Provost’s Wednesday Communiqué — September 26, 2012

Provost’s Wednes­day Com­mu­niqué — Sep­tem­ber 26, 2012

It is far bet­ter to buy a won­der­ful com­pany at a fair price than a fair com­pany at a won­der­ful price. – War­ren Buf­fett (and the same can be said about a col­lege education).

Roles & Pur­poses Dimen­sion: The sev­enth dimen­sion of the Foun­da­tions of Excel­lence (FoE) is the Roles & Pur­poses Dimen­sion: Foun­da­tions. Insti­tu­tions pro­mote stu­dent under­stand­ing of the var­i­ous roles and pur­poses of higher edu­ca­tion, both for the indi­vid­ual and soci­ety. These roles and pur­poses include knowl­edge acqui­si­tion for per­sonal growth, learn­ing to pre­pare for future employ­ment, learn­ing to become engaged cit­i­zens, and learn­ing to serve the pub­lic good. Insti­tu­tions encour­age first-year stu­dents to exam­ine sys­tem­at­i­cally their moti­va­tion and goals with regard to higher edu­ca­tion in gen­eral and to their own college/university. Stu­dents are exposed to the value of gen­eral edu­ca­tion as well as to the value of more focused, in-depth study of a field or fields of knowl­edge (i.e., the major). The ratio­nale of this dimen­sion is that, “Although many col­lege and uni­ver­sity edu­ca­tors would attest to the mul­ti­ple pur­poses of higher edu­ca­tion for the bet­ter­ment of indi­vid­u­als and the larger soci­ety, new stu­dents often see a sin­gle over­rid­ing pur­pose; for today’s col­lege stu­dents, that pur­pose is often future employ­ment.” This Dimen­sion argues that the first year is the time when stu­dents should be led to dis­cover the many pur­poses of higher edu­ca­tion and to explore their own rea­sons for col­lege atten­dance. The Dimen­sion also main­tains that stu­dents should be exposed to the value of gen­eral edu­ca­tion as well as major courses.

Stu­dent Suc­cess: I would like to acknowl­edge the efforts of many UNM units, and espe­cially those of the Office of Admis­sions from the Divi­sion of Enroll­ment Man­age­ment. The Fresh­man Class of 2012 has 3,423 stu­dents. This is the sec­ond largest ever and rep­re­sents a 2.5% increase from the 2011 begin­ning fresh­men. This was accom­plished in the midst of a grad­ual increase of our admis­sion stan­dards. The efforts of the Office of Admis­sions, in part­ner­ship with the schools and col­leges, the Uni­ver­sity Col­lege advi­sors and the Office of Stu­dent Aca­d­e­mic Suc­cess, will become even more crit­i­cal and chal­leng­ing as we focus on attract­ing high achiev­ing stu­dents while con­tin­u­ing to improve all stu­dents’ preparation.

Bud­get Mod­els for Uni­ver­si­ties: In our effort to explain the var­i­ous bud­get­ing mod­els adopted by uni­ver­si­ties, I have come across the web site ref­er­enced below. This may help to com­pare and con­trast our cur­rent bud­get model with RCM and PBB. Alter­na­tive Bud­get Mod­els.

Expec­ta­tions: Accord­ing to recent research, and as many par­ents have always stated, set­ting higher expec­ta­tions will improve per­for­mance. A recent NPR story dis­cusses this phe­nom­e­non — Set­ting Higher Expec­ta­tions. This was fur­ther dri­ven home by the efforts and suc­cesses of many peer and aspi­ra­tional uni­ver­si­ties in con­cen­trat­ing on the 4-year grad­u­a­tion rate. UT Austin and UT Knoxville are two insti­tu­tions that have focused on improv­ing the 4-year grad­u­a­tion rate, and have since increased both their 4 and 6-year grad­u­a­tion rates.

Our Law School: The UNM School of Law was ranked one of the country’s best value law schools by National Jurist mag­a­zine. The school was rated eighth out of 200 ABA-accredited law schools, based on a num­ber of fac­tors. In its rank­ings, the mag­a­zine seeks to find law schools where grad­u­ates have the best chance of pass­ing their respec­tive state bar exam and get­ting a job in the legal field with­out pil­ing up a huge amount of debt. The magazine’s edi­tors con­sider the per­cent­age of grad­u­ates who pass the bar exam and the per­cent­age who find a job. They weigh these fac­tors against tuition, cost of liv­ing and aver­age indebt­ed­ness after grad­u­a­tion. To reflect a more accu­rate employ­ment pic­ture, this year the magazine’s edi­tors gave more weight to full-time, long-term, bar-passage-required employ­ment. In past years, the employ­ment rate gave the same weight to any kind of employ­ment fol­low­ing law-school grad­u­a­tion, whether it was in the legal field or not. This new for­mula resulted in lower employ­ment sta­tis­tics nation­ally and caused a num­ber of schools to drop in the rank­ings, in some cases, out of the top 20. One other piece of good news is that the July New Mex­ico Bar exam­i­na­tion results just came out and UNM first-time Bar exam­i­nees had a 92% pass rate. The over­all State Bar pass rate for all tak­ers was 84%, so our recent grads per­formed sub­stan­tially (and sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cantly) bet­ter than aver­age. Read the full arti­cle in National Jurist magazine.

NSF Engi­neer­ing Research Cen­ters: The National Sci­ence Foundation’s Engi­neer­ing Research Cen­ters (ERCs) are change agents bring­ing together edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions and indus­try to address global chal­lenges. One of their goals is to cre­ate new indus­tries or trans­form exist­ing indus­tries; another is to expose grad­u­ate and under­grad­u­ate stu­dents to inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research. A focus of every ERC is actively involv­ing groups tra­di­tion­ally under­rep­re­sented in engi­neer­ing to exceed the national engineering-wide aver­ages. UNM School of Engi­neer­ing is a part­ner in four of the 22 ERCs. The lat­est ERC focuses on devel­op­ing nanoscale man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems for mobile com­put­ing. UNM is col­lab­o­rat­ing with UT at Austin, the lead insti­tu­tion, and UC Berke­ley to develop inno­v­a­tive nanoman­u­fac­tur­ing, nanosculpt­ing and nanometrol­ogy sys­tems that could lead to ver­sa­tile mobile com­put­ing devices such as wear­able sen­sors, fold­able lap­tops and rol­lable bat­ter­ies. The effort is led by Dis­tin­guished Pro­fes­sor Steve Brueck.

Chaouki Abdal­lah, Provost & Exec­u­tive Vice-President for Aca­d­e­mic Affairs

A PDF ver­sion is avail­able at: Provost’s Wednes­day Com­mu­niqué. Your feed­back and input are wel­come at: provost@unm.edu or at the elec­tronic town hall. Please also see the Provost’s Blog.