Statewide Operating Budget Proposed General Fund Increase Requests FY2015 August 8, 2013

1) High School-College Dual Enrollment: Tech-Prep Programs $400K GF SDI Theme: Productive Partnerships with Alaska’s Schools Annually over 2,000 high school students across the state earn college credit towards certificates and degrees from the University of Alaska through the Tech Prep (technical preparation) model plans of study. Funding will provide coordinated continuation and expansion of this dual credit program. There is growing interest in the state legislature for a dual enrollment system and the time is right for the University of Alaska to take the leadership role. After 10 years of building successful relationships with secondary schools and business partners to provide dual credit aligned courses for students focused on Career and Technical Education, UA Plans of Study working group is ready to expand the model into a Career Pathways model and create a systemic dual enrollment program. The budget will cover a Program Director and program discretionary funding.

2) Rural Campus Bandwidth $845K annually (satellite option) or $4.5M annually (terrestrial option) GF SDI Theme: Student Achievement and Attainment Two options are presented to double the network bandwidth to the following rural communities: Bethel, Dillingham, Nome, Kotzebue, Tok, Barrow, King Salmon, and Ft. Yukon. One option is satellite; the other option is terrestrial. Both options deliver the same amount of bandwidth. The advantages of the terrestrial option are faster, lower-latency connections. Latency is defined as the amount of delay, measured in milliseconds, that occurs in a round-trip data transmission. Satellite latency is 638ms, 20 times higher than terrestrial broadband with a latency of approximately 30-40ms. Adequate bandwidth is vital to delivery of a 21st century education. Increased use of rich media (images, video, 3-D models, animations), simulations and eLaboratories in education require faster speeds, shorter response times and greater bandwidth.

Rural Campus Bandwidth (continued) President Obama’s national ConnectEd initiative calls for 1Gigabit (1000Mb) connectivity to all K-12 schools in the nation by It is necessary for our rural, higher education institutions to keep pace with such progress to avoid a digital divide, widening the technology gap, between secondary and post-secondary education. To increase the bandwidth to all sites via satellite circuits would be $845K annually. Increasing the bandwidth via terrestrial circuits to Dillingham, Bethel, Nome, Kotzebue and satellite to Tok, Barrow, King Salmon, and Ft. Yukon (terrestrial is not available) would be $4.5M annually. It is important to note that even this doubling does not come close to the available bandwidth at our urban community campuses. The HIGHEST rural bandwidth would be 10Mbps while the LOWEST urban bandwidth is 45Mbps.