{"id":1137,"date":"2012-02-17T13:55:05","date_gmt":"2012-02-17T17:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/?p=1137"},"modified":"2013-05-07T15:00:47","modified_gmt":"2013-05-07T19:00:47","slug":"quality-control-meet-provost-jean-morrison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/2012\/02\/17\/quality-control-meet-provost-jean-morrison\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Provost Jean Morrison"},"content":{"rendered":"

BU\u2019s chief academic officer keeps a close eye on teaching and research standards.<\/h2>\n

By Andrew Thurston
\nPhoto by Vernon Doucette<\/h4>\n

When they were in day care, you made surprise visits.<\/strong> In high school, you got parent-teacher nights. With your son or daughter away at college, you might feel a little out of the loop when it comes to keeping tabs on the quality of your child\u2019s education. You needn\u2019t worry. Jean Morrison has it covered.<\/p>\n

Provost Morrison\u2019s office<\/a> is, as she frankly puts it, \u201cultimately responsible for the quality of academic programs Boston University offers.\u201d The Office of the Provost helps run everything from study abroad opportunities to audits of academic programs; you can think of it as your surprise visit and parent-teacher night rolled into one.<\/p>\n

Morrison, who joined BU in January 2011 after a distinguished career as a teacher and administrator at the University of Southern California, spoke to Parent<\/em> about how she\u2019s making sure your children get the best education available.<\/p>\n

Parent<\/em>: When you speak with parents, what questions do they usually ask you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jean Morrison: <\/strong>The one that\u2019s commonly asked these days is about student debt: are our students going to be able to absorb the debt they incur by completing a BU undergraduate education? We work very hard as a university to ensure that the total debt our students take is not an impossible burden; I think we do very well on this point. If you take our Class of 2011 as an example, a relatively small 57 percent of those students took out loans to finance their degrees. The students who\u2019ve chosen to borrow in the federal loan program, we have been proud to see, have had a default rate of less than 1 percent. We are very mindful that this is a difficult time for families, and so the University devotes considerable time and resources to help make these costs more manageable. This year alone, undergraduates are receiving $189 million in BU scholarships.<\/p>\n

The other thing parents are concerned about is the quality of the education and experience that students receive. We have a large number of very different kinds of offerings and, with programs as diverse as engineering, theology, and communications, there\u2019s really an extraordinary breadth of opportunities for students at BU.<\/p>\n

\"Morrison_quote1\"Many parents may also be concerned about how well a BU education prepares students for today\u2019s difficult work environment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Students go on from Boston University to a whole range of different next steps\u2014some go right into the workforce in a variety of different careers and jobs; many go on to graduate school. I think students who\u2019ve attended BU tend to have a lot of real-world experience: they\u2019ve lived in Boston and navigated life in the city, and many have had international experience as part of study abroad programs. Finally, a lot of our students have internships while they\u2019re undergraduates and that\u2019s critical. Oftentimes the internships lead directly to post-baccalaureate jobs; if they don\u2019t, the experience is almost always extremely helpful to students when they go to look for a job.<\/p>\n

<\/object>
Jean Morrison speaks about her new role soon after being selected as BU\u2019s provost. Video by Devin Hahn and Joseph Chan<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

What checks do you have in place to make sure BU continues to offer the best education possible?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Morrison_quote2b\"One of the initiatives I\u2019ve launched is the academic program review. This is an ongoing effort to assess the quality of all of our academic programs. I think that will pay real dividends as far as parents are concerned because it will help us identify the strengths\u2014and the weaknesses\u2014in our academic program and give us the opportunity to fix things that need to be fixed and grow some of our strengths.<\/p>\n

What other initiatives have you introduced since joining the University?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One that\u2019s in the planning stage right now is a University-wide arts initiative to ensure all of our undergraduates have a substantive experience or interaction with the arts. I think one aspect of being a well-rounded and well-educated citizen is having a real appreciation for the arts, and the University-wide arts initiative will provide that kind of exposure to our students and also enhance the recognition of our outstanding arts programs and those of our city. We hope to launch that effort in the next academic year.<\/p>\n

What has excited you most about BU?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The University is so intimately intertwined in the city of Boston, and we have really extraordinary faculty doing exciting things. The intellectual work that characterizes the University is exceptional, and I think we\u2019re on a really important trajectory to increasingly being recognized as a very strong, high-quality research university. It\u2019s exciting to be involved in continuing efforts to improve the quality and the stature of BU because there\u2019s such a strong framework in terms of the quality of the faculty and the depth of the research and scholarship that\u2019s already going on.<\/p>\n

There are many opportunities for undergraduates at BU to be involved in some of that research. How important\u2014and unusual\u2014is that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)<\/a> is one of our absolute gems; it\u2019s a program that\u2019s funded by the Office of the Provost and it provides research opportunities for our undergraduates in a range of disciplines, from science and engineering to political science and history. One of the reasons to choose a large research university over a liberal arts college is the chance to be involved with faculty who are creating new knowledge through research and scholarship, so the opportunities students have when they participate in UROP are comparable to the experiences that any graduate student would have in an advanced doctoral program. They work closely with our very best faculty and are involved in state-of-the-art research and scholarship. Students who had a good undergraduate research experience often go on to be researchers and scholars themselves, so it\u2019s a critical opportunity for an undergraduate student to see if these kinds of intellectual experiences and activities around discovery of new knowledge are what they want to pursue.\u00a0\u25a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BU\u2019s chief academic officer keeps a close eye on teaching and research standards. By Andrew Thurston Photo by Vernon Doucette When they were in day care, you made surprise visits. In high school, you got parent-teacher nights. With your son or daughter away at college, you might feel a little out of the loop when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4966,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5291,8816],"tags":[8875,8879,8876,8877,8878,8880,8881],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4966"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1137"}],"version-history":[{"count":50,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1194,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions\/1194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/parentmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}