The Texas A&M University System reached another major milestone in the establishment of its RELLIS campus on Thursday with the approval of an extensive partnership program with Blinn College.
Approved by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and scheduled to start this coming fall, the RELLIS Academic Alliance program will allow students pursuing an associate’s degree through Blinn to continue their education and receive a bachelor’s degree from one of 10 A&M System schools throughout Texas — all while remaining in Bryan-College Station and attending class in newly constructed education facilities on the RELLIS campus.
“The future of Texas is tied to education,” A&M System Chancellor John Sharp said in a statement Thursday afternoon. “A new approach to educating the population is needed, and the collaborative RELLIS Academic Alliance is leading the way in that effort.”
The first group of students in the program will start out taking classes in Blinn’s new education building on the RELLIS campus, scheduled to open in August 2018. Students will later transition into the A&M System’s Gateway Education Complex, a facility designed to accommodate 2,500 students. Construction on the building will take place in two phases and is slated to begin in March 2018.
Before the first semester of Academic Alliance begins, each individual degree program offered by the A&M System schools on the Bryan campus must be approved by the Southern Association of College and Schools Commission on Colleges.
According to the RELLIS website, some of the planned degree offerings for Fall 2018 include a B.S. in nursing from Prairie View A&M, B.A.s in Criminal Justice and Public Administration from Tarleton State, a Bachelor of Business Administration from A&M-Corpus Christi and B.A. in Psychology from A&M-Kingsville.
Blinn and the A&M System also plan to offer an array of workforce certificate and training programs at RELLIS.