From: UNCG Mathematics and Statistics Professors
We are concerned about the discontinuation of the MA in Mathematics and the PhD in Computational Mathematics at UNCG.
Provost Storrs stated that she was recommending the discontinuation of all graduate programs in Mathematics so that we could better focus on undergraduate education.
We share the provost’s goal to improve undergraduate mathematics education, but do not agree that discontinuing our graduate programs will help us achieve it.
Below we explain why.
As a minority-serving institution, UNCG enrolls a large number of first-generation and low-income students, who struggle academically, especially in mathematics. Making this situation worse, our student population has suffered disproportionately from learning loss due to Covid.
We are faced with more poorly prepared students than ever before.
This is not just a problem at UNCG – it mirrors a national pattern. Mathematics builds on previous concepts, going all the way back to middle school. For our students to succeed in Precalculus or Business Calculus, we need to fill in the knowledge gaps. Students cannot succeed in these courses, for example, if they do not know how to add fractions. Our goal is to improve essential math skills for all our students.
Improving Student Success at the Undergraduate Level
Our faculty is improving the success rate in all lower-level mathematics and statistics courses. For example, we have developed a support course taken concurrently with Calculus to fill in the students' knowledge gaps, and we have redesigned the mathematics courses for students from the business school. Currently we are making further improvements to our Precalculus and Calculus courses and are working on a two-course sequence for Biology majors to meet the changed needs in their programs.
Our faculty bring hundreds of years of combined experience and knowledge to improving and aligning our curriculum with the current needs of the university.
Graduate students are integral to our recent improvement of student success at the undergraduate level. Lower-level service courses are designed and coordinated by tenured faculty and taught by faculty and our graduate students.
Our graduate student teachers teach 24 sections per semester and allow us to keep class sizes small and provide targeted individual help to the struggling students.
Furthermore, the Math Help Center is a critical resource. Graduate students' deeper understanding of mathematics compared to undergraduate students, makes them exceptional tutors for the Math Help Center.
The loss of our graduate programs will lead to early retirements, inevitable loss of our most active faculty to other academic institutions or the private sector, and the inability in the future to attract the best teacher-researchers.
We will lose experienced faculty and the knowledge base needed to meet the challenges we face.
Our MA met expectations according to the APR rubric. Our PhD ranks 6th out of 30 doctoral programs at UNCG, according to the APR rubric.
Nevertheless, they were recommended for discontinuation.
The APR scores reflect our successes but there is more to be taken into account. The PhD program in Computational Mathematics makes it possible to attract excellent teacher-researchers to UNCG.
Our faculty and graduate students have a strong record in fields essential for modern society, such as data analytics, applied mathematics, artificial intelligence, and computational number theory.
Our PhD graduates, most of whom teach at universities and colleges, are conduits for this knowledge, making a valuable contribution to the education of the STEM workforce in the Piedmont Triad and beyond.
A summary of achievements of our faculty and PhD graduates is provided at: https://sites.google.com/view/math-uncg/success.
The challenges of teaching undergraduate mathematics are best overcome by maintaining qualified teacher-researchers, keeping class sizes small, and staffing the math help center with qualified tutors. Our department will suffer in all these areas if our graduate programs are discontinued.
We are asking you to review the recommendation to discontinue the graduate programs in mathematics at UNCG, keeping in mind these impacts. We will be happy to discuss any solutions that do not lead to their permanent discontinuation.
We fear the irreversible consequences for all students at UNCG who rely on our mathematics expertise.
Disclaimer: These pages are not part of the web site of the Univerisity of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG) or the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UNCG.