Utah Valley State College has added three new bachelor degrees - American sign language, deaf studies and software engineering - to the academic offerings that will be available to interested students this fall, 2007.

According to Megan Laurie, assistant director of communications, these specific degrees were chosen because of student interest.

"These are degrees that are very popular, and they are useful degrees that many of our students wanted to pursue an education in," Laurie said. "There is a demand for them, and they give breadth to our offerings."

Laurie said the two degrees that deal with the hearing-impaired were added to specifically satisfy the desire for more courses on that subject.

"We have a large population of deaf students on our campus, and we have large number of people interested in learning more about it," she said.

Bryan Eldredge, program coordinator for ASL and deaf studies, also spoke of the high demand for degrees in this area but spoke more of the opportunities these degrees will provide for students to learn about a different culture.

"It's important from a liberal arts perspective because the deaf community provides a kind of diversity we can't find anywhere else," Eldredge said, "especially in Utah, where we don't find the kind of diversity that people count as 'diversity.' It's an exposure to a different language and culture."

He said it was a first-hand experience with this different culture that interested him in the deaf community and that is what students will gain from studying in these degrees.

"It turns the mirror back on our own interests and is a reminder that we see the world the way we do because that's the way our culture sees it," Eldredge said. "Basically, it comes down to learning about someone who is different from myself. I couldn't quench my thirst to learn about people who are different from me. It just drew me in."

While he is committed to teaching these differences, Eldredge said the greatest challenge in implementing the new programs will be satisfying the large student demand while preserving a quality learning environment.

"I think the challenge is one you get with any program that's going to be significant in size and that is still maintaining the student orientation and taking care of the student's needs," he said.

Neil Harrison, assistant professor of computer science at UVSC, faces an entirely different challenge when it comes to executing the new software engineering degree.

"I think the biggest challenge we face is one of general perception," Harrison said. "People have the impression that there are few software development jobs, and so people are steering away from going into that at the college level, which is becoming an employment crisis. This is a problem across the country. We need people to go into software development and engineering."

This need for people qualified to work in software engineering goes back to the needs UVSC is trying to satisfy by adding these new degrees. Harrison said this new degree, like the other two, is borne of demand.

"In spite of what people may have heard, the demand of people skilled in software development is strong and growing in the U.S., particularly in the Utah area as this is kind of the sweet spot for that field," Harrison said. "We need people who can develop large-scale software systems that are highly reliable and available."

Copyright Brigham Young University 3 Apr 2007