Iowa State University is rolling two of its colleges into one to cut costs. I-S-U President Gregory Geoffrey says a university panel studied the entire operation and decided to combine the colleges of Education and Family and Consumer Sciences. He says in the end, they decided this was the combination that made the most sense and would also generate revenue savings that would be important enough to succeed. Geoffrey says the two colleges have a lot of synergy between them as both focus on human development and transforming lives. Geoffrey says the combination will have the biggest impact on administrators, with between eight to 15 jobs cut. But he says the classes won’t change. He says they don’t anticipate any impact on students as they aren’t eliminating any majors or departments. He says the move will free up 500- to 700 thousand dollars annually in the I-S-U budget. He says when you consider the 64-million dollars cut in state appropriations in the last four years — this is a small reduction. He says this is just one piece in the overall plan to cut costs. Some says the state-supported universities have too many programs that’re duplicated on the three campuses — including teacher education which is part of the college of education and the merger. Geoffrey was asked why such duplicate programs such as teacher education aren’t cut altogether. He says there are several reasons, such as the number of students involved. He says there’s no way the other universities could handle the two-thousand education students I-S-U has. Plus, he says students need choices. He says students change majors a lot, with about 40-percent of freshman nationwide arriving at college not knowing what they’ll major in. Geoffrey says it’s important for the universities to have the more popular majors for the students to chose from as their majors clarify. He hopes to have the two colleges combined by June 30th of 2005. The move would drop the number of I-S-U colleges from eight to seven.
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