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The University of Central Arkansas in Conway has the state's only physical therapy school that offers a doctoral degree. Arkansas State University also offers a physical therapy degree program, but no doctorate.

The physical therapy school has some crucial distinctions when compared to medical or nursing schools.

"We rank our students by grade point, GRE scores, and the best get in," said Dr. Nancy Reese, chair of the program at UCA. "Once we have that ranking, we interview them and then offer them a slot. We also maintain an alternate list."

The flip side of that is UAMS' admission process, where 70 percent of the student body has to be from Arkansas and then equally divided among the four congressional districts.

UCA has 56 students enrolled in the program.

Admission requirements include a bachelor's degree, a minimum GPA of 3.0 and the most recent average GRE score (980).

With 14 faculty members, requirements to teach in the PT program differ from those for teaching in a nursing program. While all of UCA's instructors are physical therapists, not all have a doctorate or master's degree in physical therapy. In Arkansas, an instructor is required to have a Master of Science in nursing to teach in a bachelor's degree-level RN program.

The program has been with UCA since 1970, but has only been offered at the Conway campus since 1987.

"We actually started at the old Baptist [Health] hospital," Reese said. "The classrooms were on the second floor of the nurses' dorm, but, of course, that building isn't even there anymore. It was imploded."

Reese explained what prompted Baptist Health to add physical therapy. "They brought in Joe Finnell, who had been at Baylor, to run the school," she explained. "Back then, you could get a degree in physical therapy or a certificate, but he knew that it needed to be affiliated with a college. He knew that the bachelor's degree program was the future, so he took it shopping to the colleges and it was Jeff Farris, who was the president then, (who) said yes, so as the program grew, and UCA became more involved it just became practical to move it to Conway."

Reese, who has her physical therapy degree from UCA, has seen the changes firsthand. She started as an instructor in 1986 and became chair in 2004.

UCA has a three-story, freestanding facility dedicated to the PT school on the site of the old football practice field, not the cramped quarters the program once occupied in the old gym.

"The only school that has a comparable building to UCA is Southern Cal," Reese said. "That's what we were told when we hosted the vice president of the physical therapy education association."

ie.
October 2006

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