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TU slipping more than sports

TUcandoit

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I know this is a sports forum so I get the talk about the football and basketball programs sliding backwards. Falling further and further behind in the recruiting game. Coaches who can't in-game coach. However, I am more worried about TU in general. Read somewhere we are no longer the #1 rated university in Oklahoma. We are a carnegie R2 program. Memphis....MEMPHIS....just got a R1 rating. We always made fun of schools like Memphis and Houston on the academia front and now they are catching up to us (we are falling backwards). What is going on! We need a restructure of the whole school. Fire them all.
 
Who wouldn’t believe a well sourced critique like one that begins with “Read somewhere”. 😒
 
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I know this is a sports forum so I get the talk about the football and basketball programs sliding backwards. Falling further and further behind in the recruiting game. Coaches who can't in-game coach. However, I am more worried about TU in general. Read somewhere we are no longer the #1 rated university in Oklahoma. We are a carnegie R2 program. Memphis....MEMPHIS....just got a R1 rating. We always made fun of schools like Memphis and Houston on the academia front and now they are catching up to us (we are falling backwards). What is going on! We need a restructure of the whole school. Fire them all.
In defense of the administration, this is exactly what they said they were going to do and then they went out and did what they said, so they've been completely honest about it at least.
 
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In defense of the administration, this is exactly what they said they were going to do and then they went out and did what they said, so they've been completely honest about it at least.
They also thought it would increase enrollment. No idea if it did.
 
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Admissions has completely retooled who and how they recruit. Not only are admissions deposits way way up, the academic qualifications of the admitted are up as well. Minority applications are up. Geographic diversity is way way up.

It’s still a honeymoon, but the entire senior administration is pretty much completely different from two years ago. Systemic problems in Admissions and Athletics are being solved and the finances are turning around. It’s baby steps, but things are looking brighter.
 
I am looking forward to hearing their pitch next month with my 17 year old (today) daughter. I think she wants the experience of college outside OK but it will be interesting nonetheless.
 
Carson has been quoted saying next years freshman class will be the biggest we’ve had in over a decade (900+). I also saw where our acceptance rate went from 30ish% to 66%. I know some of this is give and take (financially), but I hope this plan works to create a foundation of students so we can begin moving back up in academic rankings at some point.
 
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Admissions has completely retooled who and how they recruit. Not only are admissions deposits way way up, the academic qualifications of the admitted are up as well. Minority applications are up. Geographic diversity is way way up.

It’s still a honeymoon, but the entire senior administration is pretty much completely different from two years ago. Systemic problems in Admissions and Athletics are being solved and the finances are turning around. It’s baby steps, but things are looking brighter.
This was the big question from the beginning of TU Plan - was the model fundamentally broken so that they needed to completely change what the university was and what it's role is or was the problem mainly a matter of incompetent people in key roles? Your post seems to indicate that it was the latter, and that we probably could have avoided gutting the school by addressing what were fairly obvious, even from the outside, personnel problems. But the poor management and staffing and the resulting financial problems gave the new powers that be an excuse to push a vision for a university that interested them, even if it was not needed to address what ailed TU. I'm not sure there's much that could not have been addressed with a pretty good house cleaning and tweaks to some programs rather than the wholesale gutting and downgrading of the school.
 
Carson has been quoted saying next years freshman class will be the biggest we’ve had in over a decade (900+). I also saw where our acceptance rate went from 30ish% to 66%. I know some of this is vice and take (financially), but I hope this plan works to create a foundation of students so we can begin moving back up in academic rankings at some point.
Outside of a few priority programs, I'm not sure that moving up in the rankings is even a goal, and I really don't think we have a platform left to do it anyway. Look at the people who have "inside knowledge" - what are the key metrics they talk about? It's not rankings. It's first and foremost diversity, and then size of class.
 
Outside of a few priority programs, I'm not sure that moving up in the rankings is even a goal, and I really don't think we have a platform left to do it anyway. Look at the people who have "inside knowledge" - what are the key metrics they talk about? It's not rankings. It's first and foremost diversity, and then size of class.
And I hate that. Being a top 100 university should always be a goal for us. That’s not something that should be kicked to the side… should be a “both and” situation rather than one or the other.
 
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And I hate that. Being a top 100 university should always be a goal for us. That’s not something that should be kicked to the side… should be a “both and” situation rather than one or the other.
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.
 
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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 just want the best for TU and it would seem that slipping in academic rankings wouldn’t be considered a good thing for a small private university who is known for academics, but maybe I’m wrong?
 
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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.
 
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.
Thanks for your insight Huffy.
 
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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.
I was speaking from personal experience with my nephews and daughter and their friends who have recently or will soon start college. I have heard little about rankings in their decision making process.

But you make a good point. Generalizing from anecdotal information is against my scientific principles and I slipped into it.
 
Someone posted above that acceptance rate went from 30%ish in the past to around 66% now. Another person posted we are accepting more people at a higher academic standard. Please unravel this for me. Typically when you open up enrollment to higher percentage it is not at an academic standard gain. You are allowing those with lower GPA and lower ACT/SAT scores their chance to gain entrance, not higher. Unless we have not been accepting the best of the best before and why they hell were we not if that was the case....
 
Someone posted above that acceptance rate went from 30%ish in the past to around 66% now. Another person posted we are accepting more people at a higher academic standard. Please unravel this for me. Typically when you open up enrollment to higher percentage it is not at an academic standard gain. You are allowing those with lower GPA and lower ACT/SAT scores their chance to gain entrance, not higher. Unless we have not been accepting the best of the best before and why they hell were we not if that was the case....
The only way this could occur is a major shift in the nature of the applicant pool.
 
Someone posted above that acceptance rate went from 30%ish in the past to around 66% now. Another person posted we are accepting more people at a higher academic standard. Please unravel this for me. Typically when you open up enrollment to higher percentage it is not at an academic standard gain. You are allowing those with lower GPA and lower ACT/SAT scores their chance to gain entrance, not higher. Unless we have not been accepting the best of the best before and why they hell were we not if that was the case....
That someone was me. I’ve heard the 66% number a couple of times, but I don’t know if it’s completely true.
 
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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.
Thanks for the info - I want so badly to believe TU is doing all the right things here but I’m still skeptical (as most would be after going through the debacle of levit and co).
 
Someone posted above that acceptance rate went from 30%ish in the past to around 66% now. Another person posted we are accepting more people at a higher academic standard. Please unravel this for me. Typically when you open up enrollment to higher percentage it is not at an academic standard gain. You are allowing those with lower GPA and lower ACT/SAT scores their chance to gain entrance, not higher. Unless we have not been accepting the best of the best before and why they hell were we not if that was the case....
Because the hay isn’t in the barn. You can offer people in places and with qualifications we typically didn’t concentrate on before, it’s another thing to get them on campus. The gains in applications and the gains in deposits are not the same as confirmed enrolled students in May who actually make it to campus in August. TU has a long way to go to seeing true gains. It’s too easy with no application fee and no required test scores to get a bunch of “safety school” apps.

The theory in the recent past is a lot like Kragthorpe’s crappy recruiting harvests once word got out he might leave. He focused on “kids who are a good fit at TU.” “He fits our profile.” “We know this is where he wants to be.” “Small town Oklahomans who grow into performers is our identity” etc.

There was a lot of that in admissions, particularly 2010 to 2019. We admitted a lot of high qualified in state students that knew a lot about TU and wanted to be close to home. We needed a set number of kids in the apartments to pay that debt. And in most cases, we ended up pricing ourselves cheaper than OU to entice them to not go to Norman. It was an asinine business model but the average test score went up. Later, our academic standard averages dipped because we just weren’t getting any interest as our ranking dropped. But we still had to pay bills and fill up that housing. We let a bunch of non English fluent Chinese students into our liberal arts programs to pay for it. Those days are over.
 
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.
You will also notice that 2014 was exactly when the oil industry tanked due to the US signing the Iran Nuclear Deal. The Petroleum Engineering program was the largest major at TU with many foreign students. Overnight that enrollment dried up. No idea how the program's enrollment has changed with fluctuating prices since then, but I'd assume it's doing better than it was in 2014.
 
Thanks for the info - I want so badly to believe TU is doing all the right things here but I’m still skeptical (as most would be after going through the debacle of levit and co).
No apologies for Levit or her style. I will say her firm clutch on the purse for 18 months is what’s made the foundation for Carson to build upon. She deserves a lot of credit for that.
 
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.
Thanks for the promising update, Huffy. Can you provide the link to this? I’m not seeing it.
 
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You will also notice that 2014 was exactly when the oil industry tanked due to the US signing the Iran Nuclear Deal. The Petroleum Engineering program was the largest major at TU with many foreign students. Overnight that enrollment dried up. No idea how the program's enrollment has changed with fluctuating prices since then, but I'd assume it's doing better than it was in 2014.
PE needs help and it’s been getting it. New facilities should help things along soon. The Engineering college is still the largest by freshman enrollment, but not always by graduation lol. Roughly 4 times as many TU students start at ME as PE and that’s been true for awhile. Psychology, Computer Science/Cyber, and Nursing are the most enrolled majors as freshman, the numbers at graduation are roughly the same.

The Business School really needs some focus and it’s getting it from Mayor Taylor. The numbers there are way down and even local employers are chilly. That isn’t often discussed, but it needs to be an area of focus. From a distance off campus, I’m pleased with her efforts so far. She’s embraced TU, purchasing a suite in football for the College and funding student activities out of her own pocket. I was skeptical of her, but per her an apology judging by who she is meeting with and the bridges she is building. Assuming the internal Dean functions are being attended to properly, she’s the type of experienced local new blood we need, not another hyper technical campus bubble professional academic who will either fail or complain about their budget. She’s going to get things done and has the professional incentive to hold herself accountable due to her community visibility.

We actually graduate more than you might guess non-athlete Exercise Science students. It’s one of the more popular majors right now, despite the media hype about kids obsessed with getting a job. There’s more in that major than any one single engineering discipline. That was a huge red flag for me with TU Commitment and it’s premise that TU should focus on engineering because that’s all the market would bear. Somebody must have sent a memo to Clancy saying “We need more PE majors” and he thought they meant physical education, lol.
 
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Notice the picture of the football stadium in five areas of priority. That’s not an accident.
https://strategicplan.utulsa.edu/
Thanks. I found that but wondered about more details for the bullet points shown there. For example, on the page I have linked, there are two initiatives - but no links for either where any additional information is given. So it isn’t clear to me what is happening within the area of arts & sciences for example. Am I missing something here?

Best university in the region
 
Thanks. I found that but wondered about more details for the bullet points shown there. For example, on the page I have linked, there are two initiatives - but no links for either where any additional information is given. So it isn’t clear to me what is happening within the area of arts & sciences for example. Am I missing something here?

Best university in the region
I don’t think so. Carson said he plans to update regularly with data points measuring performance. At some point, I would think they will build out that site to show their work. That’s just me guessing.
 
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I was wondering the same thing. It shows bullet points for initiatives but nothing to get a comprehensive review on each section. I will be looking forward to the updates.
 
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.
This is far and away the most promising thing I've heard about TU in a long time. I think Carson is the best person TU could have hired to get "it" done, and it's not even close. The problem was always, what is the "it" that he's supposed to do? You don't necessarily want the best driver if you're traveling on the road to Hell...

I suspect, though I have not talked to Carson in a long time, that he's like our best coaches and this is probably a stepping stone job for him. So if he has real authority to transform the plan then that's probably the best news we can hope for. I don't think his larger career aspirations are served by building a glorified DeVry, he probably is benefited by building something that looks more like the real university that TU Commitment eschewed.
 
There was a lot of that in admissions, particularly 2010 to 2019. We admitted a lot of high qualified in state students that knew a lot about TU and wanted to be close to home. We needed a set number of kids in the apartments to pay that debt. And in most cases, we ended up pricing ourselves cheaper than OU to entice them to not go to Norman. It was an asinine business model but the average test score went up. Later, our academic standard averages dipped because we just weren’t getting any interest as our ranking dropped. But we still had to pay bills and fill up that housing. We let a bunch of non English fluent Chinese students into our liberal arts programs to pay for it. Those days are over.
This is the problem with hiring BCG, McKinsey, etc. They seem to operate on the opposite of Occam's Razor. Nobody wants to pay BCG to be told "you hired a bunch of idiots". And that's not interesting for BCG to do. I don't know how much they were actually involved but it's certainly easy to see that they could take a fairly simple case of bad hiring, which was pretty obvious, and devise something like TU Commitment as the "solution". Of course, you don't hire BCG unless something grand and "creative" is what you want...
 
This is far and away the most promising thing I've heard about TU in a long time. I think Carson is the best person TU could have hired to get "it" done, and it's not even close. The problem was always, what is the "it" that he's supposed to do? You don't necessarily want the best driver if you're traveling on the road to Hell...

I suspect, though I have not talked to Carson in a long time, that he's like our best coaches and this is probably a stepping stone job for him. So if he has real authority to transform the plan then that's probably the best news we can hope for. I don't think his larger career aspirations are served by building a glorified DeVry, he probably is benefited by building something that looks more like the real university that TU Commitment eschewed.
I imagine he has aspirations beyond the academy, but if he’s successful at what he’s trying to do at TU, every school ranked 40 to 95 will throw money at him. $2 to $3 million a year would not be unreasonable. Plus what he can work out on the side doing consulting. OU is an ocean of debt and he’s a tribal member. They will come to play with a blank check too.
 
This is far and away the most promising thing I've heard about TU in a long time. I think Carson is the best person TU could have hired to get "it" done, and it's not even close. The problem was always, what is the "it" that he's supposed to do? You don't necessarily want the best driver if you're traveling on the road to Hell...

I suspect, though I have not talked to Carson in a long time, that he's like our best coaches and this is probably a stepping stone job for him. So if he has real authority to transform the plan then that's probably the best news we can hope for. I don't think his larger career aspirations are served by building a glorified DeVry, he probably is benefited by building something that looks more like the real university that TU Commitment eschewed.
I think our President's job is fairly desirable. Didn't we get Lawless from Texas A and M? We still have a big endowment. And Carson is from the area.
 
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I imagine he has aspirations beyond the academy, but if he’s successful at what he’s trying to do at TU, every school ranked 40 to 95 will throw money at him. $2 to $3 million a year would not be unreasonable. Plus what he can work out on the side doing consulting. OU is an ocean of debt and he’s a tribal member. They will come to play with a blank check too.
He has the Rhodes thing, that makes him a legitimate choice at much higher schools than would be possible based on OU alone. I have no idea whether his aspirations extend beyond being a university president. He seems to get bored easily, though.
 
I think our President's job is fairly desirable. Didn't we get Lawless from Texas A and M? We still have a big endowment. And Carson is from the area.
If he gives us 4 or 5 years and gets TU turned around and stabilized for success, I will happily wish him well if he leaves. His history doesn't suggest that he's a "settle in for the long run" kind of guy.

I think one challenge is how much damage is there for him to undo? It feels a little like deciding you just want to change the drapes after you've already demoed half the house.
 
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The recovery from that error in judgment will be measured in decades. Ivy League types still talk about errors made in administration at Brown and Columbia made in the 1950s and 1960s. People openly question the financial position of one of the Cambridge colleges more than 100 years after they had to ask for alumni help and it leaked.
 
The recovery from that error in judgment will be measured in decades. Ivy League types still talk about errors made in administration at Brown and Columbia made in the 1950s and 1960s. People openly question the financial position of one of the Cambridge colleges more than 100 years after they had to ask for alumni help and it leaked.
Yet they endure.
 
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