UAF, Fairbanks school district launch middle college

UAF photo by JR Ancheta A student reads in the Murie Building atrium on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus.

Students in the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District will soon have the opportunity to complete their high school careers with up to two years of college credit, tuition-free.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks and the school district have joined forces to create North Star College, a middle college program that will allow students to take UAF classes at the Fairbanks campus while still in high school. The school district will cover tuition and transportation, and students will earn both high school and college credit for their UAF classes. The first group of students will start classes in the fall of 2020.

“This is the result of shared vision between the Fairbanks School District and UAF to expand academic opportunities for students and create a robust bridge between secondary and postsecondary education in our community,” said Superintendent Karen Gaborik. “I am thrilled that we’ve been able to jointly build a middle college model for Fairbanks.”

While UAF has, for many years, allowed high school students to take courses, North Star College fully integrates college courses into each student’s public high school curriculum. North Star College students will be able to take 7-15 credits each semester. Students’ course schedules during the 2020-2021 school year will include political science and economics. They will round out their schedules with courses chosen from UAF’s core content offerings. A dedicated space on campus will give North Star College students a place to check in, study or meet between classes.

Read the full story here.

Source: UA News Center

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s