A Periodic Tale of Departmental Lore (Part 3)
Written by David Lapakko
During the ‘80s and ‘90s, many of our faculty often worked six days a week. Why? Because in the early ‘80s, Augsburg created Weekend College, a school for “working adults,” with 3 ½ hour class sessions on either alternate Friday nights, Saturday mornings, Saturday afternoons, or (gulp) Sunday afternoons. WEC, as it was called, was a huge financial success; during its early years, WEC and a similar program at St. Catherine’s pretty much owned that market of 30-year-olds with full-time jobs in the Twin Cities–and beyond! (We had WEC students who commuted from as far away as western Wisconsin and northern Michigan.) And although the average age for a WEC student was in the low 30s, one WEC student–a retired airline pilot–finished his degree at Augsburg at the age of 69.
In its heyday, (especially through the mid-‘90s,) total WEC enrollment was in the 1,500 range, and the presence of non-traditional age students on campus was evident; Augsburg became their weekend home, especially since many of them took more than one course each trimester. At one point In our department, we had 150 WEC majors and 150 traditional day school majors! It was quite a task to manage, since the only full-time faculty available to advise these 300 people were Deb Redmond and David Lapakko. Suffice it to say that we didn’t schedule half-hour meetings with each of them!
WEC students tended to be very good students. They were old enough to have both the skill-set and the motivation to succeed in college. According to data collected by Augsburg at the time, WEC students had GPAs that averaged half a grade higher than day school students. In most cases, day school students were able to cross-register and take a certain number of WEC classes. We often thought that was a good thing: those thirty-somethings were good role models for our traditional age students, even though sometimes the WEC students seemed to prefer being in class with only people in their age range.
By the turn of the century, WEC was facing many challenges–most notably, an increasingly competitive marketplace in which many schools were offering options for working adults. WEC enrollment started to dip, and that dip became a slow and steady downward slide. As a result, in the last five years, WEC has now become “AU,” or the Adult Undergraduate program. And rather than being a weekend program, AU is a weeknight program, with only a few hundred students and a reduced number of majors, including the elimination of Communication Studies as one of those majors.
For at least three decades, though, WEC provided an important boost to Augsburg in a number of ways, and we all have those WEC students to thank for keeping Augsburg vibrant and financially solvent. Every time you walk into an Augsburg classroom, thank a WEC student! The main reason we now have tables and chairs in every room instead of those individual student desks is that WEC students thought the individual desks were too confining and reminded them too much of high school. That alone is reason to worship their memory.
Next time: When Auggies took lots of courses at St. Thomas, or Hamline, or Macalester; the ACTC cross-registration years.