By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Since its inception in 2015, the Sitka-based education nonprofit Outer Coast has offered academic programming, from summer seminars to full semesters, to students looking for a non-traditional way of earning college credit.
But now Outer Coast is on the cusp of obtaining academic accreditation as a two-year college.
Founder and board member Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins announced Saturday that Outer Coast will commence operations as a two-year liberal arts college in the fall of 2024.
Outer Coast Dean Matthew Spellberg leads a class this morning in the Yaw Building on the SJ Campus. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
“This is really the culmination of a nearly decade-long process,” Kreiss-Tomkins said.
“For a number of years now Outer Coast has run academic programming, and in more recent years, post-secondary academic programming for current college students or sort of gap-year students,” Kreiss-Tomkins said. “And the next stepping stone in the series of stepping stones is a proper, full, two-year post-secondary program, a liberal arts college.”
After offering its first summer seminar in 2018 to high school juniors and seniors, the school, which is located on the former Sheldon Jackson College campus, has continued that program. Along with summer seminars, Outer Coast also has had semester- and year-long post-secondary programs.
Accreditation is the next logical step in becoming a liberal arts college, said Outer Coast executive director Bryden Sweeney-Taylor.
“We sort of have a pathway to (accreditation) in a way that has not existed up until this moment that makes us feel confident that the goal of opening in the fall of 2024 is achievable,” he said.
The organizers’ objective is to operate a college that offers subjects from Tlingit language and the humanities to more technical science and math courses leading to an associate’s degree. Sweeney-Taylor draws the concept for Outer Coast from Deep Springs, a two-year college he attended before going on to Harvard. Deep Springs College combines academics with student independence and physical work on a ranch in the High Sierra not far from Bishop, California.
Outer Coast students will be earning an associate’s degree in general studies, and Sweeney-Taylor said he expects a majority will find it “a pathway to transfer with junior standing into a four-year institution” where they will earn their undergraduate degree.
Kreiss-Tomkins said Outer Coast aims to engender “academic and intellectual rigor, personal responsibility and sort of not hand-holding students, giving them responsibilities that they can learn from and grow into.”
After a decade representing Sitka in the Legislature, Kreiss-Tomkins isn’t running for re-election this year to the seat he first won at age 24. He was a senior at Yale University in 2012 when he dropped out of college to run for the first of his four terms in the state House.
Though the planned Outer Coast curriculum will span a wide variety of topics, Sweeney-Taylor said there’s a common thread.
“Our curriculum is increasingly coming into focus with an emphasis on critical thinking, clear communication and collaboration,” he said. “And in particular an emphasis on the ways that Indigenous ways of knowing and more western European ways of knowing can interact and intersect.”
Another core tenet is community service, he added.
“We’ve had students who are embedded with local organizations from the Science Center to SAIL, SAFV to Brave Heart Volunteers and working with the Pioneer Home, and many others showing up and providing 10 to 15 hours a week of the kind of work that helps those organizations deliver their missions,” he said. “And I think that for us is really sort of the essence of service for Outer Coast… It’s an opportunity to see how their time and energy can benefit the larger community.”
Outer Coast is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation and will keep that status after accreditation, Sweeney-Taylor said. Tuition for a summer seminar is $6,000, a semester runs $12,500 and a full year is $25,000, but Outer Coast “will meet 100 percent of demonstrated financial need for all students,” Outer Coast’s website says.
The school website continues, “Through a need-blind admissions process and a holistic assessment of each student’s financial circumstance, we are committed to ensuring that cost is never a barrier to attendance for any student admitted to the Summer Seminar or the Outer Coast Year.”
The plan is to continue that financial aid policy once Outer Coast is up and running as a two-year college.
“That’s definitely our intention,” Sweeney-Taylor said. “And I think that’s one of the things that we have been committed to doing from the get go. The model is to be able to have an approach to higher education that makes it less expensive for everyone, no matter a student’s financial means.”
He wants the school to attract a wide range of students.
“The thing that I think I’m most anxious about or nervous about is just how Outer Coast can be clearly communicating what we see as the value proposition for students, particularly here in Alaska, and with a focus on Alaska Native and rural Alaskan students,” he said. “But I think even more broadly, the narrative currently in higher ed in the country is sort of what is the value of higher education?”
While many educational models have shifted away from humanities courses in favor of more technical instruction, Sweeney-Taylor underscored the value of a liberal arts degree.
“Lots of education in this current day and age focuses on how to do things and is instrumental in that way. And I think that a liberal arts education is all about how to think and do things,” he said. “And that sort of focus on critical thinking, on reflecting on a particular circumstance and then figuring out how to approach it and then act in that context, I think is incredibly valuable.”
Outer Coast, he said, aims to prepare a student to live as an engaged citizen.
“Thinking about the education of the whole person, and what it means to be a citizen in our world, and thinking about the implications of our actions on a broader level,” Sweeney-Taylor said. “And that is, I think, one of the fundamental questions that the liberal arts are grappling with.”
