A loyal EMUTalk.org reader sent me a link to this freep article, “Business group’s site keeps scorecard to help compare state universities.” Here are the opening paragraphs:
The nonprofit Business Leaders for Michigan hopes a new, comprehensive website tracking Michigan’s public universities will help parents and students with decisions about which college to attend.
But the group, which unveiled the website Wednesday afternoon in front of a joint meeting of the Michigan House and Senate higher education subcommittees, also hopes it will guide legislators as they decide on funding for the universities.
The site compiles data across multiple categories, looking at state support, number of degrees granted, net cost and about 25 other categories and compares them to peer institutions across the country.
You can take a look at the results of what this group found here. The basic point of the web site/scorecards is to convince the legislature and other stakeholders that funding Michigan’s universities is a way to help the state economically.
But two observations I thought I’d add. First, I first came across this report (but just didn’t get around to posting about it) via this article in annarbor.com, “How does a Michigan college education stack up? New scorecard compares state colleges to national peers.” If you just read this article, you’d think that the main point of this scorecard thing was to explain how the University of Michigan and only the U of M compared to other research universities. A classic example of the U of M/Ann Arbor world view.
Second, the EMU scorecard is kind of interesting. A few highlights for me:
- Our graduation rate is kind of low, but our retention rate (which is the percentage of full-time students who return from the previous year) is pretty good, and we also award a lot of degrees and a lot in what they describe as “critical skills degrees.”
- The administrative spending per full-time student is significantly higher than the national average. It’s twice as expensive as it is at Central Michigan, more than Western, more than Grand Valley.
- Even with efforts at keeping tuition down, EMU is still more expensive than its peer institutions around the country. Of course, that’s true for all the universities in Michigan because of a lack of funding from the state.
I know this will seem weird, but I’m not convinced we have enough admin personnel. Why? Declining enrollments. At the end of the day, admin personnel are the ones responsible for getting students in the classroom and helping them get jobs. Once you cut enough of them, both of those functions suffer.
You can’t grow by cutting. If you try, it results in a downward spiral.
Well, I mean the costs of administrative personnel relative to similar institutions. We pay a higher percentage in administrative spending for some reason.
I’m not so sure administrators are on the front line of recruiting students and helping them find jobs, either. It seems to me that a lot of that work has shifted to faculty.
I’m judging by other institutions where I see that role being done by administrators. We do have a faculty model here which is often much less effective.
As a reporter covering EMU and higher education, I was always skeptical about claims the school had so many “administrators” relative to its peers. It did not seem that way to me, as I dealt with a variety of other universities. I would be interested to know about classification methods among various universities and how they report their data.