Part 1: Where A&M Stands Today

How would you rate Texas A&M University today?  What are we doing well?

Transcript

Porter S. Garner III ’79, President and CEO, The Association of Former Students:  Good morning, everyone.  Thanks for being here on this important occasion. I want to welcome everybody to a discussion on the future of higher education. I don’t think I have to say to this gathering of leaders that there’s been a little bit of discussion over the last year, particularly the last few months, over the future of higher education, not only in the state of Texas but in the country at large. And as Jorge and I have been discussing—more than we’d like to perhaps this year—we thought this opportunity might be the best forum we could provide to not only our board for discussion purposes but indeed for the Aggie Network. There are many misperceptions about this discussion; I read a lot of them in e-mails. And so in talking to Jorge about how we might address not only some of the educational aspects of this discussion by clearing up some of the misperceptions that are out there, we thought about this forum and thought we’d have a discussion today, so I hope you will enjoy it.

Now I want to turn it over the Kathryn Greenwade, who will ask our questions and serve as our moderator. So Kathryn, it’s all yours.


Kathryn Greenwade ’88, Vice President, The Association of Former Students:
Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us for today’s discussion. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this timely topic. And we’ll get things started.

Before we talk about challenges for the future or comment on reforms, I think it’s important that we gain an understanding of our university’s status today. So I would like to ask each of you the following questions. How would you rate Texas A&M University today?  And what are we doing well? I would like to ask Dr Loftin to provide the first response and then invite each of you to follow on with additional  comments.
 

Dr. R. Bowen Loftin ’71, President, Texas A&M University: I think all of us agree, Texas A&M is an extraordinary place. Again, more students than ever want to be part of our family here at Texas A&M. For this fall class starting in a few weeks, we had almost 30,000 applications, a new record—almost 2,000 beyond last year’s application number. That gives you an indication of how many people want to be part of this Aggie family. I think that our faculty, here, have demonstrated over their lifetimes extraordinary achievements as well, so we have a great faculty to welcome those student to this campus and to help them mature here for their four years or more at Texas A&M, and graduate and move on to exciting careers.

A lot has happened over the last few years, to really, I think, cement the quality of our product at Texas A&M: the graduates that we produce every year. A number of individual organizations and publications rate higher education institutions in various ways. I’ll mention just a couple of them. Last year in the fall, Wall Street Journal noted that Texas A&M was number two in the country among almost 500 of the largest employers in the United States in terms of the ability of our graduates to immediately make a positive impact in the workplace. That to me is exactly what we’re about here, to produce people who are going to be coming out of Texas A&M with the right skill sets, of all kinds, to be immediately useful to society. Many other places, I’ll mention in particular, Smart Money magazine which calculates pay-back ratio. They look at, for example, the amount of cost of education compared to the salary the average student gets after graduation at their first job. We rate very highly, usually among the very top schools in the country, in that particular rating scheme. We can go down the list from that point on. Every rating agency and every rating publication has their own little way of doing business, and we usually do very well typically in all of those. But I really think the outcomes are the most important measures, and that’s what these kinds publications I mentioned deal with. So I think right now we have demonstrated very clearly over a long period of time that we produce graduates that are extraordinarily effective after they leave the university. In terms of the productivity of our faculty in the areas of research, again, we rank very very highly. If you look at the top 20 universities in the United States, public and private, Texas A&M ranks in the top 20. In terms of research expenditures, which is one way of measuring productivity in that particular category—and if you take away, of the top 20, the 17 who don’t have medical schools, like Texas A&M—we rank, of course, right up there the top three then. Those are MIT, University of California at Berkeley and Texas A&M. So I think we have those kinds of objective measures demonstrating how productive our faculty are, both in terms of producing extraordinarily well-qualified graduates they’ve instructed while they were here, and doing research that’s highly valued and very, very important to society.


Dr. Michael Benedik, Speaker, Texas A&M Faculty Senate: I’d like to weigh in on a couple things. So first of all, I think it’s important to remember that 20, 30, 40 years ago, Texas A&M was a really great regional university, and it’s now become one of the top tier universities in the country, if not the world, and there’s almost no other university that’s made that trajectory in that period of time. So, the ability of this place to just grow in terms of quality and productivity, and what we do with students, and what we do with research has just been extraordinary over the last couple of decades, and I think that’s quite unique. I think the second thing we’re doing really really well is what we’re doing with our students. I mean we’re primarily an engineering, science, technical school and those fields have really become more complex over the last couple of decades. We’re able to train our students in those areas so they come out extraordinarily well educated and yet we’re actually  graduating with a higher graduation rate now than were 20 years ago. So, by any criteria you want, the quality of the students, and our ability to put students through the system, and our ability to have students graduate in a reasonable period of time is just getting better and better and better. So I think it’s been just extraordinary what this university’s done over the last 20 or 30 years.


Dr. Richard Box ’61, Chairman, The Texas A&M University System: I agree with Michael and Bowen, both, and I’d like to build on what they’ve said. If you look at where our graduates are placed in industry and in the military and in academia, all throughout all those areas— national and in many cases internationally—our people are at the very top. They’re leaders. I think this university has done an extraordinary job in producing leaders and a quality-product individual graduate.


Jorge Bermudez ’73, 2011 Chair of the Board, The Association of Former Students: I have no doubt, and going last, agree with everyone. I’ve been associated with Texas A&M since 1969, and as I travel around the world, and I travel around the country, and meet former students, and meet Aggies. I believe that one of the measures of excellence for a university is its students and what they do, and when you meet them and see them in a position of leadership in various industries, it makes you realize what this university has accomplished. I also believe that if you look at what transition the university has made, and how it’s recognized today, not just in the United States, but around the world, it is certainly delivering an excellent product in terms of its graduates, and I think it is one of the excellent universities around the world. I sometimes ask the question—Has Texas A&M ever been better, in any field that you want to measure? And certainly, my answer is, “I don’t believe so.” I think we are in an excellent state, and probably, historically, we’re as highly recognized today as we’ve ever been around the world, not just in the United States and in Texas.