as reported by The Texas Tribune<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cSo many kids from the Valley who go to law school, go to St. Mary\u2019s,\u201d Bailey said. \u201cBut this is going to really help ambitious kids who really can\u2019t afford to leave home for a variety of reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the only institution with a law school in South Texas, St. Mary\u2019s serves a large number of Rio Grande Valley students, Erevelles said. Each year, about 5% of incoming law students are from the Valley, but many of them might not end up returning home to practice, creating a shortage of lawyers in the region.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the Rio Grande Valley, you\u2019ve got roughly about one attorney for every 800 residents,\u201d Erevelles said. \u201cNow if you compare that to Bexar County or other Texas metropolitan areas, that number varies between one for every 100 residents or one for every 300 residents.\u201d<\/p>\n
The St. Mary\u2019s online law program is highly competitive and selective, Erevelles said. It currently welcomes about 2% of all applicants for its available 25 seats. So setting aside a minimum of five spots for Valley residents means allocating 20% of the total space.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To qualify, students must be accepted and enrolled in the St. Mary\u2019s online J.D. or M.L.S. program, provide proof of residency in the counties of Cameron, Hidalgo, Willacy or Starr and complete the UTRGV Hub student registration process.<\/p>\n
UTRGV agreed to set aside classroom space in the Edinburg campus library for this cohort to have access to technology, study space and support when needed. This is the first step in a program that both presidents say could grow with demand.\u00a0<\/p>\n
St. Mary\u2019s staff will help advise the UTRGV faculty on strengthening its pre-law program. They will also provide legal research resources for the students in the hub, as well as academic support and academic oversight that will mean having representatives from the college visiting the students at UTRGV periodically.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt also means that the students have full access to the UTRGV library resources, study spaces, campus facilities and so there\u2019s now a physical presence,\u201d Erevelles said. \u201cLearning happens not just from the faculty member, but from each other as well so they can ask questions, they can support each other in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Decades in the making<\/p>\n
Conversations about the need for a law school in the Rio Grande Valley have persisted through the years. About 13 years ago when legislation called for the dissolution of UT-Pan American and UT-Brownsville to create UTRGV, many wondered if this opened the door for the creation of a law school.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
But UTRGV\u2019s promise at the time was to establish a medical school, the first in the region and grow access to the medical field and to health care in the region. The UTRGV School of Medicine welcomed its first class in 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve added not only the medical school, but since [we\u2019ve opened] the only school of pediatric medicine in Texas, we\u2019ve added physical therapy, and optometry starts in fall of \u201827,\u201d Bailey said. \u201cAnd so based on all those things we just really didn\u2019t have the resources to start a law school and this turned out to be a wonderful solution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Erevelles said conversations about expanding the St. Mary\u2019s presence in the Valley started years ago, but they wondered if this was the right move for the private Catholic university.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me it always felt like if we\u2019re going into the Valley, why not partner with the big university in town,\u201d Erevelles said. \u201cAnd there was a lot of conversation because you\u2019re bringing together, first of all, two separate universities, but you\u2019re bringing a private-public partnership to table.\u201d<\/p>\n
For St. Mary\u2019s, this type of public-private partnership is not necessarily new, as the university has similar agreements with other higher education institutions. For UTRGV this is the first of this level and scope with a private higher education institution, Bailey said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Both university presidents didn\u2019t rule out the potential for growth of this partnership in the future based on demand. That\u2019s why they agreed to start with a minimum of five seats and go from there. The two presidents talked about building an accelerated \u201c3+3\u201d program to one day allow students to earn the JD degree in six years instead of the traditional seven years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Growth for UTRGV could also mean expanding the hub, as the UTRGV campuses in Edinburg, Brownsville and Harlingen sit between 30 to 60 miles apart. And for Erevelles this might also come with adding more seats to the program.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got to see what the interest looks like and we got to see what the growth looks like,\u201d Erevelles said. \u201cAnd we\u2019ve also got to see what can be supported. The thing that has to remain front and center is the quality of what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new partnership between St. Mary\u2019s University and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley has secured a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":704901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5133],"tags":[5229,294117,203433,17928,7202,7203,54439,294118,358,269643,7453,3187,7815,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,203425,20705,294119],"class_list":["post-704900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-america","tag-armando-mando-martinez","tag-guy-bailey","tag-rio-grande-valley","tag-san-antonio","tag-sanantonio","tag-st-marys-university","tag-st-marys-university-school-of-law","tag-texas","tag-the-university-of-texas-rio-grande-valley","tag-top-story","tag-tx","tag-typedaily","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-utrgv","tag-wc-750-1000","tag-winston-erevelles"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116348045648476134","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=704900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/704901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=704900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=704900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=704900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}