SALT LAKE CITY — BYU-Idaho's Pathway and online degree advisement programs needed to move to Salt Lake City as they become BYU-Pathway Worldwide because the LDS Church's new education program will require more international travel as it expands, Clark Gilbert said Thursday.
Gilbert will complete his tenure as BYU-I president in April and then assume the reins of BYU-PW.
BYU-Pathway Worldwide "will interact very intimately also with different organizations in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including its missionary department and including its self-reliance services and including all the area presidencies from all around the world," he added, according to the Rexburg Standard Journal.
At a joint news conference in Rexburg, Idaho, with his BYU-I successor, Henry J. Eyring, Gilbert said he plans to take 35 BYU-I employees with him.
Eyring shared what it means to him to follow in the footsteps of his father, President Henry B. Eyring, first counselor in the church's First Presidency and past president of Ricks College (1971-77), which became BYU-Idaho in 2000.
Pathway is a low-cost, pre-college program that prepares students for success in higher education. It also is a gateway to an online degree program. The program takes one year (or three semesters) to complete.
Gilbert made one new announcement Thursday about Pathway.
"One of the things we'll see change is that, when students start their second semester in Pathway, they'll receive an online mentor who will stay with them all the way through their degree program," he said, according to KPVI-TV.
Henry J. Eyring praised his friend Gilbert and his unusually brief stint as president at BYU-I.
"I’ll say two things about that," Eyring said, according to the Journal. "One of them is that he is going to do something now that has never been done within the Church Educational System or any other education system, and that is to take higher education out to the world of church members. There’s no one who could do that the way he will be able to do it.
"I’d also make the observation that his two years here in Rexburg, at BYU–Idaho, have been remarkably productive. President Gilbert, at least as a manager and leader, seems to live in dog years. And he can get done in two years what others would need 10 to accomplish."
Eyring said his father faced budget cuts and enrollment shortages in the '70s.
"I'm grateful that I'm not where he was," he said, according to KIDK-TV news. "I'm in a position where our challenge is not one of shrinkage, but of growth. We have been growing rapidly."
He said church data indicates dramatic demographic growth in the coming seven to eight years.
BYU-Idaho had 17,980 students in the fall. It has capacity to grow to 23,000 students.
The proposal that Eyring become BYU-Idaho's 17th president did not come from President Eyring, who told his son by phone that he had prayed to know it was heaven's will, according to a separate Rexburg Standard Journal story.
Eyring recalled that his father was a good basketball player who could jump well enough to dunk but found it difficult because he had small hands. One day, the son challenged the father to dunk.
"I'll never forget cheering for him and sort of standing on my toes, like this, at the moment he jumped," the younger Eyring said, "and I think that I felt in that call from him that he was kind of standing on his toes for me. And I'll need that if I'm going to make the kinds of dunk shots that President Gilbert has."
Gilbert said the decision to move employees from the existing Pathway staff and the Pathway and online degree advisement groups was made by the Church Board of Education.
BYU-PW will open its Salt Lake offices in the fall.
BYU-PW has 37,000 students in 500 locations around the world. Students meet weekly in the Pathway program, in church buildings with 63 students in St. Petersburg, Russia, to 506 in Orem, Utah, and 177 students in Lima, Peru.
In the fall, the Pathway program alone had 423 locations in 62 countries. At that time, 29 percent of Pathway students were outside the United States, 56 percent were female and 49 percent were over age 30, according to the Pathway annual report.
More information is available at pathwaynewsroom.org.