071: Job-Ready Education

Solutions for Higher Education with Southern Utah University President Scott L Wyatt

Show Notes:

In this week’s episode, President Wyatt and Scott Meredith spend some time with Stephen Lisonbee, SUU’s Executive Director of Regional Services. They discuss the Utah Legislature’s focus on training the rising generations to fill technical and skill-heavy jobs, such as engineering, medicine, business and education.

Featured Quotes:

I began working at a young age and by the time I graduated high school had four or five jobs. And those jobs taught me several skills that put me in a position where I understood how to work in the workforce. And currently, because of the recession we went through, a lot of our youth that are now coming into education missed those opportunities because they were filled by other adults and others. So, they’re needing to learn some of those skills and they might be starting their engagement to industry a little later, but we’re now kind of adjusting that. So, it’s interesting to see how important these jobs are for our students. Probably more so now than they once were.
Stephen Lisonbee, Executive Director of Regional Services at SUU

I was getting off of an airplane the other day and somebody complained to me about the Utah Legislature and I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” We are receiving 50% of our funding from the Utah Legislature. There’s no state that I’m aware of that even come close to that . . . And that support comes to us for the real career-focused kinds of…the things that we think are career-focused like engineering and the medical careers and business and education, but it also comes to us for all of the humanities and arts and everything else.
Scott L Wyatt, Southern Utah University President

Links Associated with this Episode:

• Transcript

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