This document outlines the proposed Snow College reinvestment plan that is defined in the Utah State Legislature House Bill 265, titled Higher Education Strategic Reinvestment. This bill requires Utah System of Higher Education (USHE) degree-granting institutions to reallocate state funding and associated institutional resources corresponding to institutional base budget reductions. Based on this bill, Snow College is required to reallocate $1,678,700 over three fiscal years as part of this process. To recoup these reductions, institutions must develop and propose strategic reinvestment plans for Utah Board of Higher Education and legislative approval. Upon securing these approvals, the Board will transfer set-aside funds back to institutions.
Work on the Snow College Strategic Reinvestment Plan began as soon as HB-265 was approved, and four core groups of faculty, staff, and administration were assembled to evaluate options to pursue. The following is a summary of the proposed Snow College Reinvestment Plan that has been submitted for preliminary review to USHE. Key themes include the following:
Snow currently offers an Associate of Arts in French and three courses in Italian. These courses are low enrolled and do not produce enough sections or credit hours to justify a full-time faculty position. This position has been eliminated following the retirement of a faculty member.
Last year, the Snow College General Education Committee voted to eliminate the Foundations course as a general education requirement beginning in the Fall of 2025. To realize savings from this program closure, Snow will eliminate four of the five faculty positions that were created through the Foundations program by not replacing faculty retirements and by shifting instructional time to other programs. Over the next three years, we plan to continue shifting the assessment and the focus of our general education program away from courses based solely on disciplinary content and towards courses that emphasize durable skills such as critical thinking, creative problem solving, written and oral communication, information literacy, and conflict management. Along with meeting the state’s current general education requirements, these courses can contribute to a series of employment-ready, stackable credentials that Snow College students will be able to earn as part of their associate degrees.
Snow currently teaches Media Studies as one of three AS degree pathways in the Communication Department. Media Studies includes training in analog radio, television, and newspaper journalism, along with work on the campus radio and television stations and the campus newspaper, The Snowdrift. Most jobs in the communication industry have shifted to digital media and strategic communication positions. By eliminating this degree and teaching out the remaining students with adjunct faculty, we can achieve significant savings in both faculty costs and production costs for the analog media associated with the degree.
Snow College has traditionally offered a one-credit course called “Convocation,” which features a weekly lecture series from outside lecturers on a topic determined by a faculty member who supervises the courses and receives a small stipend and one course release per semester for doing so. The operating budget for the course pays travel expenses and stipends for weekly speakers. The course has had significantly smaller enrollments in recent semesters and does not count towards any major or certificate program. Snow has many other mechanisms and funding sources for bringing outside speakers to campus.
Snow has a small service-learning program with a faculty director who is paid by a stipend and a limited number of grants or additional stipends to faculty who incorporate service learning into their classes. There are no courses or academic programs that require service learning. We propose to eliminate all grants and faculty stipends tied to this program. Faculty will still be encouraged to incorporate service-learning into their courses, but there will be no stipends or operational budgets available to support such courses.
The Office of Information Technology currently has one full-time employee dedicated to information security. We propose eliminating this position and shifting responsibility for information security to five other IT employees, whose salaries will be augmented to reflect these new responsibilities.
As the college strives to fulfill its mission, be a driver of economic development, and respond to industry and student needs, we are conducting a thorough review of the Economic Development Department and will not fill the position held by a recent retiree.
As part of an ongoing effort to improve operational efficiencies, functions of this position will be redistributed to existing personnel in Campus Services.
Snow currently licenses the Civitas Learning software platform to analyze student data in an attempt to improve outcomes and student success. A thorough analysis of our expenditures has determined that less expensive software may be used to achieve the same outcomes that Civitas currently provides.
Snow’s executive team currently includes a vice president for external affairs who is also the athletic director. We propose to eliminate this position at the vice-president level and replace it with an athletic director position. Other responsibilities of the VPEA will be distributed to other members of the college cabinet or current program directors.
As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance student services and improve operational efficiency, we recently completed a comprehensive review of the Student Affairs Division. Based on this review, we have made the decision to eliminate a full-time coordinator position within student support services on our Richfield campus. This adjustment was made possible by a recent vacancy in a separate full-time role within the same area, allowing us to realign priorities and restructure responsibilities without involuntary personnel displacement, and while still meeting the needs of students.
After a thorough review of the Registrar’s office on the Ephraim Campus has occurred, we have determined that one full-time assistant registrar position can be staffed with a half-time position with the support of one or two trained student employees.
In the summer of 2024, Snow College launched a prison education program at the Central Utah Correctional Facility (CUCF) in Gunnison with 40 students during the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 semesters. The CUCF has now cleared 400 students to enroll in Snow’s Associate of Science degree program. We propose to shift the equivalent of 1 faculty position to this program.
In 2024, Snow College entered into an agreement with Utah Valley University to offer a joint teacher certification program in Elementary Education on Snow’s Ephraim campus in order to train teachers in our six-county service area. In this program, Snow provides the associate degrees and UVU provides the bachelor’s degrees and teacher certification. We will start our second cohort of students in the fall of 2025 and have reached the point where we need to hire an additional faculty member in our Department of Education.
We launched the Strategic Communication degree this year as a major pathway in our Communication Department. The Strategic Communication degree will focus on digital communication and public relations. We propose shifting the funds we will save by eliminating media studies to this newer, more dynamic, and more in-demand program.
We propose to create a new Associate of Science Degree in pre-architecture within our Department of Construction Management. The new degree incorporates a 16-credit USHE-aligned technical education Drafting and Design Certificate which stacks into an associate degree program designed for students planning to transfer to a 4- or 6-year institution to pursue a construction management or professional architecture degree.
In July of 2024, after being approached by several of our area hospitals, Snow College received a grant from Talent Ready Utah to start an A.A.S. degree program in respiratory therapy. In January of 2025, we hired a program director to create the curriculum and supervise accreditation of the program. The curriculum has now been approved by USHE Peer Review Board, and we have been authorized by the Council on Accreditation for Respiratory Care (CoARC) to submit a self-study. With the clinical director in place, we anticipate accepting students into the program in January of 2026.
In the Spring of 2025, Snow College’s Department of Behavioral Science designed a Behavioral Health Technician (BHT) certificate program to address the critical shortage of mental health support professionals and juvenile justice workers in rural Utah. We propose allocating funds to this program to allow it to expand and meet the mental healthcare needs of our state and our service area.
Commercial Driver’s License is a high-demand job in our central Utah region. The current significant and ongoing demand for commercial drivers throughout our six-county service region supports expanding the program with a full-time faculty position.
Snow College currently sponsors three large tutoring centers: the Writing Lab, the Speech Lab, and the Math Lab. These labs are located in different buildings, are open at different times, and provide different levels of service. We propose to combine these labs into a single, multidisciplinary tutorial center located in the basement of the Huntsman Library, coordinated by a single, full-time director supported by reallocation funds.
In 2024, our Department of Business, in collaboration with our Grit Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, began working on a curriculum to bring a degree in rural entrepreneurship to Snow College. This program has been designed to take advantage of our unique location in six of Utah’s most rural counties—the setting of many successful businesses, including those with national and international markets—to create an internship-driven, experiential learning opportunity for students who may come from, and want to stay in, rural Utah. We propose funding a new instructional position in rural entrepreneurship. As part of the program, we propose an experimental student-led enterprise as part of our Strategic Reinvestment Plan. The student-led enterprise pilot program starts in FY28 and is modeled on the “work college” model at select colleges around the country.
The Rural Entrepreneurship academic program will work hand in hand with our TechConnect program to help students who have qualified to practice in technical or industrial fields become business owners. The program aligns with goals to enhance job skills, promote business expansion, and to further rural economic development opportunities that will augment job growth and economic prosperity in the region.
The third and final part of our strategic priority to become a healthcare hub for central Utah will be to begin implementing an associate degree in Radiologic Technology in the Fall of 2027. Like respiratory therapy and behavioral technology, radiologic technology is in high demand in our rural hospitals and will be essential to the operation of the Intermountain Healthcare hospital that has been announced for Ephraim.
Automation Technology is the technical education program most often requested by our manufacturing industry partners throughout central Utah. We plan to expand our Automation Technology offerings across rural Utah by providing industry-supported and sponsored on-site automation training, training equipment, and skill assessment resources. Our goal is to connect this technical program to Snow College’s longtime, successful Pre-Engineering associate degree.
As part of our plan to become a regional healthcare hub, we will need to increase the number of biology, anatomy, and physiology courses that we teach. Both the respiratory therapy and the radiologic technology programs will lean heavily on these areas, and we do not currently have the faculty capacity to meet this need. Both biology and life sciences were ranked in the first quintile by our program review task force, and, as new healthcare programs come online, we will lack the faculty capacity to teach the courses necessary to support these programs. Furthermore, we are experiencing an increased demand for online and life sciences courses associated with our TechConnect program, through which students who have earned certificate programs can transfer to Snow and complete an associate degree that accepts all of their technical credit. Most TechConnect students take online classes, and students with health-care certificates who are pursuing nursing or other health-care degrees need online life sciences classes to complete their degrees.
Continuous improvement is a guiding principle at Snow College, and we are committed to being wise stewards of our allocated funds. The Snow College Strategic Reinvestment Plan grows out of our strategic vision for the future. The plan creates a more streamlined and more skill-based general education experience that can be combined with high-demand certificates to give every student an employable skill during their first year of college. It also reallocates funds to create and support new academic and technical programs that will lead to high-paying jobs that meet the needs of our region and address the most crucial educational needs in our six-county service area, all while strengthening the personalized, confidence-building student experience that Snow has been providing since 1888.
Each category aligns with HB 265 requirements and Snow College’s strategic direction. Because Snow is primarily a two-year college with a general education focus, “programs” are not equivalent to degrees or majors. The programs eliminated, expanded, and created include general education courses, curricular activities, and non-degree courses of study.