course the associate deans’ and my analyses are limited to the objective data we measure only and so can only be of fewer dimensions. The associate deans are very aware of individual faculty who are extreme performers and so there is subjective data involved at their level. I am so far removed, and people tell me what they want me to know, that I must rely on associate deans and unit heads. But the academic unit heads are of the most central and critical importance. Without any other processes all I can do is look at equitable contribution based on workload and outputs. Not great but it’s all we have and at the forefront for how the UA sees and scores us.

The CES is exemplary in reviewing faculty (possibly because it is central to and common to the entire CE profession). In the CES, because of the shared mission of all CES faculty, the size of the CES and the structure that Jeff Silvertooth has in place, there is a central review of all faculty in addition to CED or academic unit head review. There is equivalent objective data and more subjective data involved in CES.

QUESTION

Wondering why there doesn't appear to be a CALS strategic marketing and media plan in place - if there is one, why haven't the units seen it? We would like to know where advertising dollars are being spent and how we could collaborate and promote our majors. You seem to have this huge new staff, including designers, writers, brand, marketers, recruiters, admins, but we don't see a plan being rolled out. For example, Nutrition made a buy at the Rec Center to promote their major - we were solicited as well, but wouldn't it make more sense to learn if CALS was participating with an ad so we could promote all majors, thus save money. As it sits, we have no idea what the strategic marketing efforts are, besides a brochure, which we have had for years. So, what exactly are the marketing/recruiting/media goals, vision, including numbers and persons responsible, and how does this tie back to data. Who are we as a college/unit targeting. What is the media plan and where? Where are areas we could collaborate on? What is the mission statement/vision/swot/strategies/content marketing calendar/tracking/what events, for example, who is attending the Meet Your Major Fair? What's the budget?

ANSWER (Posted on 09/08/2017):

Grapevine Marketing Question Response

Thank you for your interest in marketing. Last week the CALS marketing team met with the unit Heads and Directors to share the marketing and communications plans for the 2017/2018 recruitment cycle. While we are not going to make our marketing plan publically available on the website where it could be viewed by other institutions that are competing for the same students, we have shared all the documents with the unit heads and directors and those most closely involved with recruiting students in each unit. If you need access to these documents, please feel free to email me directly at jyamnitz@email.arizona.edu. For questions regarding budget and overall strategy, you are also invited to email Michael Staten, Bart Cardon Associate Dean for Academic Programs, at statenm@email.arizona.edu.

Unfortunately, at this point we have limited historical data to use in the planning process. One of the goals for this year is to be vigilant about collecting data about outreach efforts for future planning. Brian Berrellez is in the process of building a dashboard for CALS that will pull more detailed information from the UA database to help us make better decisions about the types of students and geographic locations to target with our recruitment efforts. Camille Anderson is also helping us by pulling together data from different systems into one location in order to help us identify trends. Finally, we are also working more closely with UA Enrollment Management on predictive modeling.

With the recent departures of Frank Santiago and Allison Scherer, the recruitment team will be moving under the umbrella of marketing in order to ensure that we have cohesive messaging in all our communications, as well as to provide the recruiters with more support. We are in the process of hiring these positions, and we look forward to having a full team in place before mid-October.

With the rapidly increasing costs of out-of-state tuition, we are not receiving as many applicants from out-of-state students as we did in the past, and the yield rate is significantly lower than it was 5 years ago. As a result, we believe there will be a better return on investment if we focus our efforts on Arizona students. To this end, we will be basing one of the new recruiters in Phoenix and one in Tucson.

Currently, the branding and marketing department consists of three people: myself, executive director of branding and marketing; Susan McGinley, media relations; and Amy Soper marketing communications specialist.

We appreciate your interest in marketing and look forward to working collaboratively with all of the units to increase enrollment in CALS programs.

QUESTION

There appears to be a concerted effort to improve communication between the Dean and the faculty/staff. I am curious as to why there isn't a weekly (or bi-monthly) written communication (email) effort that comes from the Dean's office to help this effort?

ANSWER (Posted on 08/25/2017):

Thanks very much for your question! Dean Burgess has always tried to keep from sending the college too many emails --- so that when he does have something important or time-sensitive to share it doesn't get overlooked. He did send out a number of messages during the spring semester and in June (you can catch up on all of these at https://cals.arizona.edu/about/dean/communications-dean) but these only go to personnel. Are you CALS personnel, and, if so, are you getting the Weekly Bulletin each Thursday afternoon? If not, please let me know - rutledge@cals.arizona.edu. The dean sometimes uses the Weekly Bulletin to send out a note between letters.

This summer, the associate deans have been sending out updates on our progress toward the college strategic goals. Associate Dean Ratje's letter went out in May, Associate Dean Silvertooth's in June, and Associate Dean Staten's in July - his will be the first of several letters about our progress toward our goal to “produce employable graduates, who can do jobs that do not yet exist and create new jobs.” There is more to come in this series, so stay tuned.

The first week of classes, we’ll be launching a quarterly e-newsletter on Teaching & Research Updates from the dean and associate deans. The Faculty Council will also be hosting a “town hall” with the dean and associate deans on September 22, but they’ll likely wait until classes have started before publicizing that event. Hope you’ll be able to join us for this event and for the next Dial-the-Dean on September 5.

QUESTION

I thought our career conversations were already due a while back. Myself and others have not had theirs. Was there a deadline?

ANSWER:

We asked all unit leaders to track and ensure that the benefits eligible (.5 FTE+) employees that fall under their responsibility had an annual performance review/career conversation within the last year (so any evaluation done between 7/1/16 - 6/30/17 would count toward this year's annual evaluation).

Memo from Shane C. Burgess regarding Appointed Personnel and Staff Performance Appraisals

The deadline for unit leaders to report those results to us for documentation was June 30th. Due to some scheduling conflicts and other circumstances, we have been made aware that a small set of employees have not quite yet had their evaluations completed, but their supervisors have assured us that they are getting scheduled. If you still have a concern about your/your peers' evaluations not being completed, please feel free to reach out to me (Heather Roberts-Wrenn) at hrobertswrenn@email.arizona.edu, and we can work together to sort it out.

QUESTION

I heard that travel policy was changing and that we will only be paid for 75% of meals, instead of the 100% reimbursement? The FSO travel website has no info on this? Is it true? What is the new policy and when are employees going to be notified?

ANSWER:

The new travel policy will reimburse for meals up to 75% of the rate of the destination city on travel days. If Tucson is the returning destination (duty post), then 75% of Tucson rates will be used for the return travel day. Other business days during the trip will still use the 100% rates of the city where business is being conducted. If a meal is provided on a travel day, the full cost of the individual meal will be reduced from the 75% reduced per the State of AZ guidelines. More information can be found here at https://gao.az.gov/sites/default/files/5025%20Meals%20and%20Incidentals%.... Additional information and policies regarding the meals and lodging index can be found here at http://policy.fso.arizona.edu/fsm/1400/1471.

Per Denise Blum of FSO "... the policy updates should be published on the FSO website by the end of this month. However, as the state policies are currently linked to the existing 14.13 Meals and Per Diem policy, I encourage the department to start using the updated state policies now to coincide with the new Fiscal Year. [However], the previous policies are still official and the choice is up the department until the formal campus announcement is published. The AP expense reimbursement team is prepared to review and approve accordingly"

When FSO publishes the updated policies, they will send a campus wide announcement. They will also offer training classes focused on the new policies. The information for those classes will be included in the campus wide announcement.

QUESTION

Is it true that you must have a master's degree in order to be promoted to a program coordinator position, regardless of experience in the field?

ANSWER:

In short, no, it is not true that you must have a Master's degree to be a candidate for a Program Coordinator per the ABOR minimum qualifications in the job description.

However, a department may list preferred qualifications for a Master’s degree, which may have bearing on who is selected. Additionally, a department may specify the type of degree or experience that is required (e.g. while ABOR minimum qualifications include a Bachelor’s degree, the department may specify that an Educational/Agricultural degree or related field is required.)

Please note, there is also a Program Coordinator, Senior job title.

ABOR minimum qualifications for a Program Coordinator are as follows:

Bachelor's degree in field appropriate to area of assignment AND two years administrative/coordinative program experience; OR, Six years of progressively responsible administrative coordinative program experience; OR, Any equivalent combination of experience, training and/or education approved by Human Resources.

ABOR minimum qualifications for a Program Coordinator, Senior are as follows:

Bachelor’s degree in a field appropriate to the area of assignment AND four years administrative/coordinative program experience; OR, Master’s degree in field appropriate to area of assignment AND three years administrative/coordinative program experience; OR, Eight years of progressively responsible administrative/coordinative program experience; OR, Any equivalent combination of experience, training and/or education approved by Human Resources.

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