AN OVERVIEW OF WHAT’S HAPPENING AT YOUR ALMA MATER.

U.S. News & World Report's map of the colleges and universities in the nation that graduate students with the least amount of debt associated with their degrees featured only one Texas school in the top 25 — The University of Texas at Arlington. UTA came in second only to Princeton in the lowest average amount students owe for their degrees upon graduating — $14,743 — well under the national average of $18,587 among the universities surveyed for the rankings, according to U.S. News. Lingering and unmanageable debt from loans taken out to finance a college education has become a topic of national dialogue in recent years. "At UTA we are focusing our efforts on providing students with an extremely high quality degree which prepares them to join the workforce ready to contribute, at an affordable price — one of the most affordable, in fact, in the nation," UTA President Vistasp Karbhari said. READ MORE

Researchers at UTA are working with Boeing and NASA to better understand the role that social networks play in the completion rates and academic performance of students taking online courses. "Learning online is exploding in popularity, as is the research evaluating how to best learn with technology," said George Siemens, executive director of UTA's Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Lab and principal investigator of the study. "This project with LINK Research Lab will examine how social networks contribute to student success." The researchers are studying the performance of students in an online four-course certification program in engineering. READ MORE.

UTA is the highest ranked public institution in North Texas and one of the highest ranked in the state for preparing students to be successful elementary school teachers, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. The NCTQ is a non-partisan research and policy group that evaluates teacher preparation programs. The NCTQ's 2016 Landscape in Teacher Preparation examined 875 undergraduate elementary teacher programs in 396 public and 479 private colleges and universities across the United States. UTA's undergraduate elementary teacher preparation program ranked 24th nationally, placing it in the nation's top 3 percent. READ MORE

Regarded as one of the top young coaches in the nation, J.T. Wenger — a former assistant at UCLA, Colorado, and Michigan State — has been named the head coach of the UTA volleyball program. Athletics Director Jim Baker announced Wenger's hiring on Wednesday. READ MORE

UTA alumna Evelyn Wang credits the University's unique partnership with Shimadzu Scientific Instruments for the job offer she received while still a student at UTA. Evelyn has two degrees from UTA – a B.S. in biochemistry and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry – and is now an application scientist at Shimadzu's North American headquarters. WATCH HER STORY

J.-C. Chiao and Frank Lewis, both electrical engineering professors at UTA, have been named fellows of leading academic associations. Chiao will be inducted as a fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, "for achievements in micro medical devices and systems." The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently elected Lewis a fellow, citing him for his "contributions in developing new neural adaptive control architectures, parameter tuning algorithms, and techniques with improved performance for nonlinear control systems." READ MORE