School of Architecture and Urban Planning Approved to Update Masters and Ph.D. Programs

The Graduate Program Review Committee passed a motion for the School of Architecture and Urban Planning to merge their MA and Ph.D. programs together due to administrative issues.

The Graduate Representative from the Biology department Peter Dunn said, “There’s only five Ph.D. holding faculty and we would like our Ph.D. students supervised by Ph.D. holding faculty so that’s a major issue there.” He also said that they were in need of a director of Graduate Studies.

The School of Architecture and Urban Planning currently hosts 500 undergraduate students in the Bachelor of Science of Architectural Studies. They also host a Master of Architecture with about 80 students enrolled. The Ph.D. of Architecture program is the only one available to students in the state of Wisconsin.

“The Masters of Architecture is a credited, professional degree that deals with the licensure of architecture,” said Chair of the Department of Architecture Mo Zell. “That’s a two-year, professional degree for students with an undergraduate degree in architecture and there’s a three-year program for students who don’t have a degree in architecture so that’s where the bulk of our focus for faculty are.”

Zell also said that their Master of Science is a one-year program that was originally started as an opportunity to dive deeper into their field, but that original idea did not work out as planned. “We haven’t had the both the kind of marketing strategy and the faculty interest to develop it enough,” said Zell.

Six years ago, the program was started with intentions of creating a degree where students pick their areas of academic focus. That strategy did not go as planned and that’s where the idea of merging the two upper level programs came from.

Just like other departments across campus, the master program at UW-Milwaukee has declining enrollment rates and the School of Architecture and Urban Planning is brainstorming different student recruitment tactics. In past years, the higher education program peaked with 150 students enrolled but now there are only 75 and Zell believes that the Master of Science program is a way to grow that enrollment right now. In order to hold a class for the semester, classes need to have at least three students enrolled and the architecture program cannot sustain with the small number of students they currently have.

While Zell knows they are not in the financial place to hire additional faculty members to lead the higher education programs she proposed that combining the programs would save money for the department as well as recruit more students to increase enrollment rates.

The architecture department is also in need of a Director of Graduate Studies and Zell believes that she would be a strong candidate.

“I think as the chair, because our Ph.D. is not the focus of the faculty and the curriculum, it’s actually helpful, I think, for the Chair to be in that position because I can address all three programs simultaneously as opposed to a Ph.D. faculty maybe focused on only one of them,” said Zell.

“It seems like there’s an opportunity here,” said head of the Graduate Program Review Committee David DiValerio. He also mentioned that it was one of the first Master and Ph.D. combined reviews. This month’s session ended with the entire committee in favor of passing the motion to approve Zell’s proposal and reassess in 10 years.