BOLIVAR — What began as a dream four years ago concerning an area of underutilized potential in maximizing enrollment revenue has now turned into a glittering jewel of a reality at Southwest Baptist University (SBU).
The Warren B. Davis Family Physical Therapy Center was dedicated Sept. 29, 2011. It is home to the biggest campus-based graduate program at SBU—and one that will be helping the university to be financially viable for years to come.
Limited by space in the Wheeler Building as the 2000s came to a close, physical therapy was bound to only three classes of 40 students apiece (120 total) despite having many more applications that wound up being turned away. Trustees became aware of the problem and leaped into the sparkling new world of the Davis facility with three classes of 80 (240 total) and double the faculty members.
A bigger class of 61 students is working its way toward a May graduation. After that come the numbers that trustees and SBU President C. Pat Taylor have been waiting for with classes of 75, 78, and 80, respectively. That means a bloc of 233 students is aiming at the goal of doctor of physical therapy.
“August we will have our first true full version of the potential for 80 in each class,” said Steven Lesh, who is in his eighth year as department chair.
Lesh said he was not surprised when SBU fixed its gaze on physical therapy as a helpful revenue stream. He reflected on something he learned some time ago in the health care industry – that physical therapy is typically a revenue-generating department in a hospital.
“As a department chair, I don’t think like an academic,” he said. “I think like a clinician. A lot of academics think, ‘My unit’s the most important.’ As a physical therapist, I’ve been a hospital administrator, and physical therapy had to help pay the bills for the hospital. So for me, that’s not unnatural. That’s expected.
“Dr. Taylor has said for years that we need more programs at graduate levels to help fund the operation, and this is part of that equation. But so is education, and so are the new graduate programs in nursing.”
SBU Physical Therapy is nationally known. Lesh easily listed 15-20 cases where students from the East and West Coasts and many states in between have chosen the program. As a rule these students find tuition cost at SBU and cost of living in Bolivar to be more affordable than in their cities and states of origin. Regionally SBU has few if any real peers in the small campus, evangelical university category for physical therapy, which also tends to boost enrollment.
Full-time faculty has grown from six to 12, plus two part-time staff.
“Physical therapy has been a valuable part of the health care delivery system for decades,” Lesh said. “When you get people up and you get them moving—get them out of the hospitals, out of their chair—that leads to better health outcomes. The beauty from where we’re at is that we’ve got a very stable program. We’ve been able to control the growth and expand our program to serve more. There are just not that many programs out there because there’s a lot of cost involved.”
The department focuses on the development of the clinician and a servant’s heart. Mission trips are used to help prepare students to be servant leaders in a global society, in accordance with the SBU mission statement.