STEVENS POINT, Wis. (WSAU) — A Stevens Point based business has given the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point its largest single gift ever in its 122 year history. Sentry Insurance has been working with UWSP officials to create an endowment that will fund two faculty positions and create a new undergraduate program.
Chancellor Bernie Patterson says work behind the scenes for over a year has led to this day. “Pete McPartland, CEO and President of Sentry Insurance, was on our campus and presented the university with a check for four million dollars.”
The $4 million gift more than doubles Sentry Insurance’s support to UW-Stevens Point since 1985.
Patterson says the gift will make a huge difference at the university in terms of the academic programs and what they can offer the students. “It will allow us to open up a new major in data analytics, which is the coming thing now. “Big data” is the talk of the business community, and being able to train students to go right into that line of work is what we need at Sentry, our other partners at Skyward, and at Delta Dental, and across central and northern Wisconsin.”
Patterson says the demand for people in data analytics is skyrocketing, because nearly everything we do requires the management of data. “Our country, our state is in an information technology crisis. You can’t go to work, you can’t go to the grocery store, you can’t get your car repaired without interacting significantly with technology. We get dressed in the morning and put technology in our pocket or our purse, and so it’s everywhere. Everywhere you turn, and having the workforce that can deal with that technology and make sense of it is going to be critical going forward.”
Currently, only UW River Falls offers undergraduate studies in data analytics in Wisconsin. A consortium of ten schools including UWSP offer a masters degree in this field.
The Sentry Insurance Endowed Chair in Computational Analytics will be part of the Computing and New Media Technologies Department. The Sentry Insurance Endowed Chair in Business Analytics will be part of the School of Business and Economics. The new undergraduate major in data analytics will be offered, beginning in fall 2016, pending UW Board of Regents approval. The program will feature an interdisciplinary curriculum that integrates the fields of business, computer science, economics, geographic information systems, mathematics and statistics.
The four million dollar gift will be invested by the UWSP Foundation, and the interest from that investment will pay for the two staff positions and assist the new program in perpetuity.
Patterson says the university is also working with other area partners during what’s called “the quiet phase” of the UW Stevens Point capital campaign. He says they are working on additional partnerships to strengthen the programs at the UWSP campus, and they anticipate announcing more partnerships later this spring.
The Chancellor says these partnerships with businesses, individuals, and communities are the new way of moving the university forward in an era of less state education funding.
(Listen to our interview with Chancellor Bernie Patterson on our website, here.)
