News

The College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University had been careful about how it wanted to enter the crowded arena of offering online undergraduate degrees. Its first offering was an undergraduate general business degree program that started with the Fall 2018 semester two weeks ago, and all indications are that having a little patience is a good thing.

“We were hoping that our first class of online general business students would have in the neighborhood of 20 students,” said Rachel Nieman, Director of Recruitment & Retention at B&E. “To our pleasant surprise, we have 25 students in the class. There is a mix of traditional-aged and non-traditional students in the program.”

The former students of a staple in the West Virginia University Department of Accounting are giving back to the College and University to honor his work and to look to the future of the industry. The gift is given in honor of Professor Robert S. Maust, who retired in 2013 after more than 50 years at theCollege of Business and Economics and made a tremendous impact on the lives of countless accounting students.

Among those former students is John Wilson, a 1989 Master of Accountancy graduate, partner at Schmidt & Wilson LLC in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, and owner of Cox Well Service, LLC, in Spencer, West Virginia, worked directly with Maust as a graduate assistant during his time at WVU, and said Maust helped shape his career. Recently, Wilson made a generous gift to establish an endowed scholarship fund, the Professor Robert Maust Scholarship. Recipients of the Professor Robert Maust Scholarship must be undergraduate students enrolled full-time at B&E and majoring in accounting.