I still remember the first morning I came to the University of New Haven. I sat in an old green chair in Bayer Hall of Graduate Studies as an overenthusiastic tour guide listed the amazing opportunities that the 4+1 teaching degree program could offer me, a UNH applicant who wanted to teach high school English come graduation day.
Under this program, I would spend my fifth year working through internships to get my teaching certification. Without this course, it would take two rather costly years in graduate school in addition to four years of college to get a Master in Teaching, with no guarantee that a job would await me after six grueling years of study.
It was at that moment listening to the tour guide paint a pretty picture of my future as a teacher that I decided, of all the colleges I’d been accepted to, UNH was the one.
Little did I know that the singular reason for my enrollment had been set to be axed quite a bit of time before I’d come in for a tour on that breezy March morning in 2014. The peppy team of recruiters knew that the program they were promising would be long gone by the time my class would be eligible to apply for it. The Board of Education had decided months before that the funds for 4+1 would be redirected into rebranding the more popular fields offered at UNH.
Even with this knowledge, it wasn't until that November that the news reached campus, leaving all the students not yet grandfathered into the program scrambling. Suddenly, without the means to become an educator, I was left to wonder if I should transfer —even though no other school could offer me a program as great as the 4+1 course could have been — or to leave teaching behind.
To be educated is a necessity to succeed in our current society. A college degree is almost always a requirement for any job that can sustain someone above the poverty line. The education of the generations to come is vital to keeping our society moving in the right direction, but if prospective teachers lose their programs and their ability to become educators so that the more popular fields can continue to grow, where will these certified teachers come from?
Well, I can assure you they won’t be from UNH.
A bit over a year after my program was taken away, my future is still unclear. The 4+1 program has now offered a new alternative that involves taking a year after graduation from UNH to attend Fairfield University. This is a great opportunity, even though it would have been nice if the program had continued to be localized on the campus of the college I'm already enrolled in.
The fifth year of the original 4+1 program would have been much cheaper than a year's tuition at a university and would have offered a plethora of internship and experiential opportunities.
My issue is how little we seem to value the path of becoming an educator in our academic society. My issue is that the program I specifically went to my current school for was cut and that the welcome wagon to prospective students were still raving about a program that no longer exists.
We spend so much money as students to become certified in our fields of passion, but universities hesitate to fund programs to train the people who could have been the ones educating the students of the next generation. Why aren't the programs to become a monumental part in the development of our young people as cognitive individuals being valued? I think it's time we focused more on the state of our education system and why teachers, the ones who prepare the next generation of thinkers and innovators, are so belittled and disrespected.
Unfortunately, there isn't much to be done about the 4+1 program being reinstated at UNH, but I think a dialogue about where our educational priorities are going forward is in order.
For more information on the 4+1 Program and the efforts that were attempted to protest its disbandment, here is a link to the petition made over a year ago by members of the College of Arts and Sciences department as well as an M.S. Elementary Student named Stacey Frizzell. https://www.change.org/p/lourdes-alvarez-save-the-...
