Fort Valley State University

June 24, 2009 - Two-thirds of the state’s residents do not have college degrees according to a University System of Georgia study. But soon, the number of graduates may increase. A new initiative will help turn on-the-job training of residents into college credit. This month, Fort Valley State University – along with Atlanta Metropolitan College, Bainbridge College, Georgia Southwestern State University and Valdosta State University – was named to the University System of Georgia’s Adult Learning Consortium (ALC). The USG awarded FVSU a $25,000 College Access Challenge Grant to create and develop the program.

When fully operational, the Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) program, that is a feature of the consortium, will help non-traditional and low-income Middle Georgia workers move into higher-skilled, better-paying jobs. The university plans to target individuals in the criminal justice field and engineering technicians at Robins Air Force Base.

FVSU’s College of Graduate Studies and Extended Education Dean, Dr. Anna Holloway, learned about PLA last summer at a conference.

“The purpose of the PLA is a way of evaluating a person’s prior work experience, see what learning outcomes they have, and then choose the appropriate college courses they correspond with,” said Dr. Anna Holloway, the principal investigator for the grant.

“This is an opportunity for those who work in the law enforcement area to gain credit and continue their education, hopefully at FVSU,” said Dr. Jean Wacaster, who was named FVSU’s ALC coordinator. “The program will be individualized, and we will be trained to assess skill sets to determine how much college credit each student is eligible to receive.”

This week, Wacaster and representatives from the colleges of agriculture, arts and sciences, and education, and offices of institutional research and planning, financial aid and veteran affairs, information technology and the registrar are attending a conference to learn how to implement the program.

The USG received a $2 million grant for up to two years from the U.S. Department of Education to start the initiative. The system will work with the Governor’s Office, community and business groups statewide, and the Alliance of Education Agency Heads (AEAH), which creates policies to ensure a quality education for all students in the state from pre-K to graduate school.