The road to 6

[HuffyCane]

I think the Board and the administration are in full agreement, but the decisions are coming from the Board. The Provost, if given unilateral authority, would make additional changes that a majority of the Board does not agree with.

 

[chito_and_leon]

I think the Board and the administration are in full agreement, but the decisions are coming from the Board. The Provost, if given unilateral authority, would make additional changes that a majority of the Board does not agree with.

Deep State. Makes you wonder why she hasn't gotten fired. Hahaha! Not really, we know the interlocking relationships.

 

[chito_and_leon]

I’m told the biggest driver is our lack of raw number of Pell Grant students (which favors big schools in big cities obvi) and we are in the bottom 5 percentile out of several thousand colleges in graduation of Pell Grant students in six years. In the past we took a bunch of full pay Chinese students to pay for the education of local smart kids who we competed for with good aid packages to OU. And the Pell Grant kids we did take almost all failed out. The freshman class is the largest ever. One third of it is Pell Grant kids, done in part to respond to the change in the rankings. We are going to have to expand to 5300 undergrads over 5 years to make up for the lost revenue — assuming we can find academically appropriate Pell Grants kids willing to move to Oklahoma. Everyone wants them for the reason cited above. You can call it TU Commitment but some, not all, of the changes in the Commitment align directly with changes in US News. A cynic would argue the rest is just cover and hippie nonsense. I would expect our ACT average to drop dramatically over the next five years while we bottom out in the rankings around 150 or so (below OSU) until this whole “help poor kids” craze blows over.

As for SMU and Tulane, if you believe the current Provost, we were never peers or colleagues of those institutions, so we shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to them. Or even trying to compete with them.

These are my words, but the thrust of her argument is that Stead was running a confidence game where we were beguiled with the borrowed building on campus to make us look like SMU, but we’ve really only been competing with OU and to a much lesser extent with KU for students. And we were doing that by largely giving away our product to anyone who met certain qualifications and wasn’t attracted to TU for geographic or legacy reasons. There’s a lot of direct evidence to refute that claim, but she’s said in several forums that SMU and Tulane aren’t peers and we cannot and should not try to compete with them or Rice. She’s also fund of reminding friends and donors that we are just a Research II institution and not a I like SMU and Tulane. Her vision, which apparently isn’t fully embraced by the Board or the President is to turn TU into something like Rensselaer Tech as an after thought to students who can’t get into more prestigious schools close by but is strong in STEM.

The freshman class is 820 compare to 815 last year so it's technically the largest but not enough to make any difference. The problem is that it's nowhere near enough - in fact, it's not even enough to maintain current total enrollment (3297). All the new changes will hopefully reduce attrition which will help but may be offset by efforts to have students graduate in 4 years, which hurts total enrollment. So this year is basically a wash. I'm not sure we can afford a wash...

It is interesting that our "peers" have managed this problem just fine. It feels like football - is the problem that we can't compete or that we have incompetent leaders who aren't able to get us where we need to be?

 

[TU_BLA]

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/university-of-south-florida-1537

That's embarrassing

 

[TU_BLA]

I still don’t understand the either or with the foreign (Chinese) students. Why not both - expand other areas and still recruit the full price tuition students? I have heard the argument regarding their English skills are lacking but for full price bring them in 3 months early and have a three month english immersion period.

TU used to do this...a lot. When I was the RHD of Twin Towers, I routinely got 15-20 students from Saudi Arabia every year looking to go into PetEng, Geology, Chem E, EE, etc. In October of each year, I would get an additional 5-10 students from Saudi Arabia who would go into the English Institute program to get their TOEFL scores above TU's minimum level to be admitted for the Spring semester. They used to do this with students from China as well (although they usually lived with host families off campus...or because some were older, they would be given an exception to move into an apartment). Since 2016 and the difficulty of these students getting a student visa for various reasons, these numbers are way down.

 

[TU_BLA]

Her vision, which apparently isn’t fully embraced by the Board or the President is to turn TU into something like Rensselaer Tech as an after thought to students who can’t get into more prestigious schools close by but is strong in STEM.

There is nothing wrong with RPI or WPI. I have a good number of friends (brilliant by the way) who went to those schools and have done great things. They're both really good schools. RPI also has a great hockey program that plays D1. Adam Oates and Joe Juneau both played at WPI. Matt Patricia played football for RPI and graduated with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering. He's the head coach for the Detroit Lions.

According to friends who went to those schools, the worst thing was the very lopsided ration of men:women at those schools. This was early 90s so...it was like 80/20 according to them.

 

[TU_BLA]

I think the Board and the administration are in full agreement, but the decisions are coming from the Board. The Provost, if given unilateral authority, would make additional changes that a majority of the Board does not agree with.

Let's hope it stays that way and that we get to keep the Kaiser support.

 

[chito_and_leon]

As for SMU and Tulane, if you believe the current Provost, we were never peers or colleagues of those institutions, so we shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to them. Or even trying to compete with them.

This is just CYA, it's just like Wojick. He couldn't get it done so he blamed it on TU, oh it's just TU, you can't expect much, other schools are better, we have bad music, you should be happy with 20 body bag wins. SMU and Tulane are kicking our a$Xes, she either says "I'm not getting it done" or she says "we're just little TU, we cannot expect to compete with SMU and Tulane." She's the Wojick of administrators.

 

[HuffyCane]

This is just CYA, it's just like Wojick. He couldn't get it done so he blamed it on TU, oh it's just TU, you can't expect much, other schools are better, we have bad music, you should be happy with 20 body bag wins. SMU and Tulane are kicking our a$Xes, she either says "I'm not getting it done" or she says "we're just little TU, we cannot expect to compete with SMU and Tulane." She's the Wojick of administrators.

I disagree but your viewpoint is just as valid as mine

 

[Tulsa_]

The road to 6 ... is dark, and full of terrors.

 

[TU_BLA]

This is just CYA, it's just like Wojick. He couldn't get it done so he blamed it on TU, oh it's just TU, you can't expect much, other schools are better, we have bad music, you should be happy with 20 body bag wins. SMU and Tulane are kicking our a$Xes, she either says "I'm not getting it done" or she says "we're just little TU, we cannot expect to compete with SMU and Tulane." She's the Wojick of administrators.

I agree to a point. Dr. Lawless and Stead had us rising in the rankings. I know Dr. Lawless was disappointed we never cracked the top 50 as was his goal, but from the drive to get there was the TURC program which ended up in a ton of TU winners of nationally competitive scholarships. At one point in the late 90's/early 2000s, TU was bragging about being 2nd nationally in the total # of Fulbright Scholarships over the last 10 years. There were also a couple of Rhodes Scholars, NSF Awards, etc. Add to that one of the 1st CyberSecurity programs in the US and TU's move up the rankings list was well warranted and SMU, Tulane, and Rice were actual peer schools. There were a couple of things that we didn't keep up on, one being % of alumni donors (for the life of me I never understood the mentality of recent graduates who would say 'I'll never donate a dime to TU' once they graduated).

While I understand a change in the ranking system has caused a drop, there's more going on than just that to explain a drop of 40 or so spots.