Destinee Marking
Senior writer
dmarking@murraystate.edu
Murray State has partnered with West Kentucky Community & Technical College to provide students the opportunity to partake in a new program, Accelerate U.
Mark Arant, vice president for academic affairs and provost, said Accelerate U targets students who were not initially accepted to Murray State.
“The Accelerate U program is a program that reaches out to students who may not have all of the criteria to get into Murray State,” Arant said. “It gives them an opportunity to build those skills that after completing the program will allow them to be successful coming into Murray State.”
There are currently 40 students in the Accelerate U program. Arant said it is a year-long program during which students live on campus and participate in Murray State activities while taking three WKCTC general education classes and one Murray State general education class.
Discussions about the creation of the program began in December 2017. Arant said he was at an event in Paducah with David Heflin, WKCTC’s chief academic officer, when they began talking.
“We had just received some enrollment data, particularly on the number of students who were not admitted to the institution,” Arant said. “We struck up a conversation on how we could possibly offer those students an opportunity to eventually be admitted to Murray State.”
The conversation continued, and Arant said they called a team together in February 2018 to begin planning the program.
“The team pulled off what I thought was almost undoable in a very short period of time,” Arant said.
While there, Accelerate U students are considered WKCTC students, but upon successfully finishing their first year of classes, Arant said they will be accepted to Murray State as transfer students.
“Since the enrollment is very seamless, these students will immediately matriculate into Murray State, adding to our transfer student enrollment,” Arant said. “We will see the enrollment benefit in their second year.”
Students must be invited in order to participate in Accelerate U.
“We did some research and identified the students who would be the most successful, which ended up being most of them,” Arant said.
Going forward, Arant said he envisions the opportunity being offered to students in their decline of admission letter from Murray State.
While the majority of Accelerate U students are from western Kentucky, Renae Duncan, associate provost for undergraduate education, said invitations are not limited to just Kentuckians.
Duncan said there are minimal differences between Accelerate U students and full-time Murray State students.
“I think that is one of the strengths of the program,” Duncan said. “It enables these students to have a true four-year university experience while developing those skills and receiving that support that they would if they were going full time at a community college.”
Another unique aspect of this program, Duncan said, is the use of success coaches. Two success coaches were hired specifically for this program. One is employed by WKCTC, while the other is employed by Murray State.
“The whole idea behind their job is to help make sure these students are successful,” Duncan said. “They actually go to class with the students, so they know everything that’s going on in class, and they are able to more easily support them and guide them toward tutoring.”
Both Arant and Duncan said the collaboration between WKCTC and Murray State was, and continues to be, a positive experience.
“This is the first in a long line of efforts you’re going to see between Murray State and WKCTC,” Arant said. “We are talking about a number of new initiatives and new agreements that will be coming in the future.”
David Heflin, vice president of academic affairs at WKCTC, said the students he has heard from are speaking positively about the program.
“The feedback has been very good,” Heflin said. “I have talked to the students themselves and they seem very pleased and happy to be at Murray State.”
Heflin said he looks forward to continuing collaborations with Murray State and ultimately supporting students in the region.
“The opportunity here to help our students in the region is enormous,” Heflin said. “I think the synergy of both of our institutes will really help this region.”