Georgia Perimeter College has suspended its athletic recruiting. HOPE scholarship awards should not be affected. And the mascot of the merged institutions will be Georgia State’s panther.
Those details were provided in meetings with faculty, staff and students Tuesday at Georgia State and Georgia Perimeter colleges. The Board of Regents for the University System of Georgia agreed last week to consolidate those two institutions.
GSU and GPC presidents Mark Becker and Rob Watts, along with Shelley Nickel, the University System administrator leading the merger plans, answered questions for more than an hour at the two schools. Few students showed up, but some submitted questions using social media during the sessions, which were also streamed on the schools’ websites.
Much of the discussion addressed possible staffing changes, costs and education programs at both institutions.
“It comes down to affordability and how (the merger) will affect the job market here at GPC with the loss of jobs,” said Georgia Perimeter student Typhani Payne, 22.
Faculty will be allowed to retain their rank and tenure after the merger, but some layoffs are likely. It’s too soon to tell whether employees would see a salary increase and whether any of GPC’s five campuses would be shuttered, officials said.
For students, a two-tiered tuition and admissions model, similar to the current system, will be likely at the main campus downtown and the two-year community college-type campuses of Georgia Perimeter.
“This all still sounds a little fishy to me. I’m not 100 percent sold yet,” said Nykki Ogbomoh, 20, a sophomore chemistry major at Georgia State, who is still concerned about costs and about students bypassing rigorous classes at Georgia State by starting at the GPC campuses.
The new school will operate as one university with multiple campuses, Becker said.
“This is something new, but not something that hasn’t been done in some shape or form,” he said, pointing to other colleges like the University of South Carolina and Penn State that have combined with associate-degree offering institutions.
The merger, which will be the sixth for the university system in the past three years, will make the new school — to be known as Georgia State University — the largest college in the state with more than 54,000 students. Once the 18-month organization, approval and implementation process is completed, students would begin at the consolidated school in fall 2016.
A website has been set up to track the consolidation process, consolidation@gsu.edu.
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