The EMU-AAUP sent around an email about this the other day and I just now finally got a chance to read this in annarbor.com, “Rick Snyder wants 3% funding boost for public universities.” I suppose it’s too early to know for sure how this is going to work out, but I wonder if there’s anyone who can attempt to explain this.
Here’s a quote from annarbor.com:
The 3 percent increase is tied to a formula that state legislators have been working to establish for months, using input from universities who have offered assistance but expressed concern about formula funding.
The formula will be based on four metrics: The growth in the number of undergraduate degree completions, the number of undergraduate completions in critical skill areas, the number of undergraduate Pell Grant recipients and compliance with tuition restraint.
If state universities increase tuition more than 4 percent, their funding will be affected, said Lt. Gov. Brian Calley. The 4 percent benchmark is significantly lower than the current metric of 7 percent.
“If we’re going to be increasing state support, we’re going to ask that tuition restraint be lowered from that previous benchmark,” Calley said.
In 2011-2012 just two universities, Central Michigan University and Eastern Michigan University, kept tuition increases below 4 percent.
And then the union sent around a document about the Governor’s recommendations which suggested quite a range in funding increases, with Grand Valley getting a 7.6% increase while EMU would get a 2.3% increase. So what is all this? Anybody have a clue?
Isn’t it obvious?
State universities are being rewarded for having admission standards that dramatically reduce the number of students who lack the skill set to survive at a university. It also appears that in Lansing real admissions standards and student success trump a history of 0, 0, 0 and last year’s tuition increase that was well below what was needed to insure an improvement to the academic environment at EMU.
I have to agree with your comment. I worked for the Holman Learning Center (Success Center now) while I was at EMU. I tutored in the sciences, but spent a significant portion of my time teaching sentence structure, paragraph formation, and generally how to write. Not all students are going to be great writers, but I assumed that to be accepted into a university, you should be able to be write a coherent short essay and know not to use slang in formal writing. This is just an example that I directly had, but I know of others that were based around basic math and reading skills that were sorely lacking.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a higher admission standard at Eastern. Even then, it wouldn’t be as if EMU would suddenly have the bar set to Ivy League standard, but just something to show that a student can meet the basics of writing, reading, and math would be a good start. I’d personally like to see science literacy as well, but that’s a wish.
Would it affect minority student admissions more? Quite frankly, yes, but it isn’t because of their race or abilities. It is because their schooling in their home districts didn’t provide the necessary education. That topic is an entirely different can of worms, though it does need to be addressed.
In short though, university should not be the place to make up for high school deficiencies.
And then Susan Moeller’s email yesterday doesn’t exactly add clarity to the situation. To quote:
So, we’re in the hole for this year (thanks, 0/0/0%!) and the increase next year is really not an increase.
Hold on folks. There’ll be cuts and layoffs eventually. The handwriting is on the wall.
I agree with the good points that Lamont and the 2010Alumna make.
For years – at least ten – it’s been advocated by many, and predicted by some of us in higher ed, that “metrics” of achievement for public universities be adopted and used for funding purposes. That much, on the face of it, is not unreasonable: taxpayers deserve to get assurance that their money is well used. What those metrics should be is exceedingly complicated….the Governor and his team are seeking to devise a set of them, and they will most certainly hurt EMU relative to other state schools.
I recall two EMU presidents, Sam the Inept and Lazy, and John Fallon the Utterly Ignorant, who I talked about this issue of metrics of achievement with. Both assured me that they would never ever be adopted. I told them they were wrong. They were.
One more thing: The real budget issue for EMU is how long we’ll continue to take about $20 million a year from revenue from tuition and taxpayers, and use it to subsidize athletics. With that much money, you could CUT tuition a few percentage points AND also improve academic services to students.
But such an action would require “Education First” be more than a slogan. It should be.
if emu raised its admissions standards, less students would attend … therefore, shrinking emu … resulting in less administrators, less budget for athletics, less staffing in campus life, etc.
retention @ emu has been an issue for years … emu is only concerned with getting students enrolled for the sake of SCH reporting
I think the balance/dance between raising admission standards and how that corresponds to graduation rates, retention, and all the rest is delicate and complex to say the least. There are examples of universities that increased admission standards and actually saw increases in applications, but I think that would take a while at EMU. And as I’ve said several times before, I think when government leaders and the general public alike call for higher standards at places like EMU, they don’t realize that might mean that their citizens and family might not be admitted to places like EMU.
I also think that the other long term problem EMU has got is that it needs to diversify more. Maybe this is just my department, but I think it’s still too K-12 education degree-centric because the long-term demographics on that are quite bad.
From the outside, looking at the numbers, if you’re the parent of an 18 year old college bound high school senior, EMU looks pretty bad: 6 out of 10 EMU freshmen don’t graduate from EMU. The negative peer effect is considerable, and those drop outs take on a lot of debt and have nothing to show for it.
This problem has existed for decades – now the state and parents are noticing.
Oh – an I think EMU is a fine school. Our performance for students in their first two years of college just isn’t close to what it could be and should be.
Would raising admissions standards greatly help graduation rates? When I was in college, I never thought it was on the school whether I or anyone else graduated or not. I was of the opinion it was all on me to graduate and thankfully I did. I know EMU has many untraditional or older students with families, full-time jobs and other responsiblites that someone like myself didn’t have while in college that might effect their ability to graduate. EMU is an acessible university for them. Would EMU have to move away from being a “school of opportunity” in the near future?
My understanding is that the single best predictor of success in college is the high school GPA. I believe this is well established. And at EMU, we accept lots of students whose high school GPA suggests will be unable to graduate from EMU. In other words, year after year, the students who fail out within a year or two are identifiably similar in terms of academic performance; many can be accurately predicted to fail. We do them no justice by accepting them and taking their money. Some of these students are illiterate and could not do well in any college that has meaningful degrees (or some huge remedial program). So why do we accept them?
what I just wrote about how a parent would see EMU from the outside, based on the numbers, is of course even more true for legislators and budget makers.
Mark, correct me if I’m wrong (I know you will), but I believe the “drop-out” rate doesn’t capture people who transfer to other schools and complete degrees there. If that is true, then we are also counting people who come to EMU for a year or two with the plan being all along that they’ll transfer to UM or somewhere else after their first or second year. We do get a lot of those folks, for whom EMU was a “safety school.”
I’ve heard many folks from community college administration say something quite similar. They get dinged for the fact that a bunch of their students go there for a year and then transfer to EMU (and elsewhere) to get a degree. On one hand, that is exactly what CCs are for in many instances – helping make that transition from high school to college for a lot of kids. On the other hand, I hear that those transfers don’t count in their graduation rate and are treated as dropouts, instead.
I’m not arguing that we are just fine and have no work to do on retention, but I do think it is useful to look at what we are actually measuring, and whether it is really what we intend to measure. Unfortunately, (again, as I understand this and I might be wrong), I don’t think we have the ability to redefine the measurement all on our own. I think this is part of a nationwide reporting system, yes?
Hi Licorice,
You ask good questions! My answer, in rough numbers: the six year graduation rate for EMU freshman ranges around 38%, and has for decades. That means 6 out of 10 EMU freshmen don’t graduate; if those who successfully transfer to another four year school and graduate from it in the six year transfer rate, were counted in the EMU six year rate, that would add about 8 or 9% to the 38%.
So that’s still a rate of under 50%.
All this is by Federal definitions that apply to all schools: so the bias in the data against SUCCESSFUL transfers exists for all schools, not just those like EMU. This flaw in the data is real, but standard for all schools —- and it in no way should be used to minimize the value of the standard of a six year graduation rate for assessing higher education.
Also, the number of people who graduate from EMU more than six years after starting college at EMU is vanishingly small, as elsewhere. At EMU, we take the incoming freshman class and then atomize it, ensuring that it has little or no common experiences — and therefore, the first year class doesn’t know itself and becomes alienated, lonely, overlooked and overworked. And 6 out of 10 of that class leaves EMU without a degree, year after year, in a predictable, repeating fashion.
I am not a numbers guy, but I have closely studied all the relevant data for EMU I can find, and I am confident in these observations.
Mark,
One other question: where do your numbers for students who transfer away from EMU and complete degrees elsewhere, come from? Or is the 8-9% a guesstimate? Again, I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that this wasn’t something we (or most schools) tracked, due to the immense difficulty of following up with students who have left the institution.
Again, I’m not attempting to suggest that what EMU does is all just fine (for many reasons, it is not). But it seems to me that the metrics we use to measure success need to be good measures of the concept in question. The fact that these metrics are used at all schools does not overcome the problem that the measures are still deeply flawed, if what we actually want to know is “who graduates?” and not “who graduates from the same institution where they began?”
On another note, while I agree that we have challenges with the wide array of college readiness we see among our student population, I am surprised to see the lack of reflection among some who are suggesting we get much more selective in admission standards. Yes that is one quick & easy way to increase graduation rates in the short term, but it is not, in my view, what most regional publics are about. You want selective, go to UM or MSU . You want a school that serves a broader community, well that’s what EMU does, and it is a major reason why I’m proud to work here. I wish we did it better. I wish we had more resources to help students who are under-prepared. I wish that “education first” meant more than a marketing slogan to some top administrators and some regents. These are areas where I tend to agree with you, Mark. But I think we lose our identity and our purpose if we stop serving students who maybe didn’t have all the advantages that a typical UM freshman probably had.
Licorice,
You ask good questions and they come from a desire for EMU to confront the real problems. I do not take your questions as praise for the status quo – to the contrary! My two quick responses: 1) as for the numbers about EMU students who transfer out and then graduate from another 4 year school, being maybe 8% of the FTIAC class: that is a figure that was presented, after much pressing for such data, at a Retention Council meeting circa 2010, when I was still a member of that body (now called Student Success Council). It was derived from a federal source, on where college graduates first started college.
2) On increasing EMU “selectivity” — I agree entirely with your comments, but would just term what I advocate as excluding students for admission to EMU who are clearly way below college level skills. That would not mean we try to mimic UofM, just that we only accept students with a real chance of success. What we do not is immoral: we accept lots of students we know won’t succeed, year after year; as a former EMU VP of enrollment services told me a decade ago, in so many words, we’re a school of opportunity and if that means maybe one in a 100 students who comes here lacking the minimal skills for success is able to grauate, so be it! That to my mind isn’t opportunity as much as it’s exploitation.
So, most EMU students are quite capable, but we do admit some who are barely literate or even functionally illiterate. They cannot make it through a 4 year program of any quality (and our programs are quality programs). So we shouldn’t admit that slice of the incoming class. This would require more resources in Admissions but produce better results for the University. It’s not rocket science but it’s complex and serious.
Education First!
I made a terrible typo a moment ago, in the following sentence —
“What we do now is immoral: we accept lots of students we know won’t succeed,” where at first the word “now” was “not”. My apologies.
Licorice: I agree that many students start at EMU but finish elsewhere. Some go to UM, others to MSU, and still others go out of state. Many of my daughter’s friends started here but after a year, sometimes two, moved to what they perceived as better schools. I also agree with Mark that we are in a climate where those who make policy and those who view EMU as a possible university for their child may begin (finally) to look askance at the manner in which we fund (or don’t) our programs. Someone must be paying attention to the huge expenditure on athletics, right? Someone must wonder why we privilege athletics over education, right? Or are we the only ones who question the funding imbalance?
EMU does get some great students. But for too long, EMU has had the attitude of taking anyone with a pulse just to try to balance the budget. Administrators know full well many of these students are not equipped to succeed at the collegiate level. T e mentality is get ‘em in, load ‘em up on loans to make the university payroll, entrench them in debt and move ‘em out — one way or the other. It’s a widget factory mentality.
I recommend the website CollegeResutsOnline for a good source of lots of data, comparative and institution specific. It doesn’t have everything but it does have a lot — such as six year graduation rates. The transfer out rate is given for some schools but not most – why I don’t know.
The site is sponsored by the Education Sector think thank/policy center. Some of the data their website includes are data that a decade ago at EMU was like closely guarded Kremlin secrets.