Well things change. Maybe we can grow programs again in the future and improve our rankings.
It is a different world now in higher education though. Not positive how much rankings go into student decisions.
I can assure you ranking is nearly everything. And there’s plenty of research to back that up. The ranking is even more important for foreign students, particularly in Asia. A lot of TU’s problems date back to 2014 when the foreign student cash started to decline because our ranking started to dip.
Carson is out in the community. Both the TU community and the Tulsa community. Talk to him. LISTEN to him. Watch what he is doing. Be SKEPTICAL, but don’t let your neurosis and anger at the previous administrations impair your ability to objectively discern that the man has a playbook and it’s totally different than TU Commitment. A few similarities between that disaster and the current strategic plan does not mean there’s some sinister conspiracy to repackage TU Commitment. The new plan sets broad goals for Arts and Sciences and athletics that are the exact opposite of TU Commitment. On the whole, the new plan is a restatement of the TU identity going back to the goals of the 1930s and 1960s. Go read it before you comment further. It’s on the TU website.
More to the current point, Carson has done several alumni and staff town halls. He has made it perfectly clear that he wants to achieve the goal first publicly announced in the 1960s of maintaining an undergraduate student body of 4,000. The reason for that number is financial yield.
TU has been unable to reach that enrollment number and the revenue it generates, due to complacency, a failure in leadership and strategy, competing and/counter productive messaging, and a lack of incentives/resources in the work force. Those problems are being resolved. They have to be. TU’s rankings have dipped to the point where the easy path of compensating for poor financial yield amongst undergraduates is not possible through admitting under qualified foreign students and increasing law school enrollment.
All you have to do is call down there and they will tell you that admissions numbers look really really good for the first time since we could offer brand new apartments at a rent discount because we borrowed a reckless amount of money.
They are achieving it through new leadership using effective strategies that are largely revenue neutral or low cost but were never explored by the previous team. We are leveraging technology for the first time our marketplace competitors have been using for more than a decade. We are using on campus faculty to assist in this innovation that ensures the technology application is tailored to TU’s unique circumstances, not the cookie cutter recommendations of some consulting firm. They are working as a team for the first time in quite awhile. More than a dozen senior leaders have been replaced in the last two years. Arguably, all of the replacements have considerably greater professional qualifications. President, Provost, Deans of Business, Arts and Sciences, Law, CFO, CIO, Dean of Students, Athletics and Facilities, just to name a few.
So his goals are all inter-related and dependent upon one another. He wants financial stability and independence from sustained short term deficit spending/finance. To do that, he needs to increase financial yield per student, to do that he needs to increase the perceived value of a TU degree, to do that he has to raise the rankings, and to do that (in part) he has to reach previously unrealized high school populations who will come to TU, raise our academic standing, and pay for it. And he’s doing that. Those students don’t exist locally or even regionally in large numbers. Get ready for freshmen classes of students with previously unheard of numbers from California, Nevada, Illinois, Washington, Virginia, and New York, if his plan works. And it appears to be working. Applications have doubled and are up as high as 1000% in some of those regions. We finally have people who know what they are doing. Now the test is minimizing internal friction and external static long enough to harvest the results. It looks promising. I’m the most optimistic I’ve been about the school since the first year of Lawless.