Part 2: The Challenges We Face

No doubt, there are challenges facing higher education in Texas and at Texas A&M today that we must be prepared to address. Can you identify a few of these challenges and discuss possible strategies to address them?

Transcript

Kathryn Greenwade ’88, Vice President, The Association of Former Students: No doubt, there are challenges facing higher education in Texas and at Texas A&M today that we must be prepared to address. Can you identify a few of these challenges and discuss possible strategies to address them? 


Dr. Richard Box ’61, Chairman, The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents: I’ll tell you, one of the big challenges we have right now is public perception of higher education. Thank goodness the members of this Association and the Aggie family are not in that category, because they have a great passion for this university. But outside of that, the public perception of higher education—what we hear from the legislators and our people that work over there, and national polls—is down. It’s not to the level it used to be.

So, that has an impact to some degree on the funding that we get. Both statewide and nationally, our funding is going down. The economy has not been as good as what we’d all like for it to be, and I think Texas is a little bit more special than other places because we’ve been insulated from that to some degree. But that, certainly, is impacting the money that we have to do our work. We had recently had Dr. Raymund Paredes, who is the commissioner of higher education, over here at our last board meeting along with Chairman Fred Heldenfels IV '79, and explained the difficulties that higher education had in Texas and how we were going to have to fit into the overall scheme as a public university.

How will we help solve some of the problems—diminished resources, an expanding population base, and low public perception—and then balance those things with tuition? This board’s been very sensitive not to raise tuition out of the reach of our citizens. We don’t want young people graduating from this university with enormous amount of debt. At other universities, they do that. We want to try to keep this university accessible to our population base. So those are some of the things we’re going to have to deal with.


Dr. R. Bowen Loftin ’71, President, Texas A&M University: Let me add a bit to that. I think Chairman Box has identified a very real problem we have. A number of polls have indicated, both in Texas and elsewhere, that a growing number of people, many of whom are not college educated, view higher education as a private rather than public good.
I mean by that: I’m a graduate of a university, and therefore because of my degree, I’ve gotten a great job and I earn a good income. That’s a private good to me. A person who’s a high school graduate working an hourly-wage job is struggling to get along and saying “why am I paying my sales taxes here in Texas, for example, to enable this person to go to a university and get a degree that’s benefiting them, and not me.”  So, I have failed as a university president, we’ve failed as a university in toto, and higher education has failed to make a good case over a period of time that we’re a public good.

That, besides educating the population—which is a good thing to do and good public good thing, a public good for others—we also do things like research and service that has extraordinary benefits economically and otherwise to Texas and to the nation. And so we owe it to, I think, the nation and our state to be very persistent and very careful at laying out the case as to why we’re a public good and that kind of perception is what’s driving some of the issues the chairman mentioned a moment ago. I’m very sensitive to cost. I think higher education needs to be paying great attention toward the cost to attend the university and to be efficient as we can be and still deliver a high-quality education to our student body.

We do that here at Texas A&M very well. The Higher Education Coordinating Board measures, each year, the administrative costs, for example, in higher education in Texas. This place has the lowest cost, where under 5 percent of our budget goes to administration. The state average is over 10 percent. So, we’re highly effective in comparison to the other universities, but we can still get better. We’ve worked hard over the last eight years to reduce energy consumption here at Texas A&M. We’ve grown our facilities, and at the same time shrunk our costs by over 30 percent. We’ve done that by acquiring very highly efficient systems and by trying to adopt a very good and conservative approach utilizing energy here at Texas A&M. That’s just one way we’re trying to do things better.

I think we owe it to our faculty to amplify their ability to do their jobs. Faculty members, I think, do a lot of work here. They spend many hours working the classrooms , laboratories, their offices, even walking down the hallways here talking to our students. We need to use technology in ways that amplifies their ability to touch more students effectively over time, and we’re going to work with them over the next few years to make that happen. We’re applying resources to actually identify ways in which we can amplify their ability to do their jobs better without having to increase how many hours per week they actually put in.

That, we think, is a viable way to do business. And as the chairman said, we have to really keep our costs under control in terms of what’s passed along.

It’s clear to all of us that state support will continue to diminish. We’re part of what’s called the discretionary budget portion, so higher education is one of those few areas of the budget that most people think is discretionary which means to me, it’s going to be diminished over time. In fact I can show you data for the last 45 years that demonstrates that in Texas, for example—and this is also true nationwide— that the support for higher education by states has gone down on a per-capita basis. The numbers may have gone up overall because, guess what, the populations have gone up extraordinarily. But the growth of population, especially in Texas, has far outstripped the growth of the total outlay for higher education. So the amount of money per student has not even stayed constant. It’s gone down. That’s reality. We can’t change that. Tuition’s the other thing we can deal with, and as the chairman indicated, that’s a sensitive issue and there are really hard limits as to how far we can go with that.

So what’s left? One thing that’s left is what you do here at The Association for us—to help us raise funds that come back to the university and help offset some of those costs that we have to bear here. We do a lot of work, and I’m very pleased to see that Texas A&M ranks extremely highly in terms of the support of our alumni for the university. That money goes primarily to scholarships which helps defer the cost of education that students bear. It also goes to help retain and attract great faculty. We appreciate that very much. It does all kinds of things here. Especially The Association’s gifts to us, which are usually unrestricted, are highly highly effective because we can direct those exactly where they make the most difference.


Dr. Michael Benedik, Speaker, Texas A&M Faculty Senate: Both have brought up one of the big important points, that is—there really are public perception issues. I think a lot of that—people aren’t recognizing what has fundamentally changed in higher education over the last 100 years, 50 years, 30 years, and that is access. One hundred years ago, about 2 percent of the population went to college. It was easy to understand why it was import because that 2 percent of people, they were the leaders. They were the business leaders, the politicians, the lawyers, they were the leaders in the community. After World War II, perhaps 30-40 percent of people went to college, and then it was still clear. Now we’re hitting 70 percent of people coming to college, so it is becoming a little less clear—what’s the value of that? Because when you have 60-70 percent of your people doing it, you can’t really say these are all the leaders because it’s a majority of the people.

So, we’ve not really been able to articulate that change in the argument as to what higher education is doing or what its value is now relative to the arguments that might have been made some time ago, and it think that’s something that we need to better.

The second thing we need to is, I think, stop saying higher education because that’s an all inclusive term that actually has a lot of different things under it, and as soon as you start comparing them and putting them all into the same category, you lose the differences between the different kind of things.

I mean, Texas A&M is fundamentally different than Houston Community College. I’m not saying ones better than the other. They’re different. They have different missions, different students, different faculty, different cost structures. OK? Some people said, I’ve heard it mentioned you have Chevy Impalas and you have Cadillacs. We don’t all need to be driving a Cadillac. And that’s true, but we also don’t want everyone to be driving the Impala. There is room, I think--there’s a necessity--in this country to have top tier universities that are really doing something extraordinary and really are educating those people who are going to become leaders, and I think that’s one of the things Texas A&M does. And I think there’s really a need to be sure that we’re recognizing that difference and that what we do as we’re going into the future doesn’t jeopardize that difference.

We can’t start lumping all of higher education together and say, graduation rates are really going down in higher education. Well, not here they’re not. Our six-year graduation rate is like 85 percent. It’s hard to get any better. So keeping in mind the different kinds of institutions, different kinds of missions in higher education, I think it’s really critical to recognize what the different ones are doing and what the values of those are. Lumping them all together, I think, does a disservice to both ends and the middle of the spectrum. 


Jorge Bermudez ’73, Chair of the Board, The Association of Former Students: I think this question is actually related to the first question you posed. A&M, and we all agreed, has achieved a level of excellence that is somewhat unique as Michael was saying, going from a regional university to a well-recognized national and global university. That doesn’t come without expense. At the same time, we’re facing an economy that’s not growing, and so the revenues that the state will have in order to fund education are under pressure. I think that is a huge challenge for Texas A&M. If its aspirations are to continue to be an excellent university, that has a cost.

At the other end, Texas A&M is a land grant university. It was formed to educate and make education affordable to a wide breadth of the population. And therein lies, I believe, a huge challenge that the leadership of the university and the regents have to look at and say how we balance the two. At some point excellence will continue, but with a cost. Texas A&M has been fortunate, I think, being part of the state of Texas in being able to keep that cost at a low level. A personal experience—when my daughter was graduating from high school, we were living in Connecticut. It was less expensive for her to attend Texas A&M as an out-of-state student than to attend the University of Connecticut as a resident. Those things, I believe, have to be balanced. My hope is that we can achieve the level of excellence that we have maintained while continuing to give accessibility and affordability to the population of the state of Texas that requires education and to the nation. Ultimately, that has to be the goal. Because I do not believe that as a land-grant school, you can lose sight of what your original charter was.