Undergraduates at Northwest Missouri State University, as well as students enrolled in the Northland Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS), will soon have the opportunity to gain workplace experience while earning college credit.
A new course at Northwest, Professional Based Experience, was approved during Friday’s Board of Regents meeting. The offering allows students to explore career avenues while gaining real-world experience.
“(It’s) a mechanism to help make their time with us more relevant,” Northwest Provost Timothy Mottet told the regents. “When you have a sharper idea of the end in mind it adds a relevance to what you’re doing. It makes it a bit more meaningful.”
Under the new program, freshmen and sophomores will be able to explore different careers in ways that allow them to earn academic credit. In the past, such programs have generally been limited to juniors and seniors.
“There’s been this thing where you start exploring your career later on in your college career, which is really too late we think,” Mottet said.
Students can take the new course in order to earn between one and three credits. Each credit requires 50 hours in the workplace during the 15-week semester.
It’s open to all students who need one to three lower division credits, but it’s more-so tailored to the younger students,” Mottet said. “It’s more than (job) shadowing, but it’s not an internship.”
Mottet said an internship assumes the student has learned enough to produce quality work. The new class is for undergraduates who lack that level of professional skill.
So the course is more about learning and exploration than workplace productivity, Mottet said.
“Higher education is about a meaningful life,” he said. “We want out students to have a career, not jobs.”
Mottet said the course is of a piece with other Northwest programs designed to prepare students for their chosen professions.
“I think we keep education real here,” he said. “I think we have an idea of the dynamics of where modern life is, where our students are, where students need to be, where employers are, building relationships with employers, being responsive to employers. I think we’re in the trenches, and I think some universities loose track in the trenches.”
Professional Based Experience will also be offered through Northland CAPS, a programs that incorporates students from six Kansas City school districts.
“These are the school systems that are feeders to us already,” Mottet said. “This is another opportunity for us to strengthen that relationship to keep them thinking about coming north versus going to some other university. It’s a foot in the door strategy.”
Northland CAPS students will earn both high school and college credit.
Donna Deeds, regional executive director at CAPS, said this course will help send students to college with a clearer idea of their professional future.
“They will be able to acquire professional skills no high school student is learning in a classroom setting,” she said. “This gives our kids a jump start.”
Northwest faculty will work with Northland CAPS students periodically throughout the course.
Northwest President John Jasinski said the class aligns with the university’s strategic plan for enrollment growth and partnership development.
“This Northland CAPS … is a piece to getting the students embedded in Northwest Missouri State on the dual credit side, but also helping our students out,” Jasinski said.
Deeds said she is unsure how many high school students will sign up for the program, but she expects the number to be significant.
“Because Northwest is a four-year institution and is highly regarded, I anticipate there’ll be a high uptake,” she said.
The original article published by the Maryville Forum can be found here.
