Page 22 - 2021-2022 Year End Report

UNIVERSITY RELATIONS COMMITTEE
Co-VPs University Relations: Meleah Ashford & Kris Kern
Committee Members: Joan Foley, Anne Jarvis, Jean Josephson, Cassandra Moseley, Janine Salwasser, Jackie Wirz, Annie Zeidman-Karpinski
Site Visits: This year we were scheduled to visit OHSU’s School of Nursing and School of Medicine, and OSU/OHSU’s Pharmacy program, but these programs were highly impacted by COVID, so the site visits were switched with the OSU College of Engineering (scheduled for 2022-
23).
We conducted one virtual site visit with the OSU College of Engineering in March 2022. The site visit was well attended and the discussion robust. Three main areas for ARCS Oregon to consider are: 1) our allocations notifications should come out sooner so that that our awards can be better leveraged for graduate student recruitment, 2) the UMEs, partially funded by the college, have not resulted in additional allocations so that there is less incentive at the College to add more UMEs, and 3) the US citizen requirement of ARCS’s is a constraint to funding the most highly qualified scholars because they must bypass highly qualified scholars who are not US citizens even though they may be permanent residents.
Site Visit Schedule: In addition, we reviewed the overall site visit schedule and adjusted it to compress the length of time between site visits to be more in alignment with the National UR guidelines (visits each three years). The intervals have gone from 5-9 years to 4-5 years, which will require three site visits per year.
Inclusive Excellence Efforts: To support ARCS Oregon’s DEI (Inclusive Excellence) program, the UR Committee added one question on the University Site Visit Form; 24. ARCS Foundation values inclusive excellence. “How do you support and evaluate the effectiveness of DEI efforts with your scholars?.” We used this question during the site visit of the OSU College of Engineering and had a good discussion about DEI.
New Programs: We continued to work on bringing the joint OHSU/PSU Public Health program into our ARCS Approved Programs. The process was delayed because of COVID, but it should be completed in the Spring of 2022. We also had discussions with our other universities about programs that they would like to see added to our Approved Program list. ARCS Oregon currently has 37 Approved Programs in the three universities we support.
University Partner Data: Data was collected from our university partners twice this year; once in the Spring to alert us of scholars who were not meeting their GPA requirement of 3.5 and once in
the Fall to collect total graduate student numbers to help with the allocations process in January.
Allocations: University Relations Committee members participated in the annual allocations process where recommendations are made for the number of scholars to be awarded to each Approved Program.
ARCS National Collaborations: University Relations Co-VPs participated in the National UR Collaboration Network to coordinate and learn from other chapters.
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