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OREM, Utah (AP) -- Utah Valley State College's new president William A. Sederburg believes the college can become a university in the next three to four years.
"It is my goal before I leave here that we become known as a university not just in quality but also by name," Sederburg, eight months into his tenure as president, said Thursday in his first State of the College address.
UVSC first needs to become a university in function and quality before it goes after the name, he said.
"The state isn't ready for us to seek university status. ... When the time is right, we'll strike for the name change," Sederburg said.
He envisions "Utah Valley University" as having an emphasis on teaching rather than research.
UVSC will need to ask the state Board of Regents for a comprehensive set of two- and four-year degrees. Sederburg said he would like UVSC to eventually offer a handful of master's degree programs in areas such as education, business administration and technology to meet the community's needs.
Sederburg said higher education in Utah has reached a state of paralysis with frozen salaries and a moratorium on new academic programs. Revenues may be limited, but colleges should be adding and subtracting academic programs as they go.
The old "state agency" philosophy needs to be replaced with a new market-driven philosophy that relies more heavily on tuition revenue and private grants and responds to changing educational markets, he said.
Asked later about the need for satellite campuses, Sederburg said the current campus can't sustain many more than 30,000 students. UVSC needs to look at acquiring property for additional locations if the college's enrollment is going to grow to 40,000 or more, he said.
UVSC has about 24,000 students, and, "We have a huge tidal wave of students coming down the road, and Utah has to get ready for that."
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
