The Current: Program Reboot

Excerpt from The Current:

There’s a good chance you have no idea what UC Santa Barbara Extension does. Bob York, interim dean of the program, understands this. That’s one of the reasons he decided to change its name.

“Nobody knows what ‘Extension’ means,” he explained. “Even people I know who’ve been here for 30 years didn’t know. ‘What does extension do?’ The academics on campus are mystified by it. Students — most of them have never heard of it. And even a lot of community members, I think, don’t really know.”

So, out with Extension, in with Professional and Continuing Education. Or, if you want to tempt the gods of language clarity, Extension 2.0.

But York and his team in the campus’s Kerr Hall have embarked on something much more substantial than a name change: They’re rethinking the program’s mission, content and approach. For decades Extension was largely focused on continuing education, like project management and paralegal studies for the public. York, however, sees a much bigger — and largely untapped — audience for professional development courses: UCSB’s nearly 22,000 undergraduate students.

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