Adult students in the Board of Trustees Bachelor of Arts Degree Program may have to take less electives and more required classes next year.

If the request from the BOT program passes through the Council on Academic Affairs Thursday, students in the program would be required to take a senior seminar and six semester hours in communication and language courses. In return, they would only be required to take 15 semester hours of electives instead of 18 to 20, William Hine, dean of the School of Continuing Education, said.

The program, which is for returning adult students over the age of 25, is designed to ease returning students back into higher education and provide them with an easier opportunity to get a degree while working a full-time job or raising a family.

The program was originally set up so students could take courses from any of the five institutions involved in the Board of Governor University System, regardless of which institution they were actually enrolled in, Hine said.

Three years ago, the BGUS ended and each university established its own Board of Trustees, he said. With the end of that system, some universities are requiring BOT students to take courses only from the university in which they are enrolled.

Therefore, students would be taking 20 semester hours, which includes the addition of the communications and languages courses and the senior seminar at Eastern, instead of the 15 hours students are currently required to take from any school in the BGUS institution before it ended.

Despite the addition of five semester hours, students would still only need a total of 120 semester hours to graduate, Hine said.

The request would make the program more “related to other on-campus admission and graduation requirements,” Hine said.

In addition, “We want to strengthen the communications and languages portion of the program,” he said.

The Council on Academic Affairs will meet to discuss the issue at 2 p.m. Thursday in the Arcola/Tuscola Room of the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union.