UVSC is boosting its ranks of Ph.D.s

OREM — This semester, a Utah County professor must write her own papers for a demanding professor. That's right, the professor is back in school.

Gaya Carlton, who has taught at Utah Valley State College for 15 years, has taken a semesterlong sabbatical to finish a doctorate in nursing.

"I've just always wanted to do it," said Carlton, who is completing her academic work through the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. "I knew, you know, 20 years ago that I would eventually end up here. It's just taken me a while."

Carlton is among a handful of UVSC professors who received permission to take sabbaticals to earn three letters that make the college look more like a university: Ph.D.

The Orem school was founded in the 1940s as a vocational school, morphed into a community college in the 1980s and began offering bachelor's degrees in the 1990s.

And it's no secret that UVSC chiefs covet the next rank — university status.

In Utah, where a governor-appointed Board of Regents oversees the system of public colleges and universities, schools are given university status if they are able to provide students with graduate-degree level programs.

Graduate courses, however, must be taught by faculty with doctorates.

At UVSC, slightly more than half — 50.3 percent to be exact — of faculty and administrators had doctorates in 2004.

"We hired a bunch of people under a community college (blueprint), and the need for a Ph.D. wasn't there," said Bruce Parker, UVSC associate vice president of academic affairs.

Instead of hiring new professors with doctorates, many UVSC deans are encouraging existing faculty to return to school and earn their own.

During a sabbatical, which is only available to tenured faculty, the administration pays teachers 80 percent of their salaries. They hire adjunct or visiting professors to teach the course load with the remaining 20 percent.

"(It is) written into the policy they have to come back and work for at least a year at UVSC to pay back the sabbatical," Parker said. "That's the only thing we can hold them to."

The deans risk losing the professors to other colleges after they earn their degrees, Parker said, but new faculty "could be more expensive because they're on the market, and Ph.D.s in some of these areas (such as computer science) are in high demand."