719
Three small but modern campuses in Del Rio, Eagle Pass, and Uvalde make up Sul Ross State University’s Rio Grande College, which enrolls approximately 950 upper-level undergraduate and graduate students per semester. The college offers 12 bachelor’s and 7 master’s degrees that range from international trade and counseling to criminal justice and biology. RGC will add degree programs in chemistry in 2009 and computer science in 2010.
Most of RGC’s students hail from the southwest Texas region, and they benefit from the college’s small class sizes and attentive faculty. RGC’s education students consistently earn passing rates of 99 to 100 percent in the teacher certification course, and the college graduates the largest number of public school teachers, counselors, and administrators in the U.S. borderlands. In fact, the Future Educators Club is one of RGC’s 10 student organizations.
The Del Rio campus features new buildings and facilities for laboratory science courses in addition to more traditional classrooms. Located across the border from Piedras Negras, Mexico, the Eagle Pass campus has computer labs and learning centers, and students like to shop at Mexico’s outdoor markets. Academic support services and student services are based at the Uvalde campus, which is near Garner State Park, a popular recreational area. RGC has one of the most sophisticated distance learning setups in the state, which relieves students from long commutes among the three campuses. Each site has four distance learning classrooms with multiple 63-inch plasma television screens. A recent $2.8 million grant, allocated over the next five years, will allow RGC to continue to upgrade its distance learning facilities as well as its course offerings.