SALT LAKE CITY — As the Utah State Board of Regents convened its final scheduled meeting, Chairman Harris Simmons described the day as a “bittersweet” and “historical.”
Governance of Utah’s public colleges and universities isn’t going away. It has been reimagined as the Utah Board of Higher Education, an 18-member board that will oversee public, degree-granting colleges and universities as well as the state’s eight technical colleges. The new board’s first meeting is Wednesday morning.
Simmons’ father, Roy W. Simmons, was on the inaugural board of regents while his son served on the final board, a father-and-son bookends of sorts.
“All right, that’s the end of it, (a) long chapter,” Harris Simmons said as the board voted to adjourn for the final time.
The Utah State Board of Regents was created under the Utah Legislature’s Utah Higher Education Act of 1969 to “improve the welfare and education of Utah citizens.”
Peter W. Billings, the board’s inaugural chairman, noted in the board’s first annual report that its major achievement was taking a statewide view of the state’s colleges and universities.
“We are not serving as representatives of a particular institution or a particular geographic area, but as citizens of Utah interested in the welfare of the entire system,” he wrote.
A resolution recently approved by the board points to several of the system’s highlights.
It began in the fall of 1969, serving about 48,000 students.
To start, the board oversaw nine member institutions: the University of Utah, Utah State University, Snow College, Weber State College, Southern Utah State College, Dixie Junior College, College of Eastern Utah, Utah Technical College at Provo and Utah Technical College at Salt Lake.
At the time, the state’s population was just over 1 million.
Fast forward to 2020 and the state’s population exceeds 3.2 million people. The higher education systems includes eight member institutions, which include two research universities, the University of Utah and Utah State University; four regional universities, Weber State University, Southern Utah University, Utah Valley University and Dixie State University; and two comprehensive community colleges Snow College and Salt Lake Community College. The College of Eastern Utah is now under the Utah State University umbrella.
By fall 2018, Utah System of Higher Education colleges and universities had a combined headcount enrollment of 189,093 students.
As enrollment has grown steadily over the past five decades, Utah’s public college and university campuses have also become increasingly diverse.
In fall of 1998, only 6.4% of students at Utah’s public colleges and universities were students of color. That climbed to 20% by 2018.
Numbers of Hispanic students enrolled in Utah’s public colleges and universities climbed nearly 600% between fall 1998 and fall 2018, up from 3,140 to 21,900.
For the same period, the number of black students increased from 655 to 2,614, nearly a 300% increase, while the number of white students increased 48% and Asian-Pacific Islander students increased by 148%. American Indian and Alaska native students increased by 28% over the same 20-year span.
In 1969-70, Utah’s colleges and university institutions conferred a combined 8,566 postsecondary certificates and degrees. By comparison, the University of Utah’s class of 2020 included 8,628 graduates.
Between the 1969-70 and 2017-18 academic years, the state’s public colleges and universities awarded 901,743 certificates and degrees.
The membership of the board of regents has evolved over the years, too.
College students have served as regents for more than 40 years. Student regents have full voting rights, participate in presidential searches and serve one-year terms.
Student regent Scott L. Wyatt went on to become a state lawmaker, a county attorney and currently president of Southern Utah University.
As turf battles and other issues have surfaced over the years, state lawmakers passed bills to add members of the Utah State Board of Education to the board of regents and regents to the state school board, but none were voting members. That effort was short-lived.
About 20 years ago, the governance of Utah’s degree-granting institutions and technical colleges was combined under the Utah State Board of Regents, with just one regent representing all of the state’s tech colleges.
The arrangement fell apart after a few years over concerns about mission creep, that technical colleges were not adequately represented and lengthy program approval processes had bogged down technical colleges’ ability to meet industry demands.
Earlier this year, Utah legislators passed SB111, which created the Utah Board of Higher Education to govern both technical colleges and degree-granting universities.
The combined systems will work under the same roof at The Gateway, where the Utah System of Higher Education has been headquartered for many years.
The Utah State Board of Regents and the Utah Technical Colleges Board of Trustees have merged into the Utah Board of Higher Education and one of the new board’s first responsibilities will be to hire a commissioner.
The board’s priorities have evolved over the years, too. In recent years, the board has developed a number of initiatives and programs to improve college access, affordability and college students’ mental health.
The Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education placed college access advisers in 34 Utah high schools for the 2019-20 and plans to eventually have one in every Utah high school.
In 2017, the regents approved a working group’s recommendations to increase students’ access to mental health services through community partnerships, the use of technology such as the SafeUT smartphone app and expanding the capacity of graduate programs to increase the number and diversity of mental health professionals in Utah.
Last year, the Utah Legislature passed HB260, which created the Access Utah Promise Scholarship program, which is a need-based scholarship.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Derrin Owens, R-Fountain Green, covers up to two years of tuition and fees of qualifying students, who include returning adults at state colleges, universities and technical colleges. The U. and SLCC have since introduced new and expanded need-based program. WSU also has a need-based program which the Utah Promise Scholarship was patterned.
It also offers the Regents and New Century scholarships, which reward rigorous course-taking and attainment in high school.
Aside from changes in missions and initiatives, the membership of the board of regents over the past five decades has included “dozens of influential and accomplished community members and students,” according to a resolution passed by the regents at its final meeting in May.
It members have included successful executives, religious leaders, attorneys, community leaders and some former lawmakers.
Some regents and commissioners of the Utah System of Higher Education have gone on to serve at the highest levels of government.
Former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt served on the board prior to running for governor in 1992. He is one of only two Utah governors elected to three terms.
In 2003, Leavitt became the 10th administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, nominated by President George W. Bush. The following year, Leavitt was nominated by Bush as secretary of Health and Human Services and was confirmed by the Senate in January 2005.
Former regent Thomas Wright is a Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2020.
T.H. Bell, Utah’s second commissioner of higher education, served in the administrations of President Richard Nixon and President Gerald Ford as the nation’s education commission prior to the creation of a Cabinet system. He later served as secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan.
While the faces and initiatives have changed over the years, the core mission of the board of regents has remained the same, as then-chairman Kenneth G. Anderton observed on the board’s 25th anniversary. Anderton passed away in 2015.
“Today’s regents carry the educational torch relayed to us by regents past, and building on the substantial accomplishments of prior boards, we are determined to meet existing challenges, and carry out the charge of those who have entrusted us with providing a world-class education for Utah’s college and university students.”