University of Las Vegas Program Cuts

Can't get there from here, how UNLV cut backs will affect all of us in the long run.

As student of the University of Las Vegas return to the classroom there are many completes from students ranging from books costing too much. Required classes offered at inconvenient times or no parking on campus. These all seem small compared to other issues but they still affect students.

One of the more pressing issues is that you just can't learn what you use to. In June the Board of Regents nearly unanimously voted to eliminate entre programs from the academic catalog. Budgets had to be cut and money needed to come from somewhere. Altogether, they saved $4 million in academic costs short term. Of course the long-term costs of eliminating programs such as Clinical Laboratory Sciences might be far great than the short term benefits. But in a time of economic crisis, gambles must be made. CLS is expensive to run, so never mind the fact it offered the state's only four-year program or that many of its students were BA-holding, non-degree-seeking students seeking certifications required to work in the industry. The Collage of Southern Nevada plans to pick up UNLV's orphaned program, but with no definite timeline or commitment made by the regents, holding your breath for the program rebirth might be hazardous to your health.

More woes for students seeking help paying for their higher education, some of the students that believed that they would receive help from the Millennium Scholarship program set up by the formal Governor Guinn have received no money at this time from the scholarship, after they were told in June that they had received it.

We are a state that is already struggling with more than its fair share of health care issues, the prospect of a shortage of professional medical and laboratory technicians should be terrifying.

It could be worse we could all be going crazy, oh wait it could be bad to be having mental health issues in Nevada as well. One of the whole programs offered like a little sacrificial lamb to the budget-cut ax was the Department of Marriage and Family Therapy. According to the department chair Gerald Weeks, marriage and family therapists accounts for half of all mental health providers in the state and because UNLV offers Southern Nevada's only certification program, eliminating it is akin to axing the university's nursing program. The crippled mental health industry would collapse stated Weeks, during an interview with the Las Vegas Journal.

Daunted by that prospect, the department came up with a way to save themselves a self-supported graduate program that draws funds not through the higher education system's semi-complicated enrollment-dependent equation but directly from student's fees and tuition. This will result in students paying a higher cost but will save the program.

Now the department's bigger problem is publicity or the lack thereof. There word is not out there yet that the program has been saved. Weeks is still receiving calls on where aspiring therapists should go instead of UNLV.

Sadly other programs were not as lucky as the Department of Marriage and Family Therapy such as, educational leadership, sports education leadership and urban horticulture. For students grandfathered into the programs will be allowed to finish, while other students will face the decision to find a new major or leave the university.

Still another problem facing students at UNLV is that back in June some of the students seeking money from the Millennium Scholarship were told that the money was being paid to the collage of their choice; now that it is August the money has yet to be paid to UNLV. Is it the state that has dropped the ball or is it UNLV?