Developing Degree Programs

What degrees are offered to students who are incarcerated?

Notably, the majority of HEP programs (including SDSU) offer a two-year degree completion program for students who have received an Associate's Degree. Since the campus at the prison tends to have limited space, the degree is often offered in a cohort model. For this reason, often one degree is offered at a time. This is the case for VISTA.

How does an institution of higher learning determine which degree to offer?

There are many considerations when determining which degree to offer. Some of these are:

• Which courses and associate's degrees do students have? What courses will transfer?
• What disciplines are students interested in pursuing?
• Which faculty are engaged and interested in teaching in this program?
• What degree offerings could facilitate graduates getting jobs, despite their experience of incarceration?

“I would try to include students when deciding what degree is offered.”

In an ideal world, how would a degree be selected?

In an ideal world, students would have access to multiple degree offerings and could choose the one that best aligned with their interests and experiences. This could be possible as HEP programs grow and there is additional space at prisons to offer classes and funding for students to participate. An option in the interim would be to offer at least one degree in the Humanities or Liberal Arts, one in the Social Sciences, and one professional degree to give variety. SDSU hopes to grow to offer at least different degrees per cohort for student choice.

How did SDSU select the degree to offer?

For the first cohort of VISTA, the initiating faculty collaborated to create a version of SDSU's Interdisciplinary Studies degree that included Art and Design, Journalism and Media Studies, and Communication. Considerations included all of the above, with a focus on which faculty were engaged in the process and what might prepare students for jobs. The VISTA team also wanted to provide a breadth of topics and a merging of critical and creative thinking that could ideally support students in any path that they wanted to pursue.

“The humanities provides a language to understand the experiences of others in various contexts. So you feel like you're not alone. And one of the things that I think the humanities offers that might not be accessible in other disciplines is variety. Humanities is inherently interdisciplinary. So we have to talk about religion. We have to talk about ethnic studies. We have to talk about geography. We have to talk about history. And I think those multiple strands of understanding how humans experience day to day life equip students with an understanding of how people have evolved over time, how opportunities might have shifted politically and how that might have impacted folks' everyday experience…One of my favorite classes that the humanities offers, at least at SDSU, is the future and thinking about what does the future look like in the United States? What does the future look like in institutions across America? And what can we do now to change or to shape the future in ways that can support our students?”

“A journalism student learns critical thinking. Our journalism students also learn how to tell stories in a very specific way that's informative, should be truthful, and should be without bias. Learning how to communicate a story whether it's about yourself or it's about issues going on in society is a really important skill that all of our journalism majors acquire.”

“Communication pervades the human experience. One of the things that I love about being a scholar and a teacher of communication is exposing our students to the concepts and the vocabulary of constructive communication alternatives…it opens up opportunities to unpack and understand one's life experiences and imagine something different…from COM 300, which is conceptualizing communication, where people learn, wow, here I thought communication just meant telling people what I want them to do, right? And then we unpack it together as a classroom community and …realize how we can take those constructs and say, ‘what do I want to do with my future that is different? And how can I articulate that not only to myself, but to others who can help me then to advocate for a different way of being?”