State leaders unveil 2012 Texas Public Higher Education Almanac

By Diane Smith | Star Telegram

Tuesday, May. 15, 2012
 
Want to know how many Texas college students are enrolled part time or how many are prepared for coursework when they start university or community college?
For those pondering these topics, the answers are now available in the second edition of the Texas Public Higher Education Almanac that was released Tuesday.

This year's almanac, which is available on Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board website, details a variety of data and aims to provide the public a snapshot of how the state is performing on the higher education front. State and national data about college tuition, access and completion is documented in the almanac.

"It's a living, breathing document," said Dominic Chavez, spokesman for the coordinating board.
The 2012 almanac was announced at a press conference held at Texas A&M University-San Antonio Tuesday. Gov. Rick Perry and Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Chairman Fred Heldenfels IV described the efforts as a way to promote transparency and accountability.

"Access to a college degree is more critical than ever, and we must maintain our dedication to transparency, which is essential to making higher education more affordable, accountable and accessible to Texas students," Perry said in a release detailing the event.

"This almanac is an important tool in those efforts, not only because it offers transparent data that is valuable to a student in the process of choosing a school, but also because it holds our colleges and universities accountable as they pursue efforts to improve their graduation rates, create more affordable degree options and achieve standards that will keep our state a leader in higher education."
Chavez added that the almanac is a work in progress as it is improved to include more data and changed to reflect current concerns.

For example, this year's almanac includes part-time student performance and how graduation rates have improved over time. The almanac also has several topical pages that reflect current higher education concerns, including developmental education, graduation success, transfer trends and finance.

The idea is to make the information accessible to policy makers, educators, parents and students, Chavez said. This year, the effort goes more grassroots as the coordinating board works to get the almanac in the hands of school district superintendents.
Among some of the findings documented this year:

• Texas ranks 35 nationwide in the percentage (49.6 percent) of students who graduate in four years from an institution.
• Texas ranks 28th nationally in the attainment of Bachelor's degrees.
• Texas ranks 27th nationally in average tuition at public, four-year institutions ($6,350).
• Fifty-seven out of every 100 Texas public university students earns a degree within six years.
• Forty out of every 100 students, who are college ready when they start at a two-year institution, graduate or are still enrolled after three years.
• Seventy percent of students enrolled at public community colleges were enrolled part time.

Daniel Formanowicz, former chair of the UT System faculty advisory council and a biology professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, said the more information about higher education available to the public, the better. He said providing information about part-time students gives people a fuller picture.

"I see that as a positive thing," Formanowicz said.

The almanac's release coincided with a directive from Perry to the coordinating board to follow up with state colleges and universities to see how they are progressing in implementing previously recommended cost efficiencies.

Among recommendations are that higher education institutions improve credit hours produced per full-time faculty member by 10 percent. That move would save an estimated $255.3 million over four years. The report also suggests institutions should evaluate e-textbooks to se if they are more affordable to students and institutions and how they impact learning.
Formanowicz said every Texas institution is dealing with cost savings as they see less state dollars and more students.

"We don't really have a choice. We have got to get more efficient," he said.
The cost savings issue, along with creation of undergraduate programs that cost no more than $10,000, was highlighted Tuesday.

Texas A&M University-San Antonio has created a $10,000 Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences degree program that focuses on information technology and includes dual credit coursework at the high school level, said Jillian Reddish, a spokeswoman with the campus.
To find the almanac, go online: www.thecb.state.tx.us

Source: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/05/15/3962270/state-leaders-unveil-2012-texas.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/05/15/3962270/state-leaders-unveil-2012-texas.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

Perry touts higher ed accountability, responds to rumors: Political attack on universities denied.

Gov. Rick Perry told Texas educators Tuesday, May 15, 2012, that he agrees with the University of Texas regents’ decision to impose a two-year freeze on undergraduate tuition for state residents, saying education costs need to be kept down. Photo: JOHN DAVENPORT, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS / SA

By Jennifer R. Lloyd | San Antonio Express-News
Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Gov. Rick Perry, in town Tuesday to talk about accountability in higher education, found himself addressing questions about his influence and direction of higher education policy.

In prepared remarks before other education leaders at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, the governor touted the second edition of the Texas Public Higher Education Almanac, a compilation of statistics — tuition and fees, enrollment, graduation rates and other details — that was released Tuesday.

Perry said the almanac will send a message to employers that Texas has a skilled workforce and will give young people the data they need to choose the right school and maximize their potential. The almanac is available online at www.thecb.state.tx.us/almanac.

But Perry had to veer off the topic when asked about recent controversies involving the University of Texas System Board of Regents and a comment made Monday by Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who opined that higher education in Texas is under political attack.

A recent blog post from Paul Burka, senior executive editor at Texas Monthly, stated that University of Texas at Austin President Bill Powers could lose his job after opposing the regents' decision to impose a two-year freeze on undergraduate tuition for state residents there.

On Tuesday, Perry said he agreed with the regents' decision.

“I don't think it's any big secret that I'm for keeping the cost of education down, so my suspicion is that no one in Texas thinks that I'm for tuition growth,” Perry said. “It's a good message to send to the citizens of the state that we're not going to just have tuition ... increasing with no regard for what's happening economically for the citizens of the state.”

In the blog, Burka wrote that an unnamed source said UT Regents Chairman Gene Powell asked UT Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa to recommend firing Powers, but that Cigarroa refused. The chancellor later responded with a statement saying Powell “has never directed me to fire anyone.”

Asked if he was satisfied with Powers' job performance at UT Austin, Perry responded, “That's for the Board of Regents to decide.” “I've got a state to oversee,” Perry continued. “I don't spend all my time focused on one institution of higher learning.”

Support for Powers has flowed in recent days from UT students and faculty. Michael Morton, a student and president of UT Austin's Senate of College Councils, said he believes the threat to Powers' job is real and continues.

“This is not the first time we've heard this rumor,” said Morton, who sent a letter supporting the president to regents Monday. “I don't think it's any coincidence that this happens at the end of the school year when students are either leaving the university or are consumed with finals.”

During Perry's visit to San Antonio, he also disagreed with Wolff's statement that there has been a coordinated attack on higher education in recent years.

Wolff's comment came during a San Antonio Express-News editorial board meeting in which he supported the University of Texas at San Antonio's campaign to become a major research university despite cuts in state funding.

Perry countered by saying, “There's been a coordinated focus on higher education” in a positive way. He said he couldn't recall a legislative session that left everyone satisfied with their funding and added, “I'm pretty sure that won't happen in 2013.”

Source: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/article/Perry-defends-school-policies-3560897.php#ixzz1v5tzsY95

Secretary of Education to discuss college affordability here

PLEASE NOTE: The summit is open to the public but requires advance registration. To register, visit http://go.usa.gov/P4m

-Patricia


By Jennifer R. Lloyd | San Antonio Express-News
Wednesday, March 7, 2012

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will visit San Antonio tonight and Friday to discuss college affordability and the role Hispanic students could play in boosting college completion rates, officials said.

After speaking in Austin today, Duncan will travel to San Antonio for a “college affordability and Hispanic community town hall” tonight with Mayor Julián Castro. The meeting will be at 6:10 p.m. at Café College, 131 El Paso St., a U.S. Department of Education news release states.

Duncan will discuss “the importance of college and the key role that Latinos play to help the nation meet the president's goal to lead the world in college completion by 2020,” according to the release.

The invitation-only event is mostly for students and parents and is already full, but NOWCastSA will webcast the event live, and Café College will open a classroom for 120 people to view the webcast at the site, said Eyra Perez, executive director of the San Antonio Education Partnership.

At 9 a.m. Friday, Duncan will speak at the White House Hispanic Community Action Summit at Fox Tech High School, 637 N. Main Ave.

At the day-long summit, a long list of administration officials and about 300 community members will discuss education, job creation, health care and immigration, according to an itinerary released by the White House.

UT official resigns after questions raised about ties to startups

By Kirk Ladendorf | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Published: 9:49 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012

Richard Miller, the University of Texas' first chief commercialization officer, resigned his position last week after being told he must no longer have a financial interest in startup companies that might want to license technology from the school.

Miller, a veteran biotechnology researcher and entrepreneur in California, went to work for UT in September 2010 to help turn more of the school's research discoveries into new jobs, companies and licensing income. As part of his job, he oversaw the work of the Office of Technology Commercialization, which assists companies that are interested in using patented UT technology and negotiates licensing deals with them.

Miller resigned effective Dec. 31 after he was told by UT officials that he could not have a personal and financial involvement in companies that might want to license technology developed at UT.

UT generated $25.6 million in licensing revenue in the most recent fiscal year and completed 29 new licensing and options agreements, according to the commercialization office's website. The school also received 58 U.S. and foreign patents last year.

Juan Sanchez, UT's vice president of research, said there was no active conflict of interest with Miller's involvement with the companies because they had not yet licensed technology from UT. However, Miller "was setting up a scenario in which he would be negotiating with himself, and that would have been a conflict of interest, which we would not allow," Sanchez said.

"We couldn't move forward with his expectation of having a dual role" with the companies, Sanchez said. "It was clear that he would have to divest his interest. The resignation was his call. I would have liked him to remain as chief commercialization officer, but he chose not to."

Sanchez said he instructed Miller in December to divest his interests in three startup companies that he had co-founded with UT faculty members and graduate students. Miller did divest his holdings in the three companies — Wibole, Graphea Inc. and Ultimor — but resigned sometime after that discussion, Sanchez said.

Sanchez said he asked Miller to divest his interest in the Austin companies he co-founded as soon as he learned of Miller's involvement with them.

Sanchez said that, to the best of his knowledge, Miller received no financial gain when he divested his interest in the companies.

Miller could not be reached by the American-Statesman for comment Thursday.

"In his heart ... Dr. Miller is still an entrepreneur and wants to work directly with startup companies in Austin and elsewhere," Sanchez said in a letter announcing Miller's resignation within UT.

Miller arrived in Austin in 2010 with ambitious plans to accelerate the pace of turning technical discoveries into jobs, companies and licensing revenue at the school.

Miller is an experienced biotech entrepreneur in California, and also taught at Stanford University, considered one of the nation's leaders in commercializing technology advances. He was hired by UT at a salary of $310,000.

UT's Office of Technology Commercialization, which Miller oversaw, had been involved with introducing at least two of the companies that Miller co-founded at conferences in which companies seek new investors. The office reported on a Venture Labs Expo at UT in May , at which Miller spoke and where two of the companies, Wibole and Graphea, were given as examples of the kinds of young companies that the Office of Technology Commercialization was working with.

The report said Graphea "was commercializing a patented graphene-based chemistry for high-performance composites."

It also said that Wibole had developed "a technology to improve the performance of cellular networks" and added that "OTC helped Wibole patent its technology."

But Sanchez said this week that UT has no formal ties with any of the companies Miller co-founded because the school has not yet licensed any of its research discoveries to them.

Sanchez said after his conversation with Miller, he asked UT's legal affairs office to provide a detailed talk to employees at the commercialization office on which limitations apply to them in working with customers that seek to license the school's research.

"We needed to make sure that we properly educated people," Sanchez said of the meeting.

Sanchez has asked Dan Sharp, associate director of the commercialization office, to serve as the interim director until a permanent replacement for Miller is found.

On reflection, Sanchez said, UT had a positive relationship with Miller, who he said brought several innovations to the school's commercialization effort.

"I see this as a minor obstacle that we have to overcome, — to find another chief commercialization officer with the same level of experience and enthusiasm" as Miller, Sanchez said. "I am committed — and so is everyone here at UT — that OTC continue to succeed. We are enthusiastic that we will continue to be very proactive in commercializing research."

While he was at UT, Miller pushed for the creation of a so-called embedded fund that would pay for early-stage work for startup companies working to commercialize the school's research work.

He also said it would take time for his ideas of accelerating commercialization in Austin to bear fruit.

"In a year or two, we will know if we can do some big-time stuff," he told the American-Statesman in an interview published in September 2010. "You will be able to feel that you are getting some traction.

"I am expecting to work very hard. In fact, I am already working very hard. The attraction is the possibility of doing something really, really different that is fun to do and that can have a huge impact."

Over the past decade, UT has stepped up its efforts to generate more revenue from technology licensing. Part of the reason is faculty pressure and recruitment of top-level researchers. Both new recruits and existing research faculty have pressed the school's administration to take a more proactive role in tech commercialization.

Pike Powers, an Austin lawyer and veteran economic development activist, said Miller brought new ideas to UT but might not have understood the constraints of working for a public university.

"He was offering some new ideas and thoughts about ways that the University of Texas could be more competitive," Powers said. "I don't think he received as strong a reception as he wanted to receive, so it was frustrating for him. He met with numerous members of the business community, and we advised him to be very careful about what steps he took next and to make sure he had the full support of the business community and the UT administration. But I don't think he ever heard that message to the extent that he should have."

UT-Austin Prepares for Fight Over Tuition Increases

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
January 5, 2011

A group of students taking their cues from the Occupy movement wants the University of Texas System regents to know they won’t take tuition increases without a fight.

At a meeting in front of UT’s iconic tower tonight, the students will settle on a final version of a protest document they hope sparks a larger pushback against the growing cost of higher education.

If 2011 was a rough year for higher education, and UT in particular, the burgeoning Occupy UT group — which takes its name and inspiration from the worldwide phenomenon that began last year — might be an indication that 2012 may not be any easier. One assured flashpoint: how and how high tuition is set.

Forces on both the left and right of the political spectrum are already preparing for battle.

Toward the end of 2011, UT President Bill Powers concurred with recommendations from the university’s Tuition Policy Advisory Committee, made up of students, faculty and administrators, to ask the University of Texas System Board of Regents to increase tuition by 2.6 percent each of the next two years. That’s the maximum the regents, who will make the final tuition decision later this year, said they’d allow.

Adopting the recommendations will mean an extra $127 for in-state students in the coming academic year and $131 in the next. Leaders at UT argue that increases are necessary to avoid immediate cuts to crucial programs.

Not every university in Texas intends to increase tuition next year — the University of Texas at Arlington is a notable example — but it certainly is the trend. And the opposition UT faces from students and others who oppose the price hikes is illustrative of tuition struggles statewide.

Natalie Butler, the UT student body president and a member of the tuition advisory committee, said she hoped the increases would buy the university time to reconsider its approach to funding. “The fact that this current model is not sustainable is not lost on anyone, myself included,” she said.

When the committee’s recommendations were released following a closed-door meeting, many in right-leaning circles that spent much of last year questioning UT’s efficiency and transparency began crying foul. On the conservative Empower Texans blog, writer Will Lutz questioned if the process had violated recent legislative efforts to increase the transparency of the decision-making process regarding student fees. He concluded that while no open-records laws may have been broken, the committee was “ignoring both the intent and spirit” of recent legislation.

UT officials argue that as an advisory body that does not make final decisions on tuition, the committee can meet behind closed doors, allowing members to speak more freely.

Meanwhile, the ostensibly nonpartisan but generally left-leaning members of the nascent Occupy UT movement attended the advisory committee meeting following the announcement of the recommendations to chant their complaints about the proposed increases and the process that led to them.

“We know that this forum is a mere formality,” dozens of students stood up and shouted. “We know that this forum was never a chance to democratically participate in this decision-making process.”

UT President Powers later told the student newspaper The Daily Texan, “I thought the comments were very constructive. It was an interesting theatrical way to make a point. … It doesn’t surprise me that there’s not unanimous agreement on this across the University.”

Trevor Hoag, an assistant instructor at UT and an Occupy UT participant, said — speaking for himself, not the group — that he believes administrators are in “a tight spot” due to state budget cuts. And he said he wants to believe that they are more like-minded than it might seem at first blush. But, Hoag said, “If you’re really standing with us, then what would be the perfect rebuke to the Legislature than to say, ‘You’re going to cut us, but we’re not going to raise tuition. We’re going to buck the trend.’”

The Occupy students’ draft statement catalogs a list of grievances with the university: tuition increases “such that lower- and middle-class students can no longer afford to attend”; students accruing massive student loan debt, “which has led to wide-spread bankruptcy and default”; and an administration that “has leveled no serious rebuke against the legislature of the State of Texas” by demanding the re-regulation of tuition and a return to previous funding levels.

The students also complain that UT has made those decisions, among others, “with practically no democratic input from students, and it will continue to do so until students unite in order to turn the tide.”

Kevin Hegarty, UT’s vice president and chief financial officer, disagreed. He said the opportunities for student involvement in tuition recommendations had increased — the tuition advisory committee held open forums prior to its decision, and several new student budget advisory committees have been established in the last year — but overall student participation had not. “The vast majority of the student body does not seem to want to engage in that particular discussion, but that said, we’ll continue to make the effort,” he said.

Butler, the student body president, agreed, saying she had expected to hear calls to prevent tuition increases at two open advisory committee meetings before the recommendations were finalized. “I was expecting it and didn’t hear it, and that colored my thinking of things,” she said.

Now, the tuition decision rests with the regents, and it’s likely that they will hear opposition from voices on the right and from Occupiers like Hoag, who said, “We just want, if nothing else, manageable student debt.”

Hoag and his compatriots in Occupy UT have big plans. Thus far their strategy has been more event-based, but a physical occupation could be in the works for later in the semester. And they are reaching out to sympathetic groups at other schools, like Texas State University in San Marcos, which has had a small band of occupiers for months.

“Our target is, in some way, to attract others to swell the movement rather than to plead to the masters for more scraps,” Hoag said.

Senator grills UT chancellor, an old friend

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, Nov. 18, 2011

State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, has known Francisco Cigarroa since he was born. His mother is one of her best friends. His father is her physician.

But Cigarroa, the chancellor of the University of Texas System, didn't alert Zaffirini, who leads the Senate Higher Education Committee, when a controversy erupted early this year over the direction of the system and its governing board.

"And when UT was criticized in particular, you didn't defend UT," Zaffirini told Cigarroa at a hearing held Friday by a special House-Senate panel. "Why not?"

Cigarroa replied that he initially was "trying to put my hands around how quickly this was moving and where it was going."

Indeed, he was navigating a political minefield. The chairman of the Board of Regents had hired an adviser — who was later dismissed — with a job description overlapping some of the chancellor's duties. And some UT regents, along with counterparts at the Texas A&M University System, seemed sympathetic to Gov. Rick Perry's desire to shake up public higher education.

Cigarroa testified that he found other venues to speak his mind, including a gathering of prominent donors, newspaper editorial boards and meetings of the regents where he defended the system's faculty members and scolded board members for micromanagement.

"So in my voice," Cigarroa said, "I spoke out to the best of my abilities."

The exchange wasn't the only moment when the senator put her old friend on the spot during Friday's hearing of the Joint Oversight Committee on Higher Education Governance, Excellence and Transparency, which Zaffirini leads along with Rep. Dan Branch , R-Dallas. Up to now, she has largely defended the chancellor's handling of the higher education debate, which broke out in March after Gene Powell, chairman of the UT regents, hired Rick O'Donnell as special adviser and suggested that college costs could be reduced by offering a $10,000 bachelor's degree akin to the quality of a midlevel vehicle .

Zaffirini noted that when her office requested emails and other records about several higher education proposals promoted by Perry, including bonus pay for faculty members based solely on student evaluations, the A&M System "turned in the documents we requested almost immediately. Nothing was marked confidential. Working with UT, on the other hand, whether with the system or with a particular individual, was incredibly challenging.

"I think I called you, chancellor, what, perhaps five times, saying, 'Where is the information and why aren't we getting it?' And so many of the emails were marked confidential," Zaffirini said.

"We haven't found anything that we consider confidential. Embarrassing? Yes. Controversial? Absolutely. Stupid? Sometimes. But not confidential. And even today we have not resolved which are no longer considered confidential. Why is it so difficult and why is this information still being considered confidential?" she said.

Cigarroa replied that he didn't understand why it was so difficult. "I certainly conveyed your strong concerns to the Office of General Counsel," he said. "I think a complicating factor was that we were under threat of ... a lawsuit by the previous special adviser to the board. I wasn't really an expert to determine what was confidential or not from a legal perspective."

The chancellor said he would convey her concerns again to the system's general counsel, Barry Burgdorf .

"The sooner the better," Zaffirini said, "because we have so much information that I can't ask you questions about because they're marked confidential, and that really ties our hands."

UT System Launches Online Route to Degree Completion

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
December 13, 2011

The University of Texas System is creating a new path to completion for students who attempted but — for whatever reason — have been unable to finish their college degree.

The Finish@UT program, which launched last week, is a selection of UT-System-approved online courses aimed primarily at students between ages 25 and 35 who have already amassed credits toward an undergraduate degree. “Particularly those students who have had various life issues intervene and cannot get to campus on a regular basis,” said Martha Ellis, associate vice chancellor for community college partnerships at the UT System.

So far, three institutions are participating, and each offers a different degree. Students can earn a bachelor of science in university studies degree at UT-Arlington, a bachelor of multidisciplinary studies degree at UT-El Paso or a bachelor of arts in humanities degree at UT-Permian Basin.

Students must apply and be accepted to the institution from which they will ultimately graduate, but once they are in the system, they can take courses from all three.

So far, the program is fairly small. This fall, 18 students were enrolled with the declared intent to graduate at UT-Arlington, 40 at UT-El Paso and 72 at UT-Permian Basin. However, the total course enrollments were significantly higher at each university, which, according to Ellis, indicates “some students are taking more than one class and from more than one institution.”

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This summer, the UT System increased its commitment to developing new options for blended and online learning. UT System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa’s framework for the future of the system, which was unanimously approved by the board of regents in August, included a $50 million investment in a new Institute of Transformational Learning, which will focus on such issues.

Other institutions in the system have also been investing in online expansion. UT-Arlington, for example, has a deal with Academic Partnerships, a private company owned by Dallas entrepreneur Randy Best that focuses on translating public university programs into online courses.

While somewhat similar in spirit, Ellis said those initiatives are separate from Finish@UT, which has been in development for about two years — one year of planning, followed by another of pilot projects.

In addition to the ability to earn a degree from the highly regarded UT System, Ellis said the primary benefits of the program for students are the flexible scheduling and degree personalization. “We want to know: How can we tailor a degree to get you a quality degree best utilizing the coursework that you’ve taken to date?” she said.

Students need not have begun their studies at a UT System institution, nor do they need to be Texas residents, to participate, and prices vary based on institution. For Texas residents, 12 credits — a full load — will cost roughly $4,448 at UT-Arlington, $2,815 at UT-El Paso and $2,697 at UT-Permian Basin.

While it’s possible that the program could generate revenue at a time of declining state funding, Ellis said that was not the driving force behind the program's conception. “Revenue? Sure, that would be great too,” she said, “but the primary purpose is to meet the needs to the state of Texas with having a trained work force.”

Newsom Stakes a Claim With Student Protests

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom joined a group of protesters on Monday after they disrupted the University of California Board of Regents meeting in San Francisco and conducted a meeting of their own.

By JENNIFER GOLLAN and GERRY SHIH | NY Times
Published: December 2, 2011

Dozens of chanting protesters disrupted a public meeting of the University of California Board of Regents on Monday, driving all but one of the regents from the room.

“What the hell,” said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a regent by virtue of his office, as he flashed a smile and strode past nervous police to mingle with protesters.

While other regents at the meeting in San Francisco huddled behind closed doors or waited at a safe distance on a teleconference call, Mr. Newsom sat forward in his chair, surrounded by students and faculty members railing against a raft of ills: rising tuition, mounting student debt, grim job prospects and accusations of police brutality.

When he finally spoke, Mr. Newsom thanked the protesters for “restoring my faith and confidence in this state and country.” He added, “You have my support.”

And, no doubt, he would like theirs in return.

With the University of California and the California State University systems convulsing over increases in tuition and the ensuing protests at several campuses, Mr. Newsom has staked a position as a populist champion for students, a key part of his base that will be critical if, as expected, he seeks higher office.

“Gavin is speaking from the heart, but it also makes sense for him politically,” said Nathan Ballard, a former press secretary and an aide to Mr. Newsom.

In an interview Thursday, Mr. Newsom said he was deeply alarmed by what he called the dismantling of the U.C. and C.S.U. systems and gently criticized the budget deal struck by Gov. Jerry Brown last year that included steep cuts to financing for both institutions.

“You can’t cut $650 million from both systems and tell me you value the system,” he said. “I believe we could’ve avoided a substantial portion of these cuts.”

He added, “If I were governor, I’d take that as a critique, but I stand by it.”

While Mr. Newsom, 44, has grabbed headlines by criticizing tuition increases and cuts to state spending on education, Governor Brown, a fellow Democrat, has been wrangling for months with the Legislature over a pension overhaul and proposed taxes to help finance education.

Mr. Brown was on vacation last week, and aides had to address criticism that he failed to swiftly address incidents in which campus police used pepper spray and riot batons to quell student protests at Berkeley and U.C. Davis, incidents that were condemned by Mr. Newsom and John A. Pérez, the Assembly speaker and a U.C. regent.

Mr. Newsom told The Sacramento Bee last week that the relationship between a governor and a lieutenant governor was typically “difficult.”

But on Tuesday, Elizabeth Ashford, a spokeswoman for Mr. Brown, said the governor and Mr. Newsom had a “shared concern” over the tuition increases.

“The governor’s position has always been that without additional revenue coming into the state we’re faced with some terrible choices,” she said. “The lieutenant governor is very aware of the very serious fiscal realities that are facing the state.”

Larry N. Gerston, a professor of political science at San Jose State University, said Mr. Brown and Mr. Newsom had fundamentally different aims.

“The easy part is to condemn tuition increases; the harder part is to decide how you’re going to offset those increases with revenue augmentation,” Mr. Gerston said. “Jerry Brown has to be the conductor and make all the pieces come together. Gavin can be a star performer, but he’s just one instrument in a 60- or 70-piece symphony.”

Although Mr. Newsom sees higher education as an issue within his purview as regent, the latitude the governor allows him will be scrutinized because Mr. Newsom has been openly frustrated by the limited scope of his office.

When he briefly ran against Mr. Brown, 73, in the gubernatorial primary last year, Mr. Newsom repeatedly emphasized his youth and questioned the “fire in the belly” of Mr. Brown.

During Mr. Newsom’s campaign for lieutenant governor, “much of Gavin’s support came from the younger generation,” Mr. Ballard said. “He’s certainly speaking to a demographic that will help him in the future.”

In fact, advisers who cultivate Mr. Newsom’s social media presence are quick to note that the majority of his followers on Twitter and those who “like” his Facebook page are young.

Mr. Newsom’s supporters say that he has always backed students’ causes, and that his outspokenness underscores his integrity and his image as an iconoclast.

In 2004, Mr. Newsom riled elders in his party when, as mayor of San Francisco, he issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite a state ban.

“He’s always had a ‘damn the political torpedoes’ attitude and a willingness to take on tough issues,” said Peter Ragone, a close political adviser to Mr. Newsom.

As the matter of tuition increases and cuts to education spending has gained prominence nationwide, Mr. Newsom has stocked his official Web site with press releases calling for more transparency around spending decisions.

At Monday’s regents meeting, he declined to sign a petition calling for state lawmakers to close corporate tax loopholes, among other proposed changes in the tax code, but pledged his support for the initiatives.

“I think it’s a lot better than any signature," Mr. Newsom said, adding that he was working with Mr. Brown to devise various changes in tax laws.

Mr. Newsom is not the only U.C. regent to express support for students. On Monday in Los Angeles, for example, Sherry Lansing and Eddie Island met with protesters for 45 minutes after the latter disrupted the regents’ conference-call meeting there. And Ms. Lansing, the board chairwoman, has said she intends to march with student demonstrators in Sacramento early next year to protest cuts in education spending.

But in some ways, the lieutenant governor’s support for the uprising, including students’ demands for higher taxes on the wealthy, may seem like a peculiar undertaking. He recently bought a $2.2 million home in Kentfield, and his business and investment holdings made him the richest of the state’s top elected officials in 2010, according to the most recent financial disclosures available from the California Fair Political Practices Commission.

Some observers, however, say his years in politics have allowed Mr. Newsom to cultivate an unusually approachable demeanor.

“He has a much broader role than the typical regent,” said George Marcus, a U.C. regent who is the founder and chairman of Marcus & Millichap, one of the largest commercial real estate brokerage firms in the country. “He is much more accustomed to dealing with different groups of people. Some regents are more inclined to interact with students than others.”

John Vigna, a spokesman for Mr. Pérez, said Mr. Newsom was casting himself as a liaison between the students and the regents, who are under intense scrutiny.

“I think that he does have a needle to thread here,” Mr. Vigna said. “The risk is you identify the problem and never figure out what the solution is.”

Texplainer: Could Universities Undergo Sunset Review?

Great response from Texas Tech: “We have a sunset review; it’s just not called sunset review. Every two years we come down here and try to justify what we’re doing.”

-Patricia

Hey, Texplainer: Could the state’s public universities go through the so-called sunset review process, forcing them to periodically defend their existence to state legislators?

The issue came up at a November hearing of the Joint Oversight Committee on Higher Education Governance, Excellence and Transparency, a group formed earlier this year amid tense debate over the operations of higher education institutions in the state.

A co-chair of the committee, state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, cited a recommendation from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank whose higher education proposals she has openly opposed, that was delivered to legislators prior to the recent legislative session. It called for lawmakers to “study the feasibility, the pros, and the cons of placing universities under sunset review.”

Most state agencies go through the high-stakes process every 12 years. Their operations are scrutinized and the Legislature decides whether they should continue to operate. If legislators don't act to keep an agency in sunset alive, it shuts down.

“If the Legislature were to adopt such a recommendation, how would your universities in your system be impacted?” Zaffirini asked a group of university system chancellors who had been invited to testify on matters of governance.

As might be expected, the chancellors didn’t go for the idea.

University of Houston System Chancellor Renu Khator said it was “not doable.” Texas Tech University System Chancellor Kent Hance, a former legislator, said, “We have a sunset review; it’s just not called sunset review. Every two years we come down here and try to justify what we’re doing.”

That the discussion was even occurring surprised some in the higher education community. Michael McClendon, an education policy expert from Vanderbilt University, has been retained by the Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, an organization that sprang up in opposition to the TPPF’s proposals. He said it struck him as “illogical,” at a time when universities must increasingly look to private dollars to fund their activities, that they might have to do so with the caveat that they might not exist in a few years. “What right-minded donor would give to that organization?”

Lee Jackson, the chancellor of the University of North Texas System, expressed reluctance to proclaim that universities should be exempt from the sunset process — after all, as a state representative in 1979 he had disagreed with the State Bar of Texas that it should be exempted.

Higher education might be different. Usually, Jackson said, when an agency is sunsetted — a nice way of saying shut down — its functions are transferred to another agency. But because of accreditation requirements, among other issues, the students at a university that was eliminated through the sunset review process could not simply or easily be transferred and would most likely be left in the lurch.

“If the question were asked … could the state of Texas use our time better evaluating our progress, I would say yes,” Jackson said.

That’s what the recommendation was driving at, according to Thomas Lindsay, who arrived as director of the TPPF’s Center for Higher Education after the proposal was made. “The idea behind it is pretty common sense,” he said. “As an entity created for and paid for by the taxpayers, it, like all other state entities, should be reviewed.”

The intent was not to shut down the universities, he said, adding that it was “unfortunate” if that was the impression that had been given. And if a sunset process were in place, he does not believe it would shutter universities. “The purpose of education is not something that’s going to go out of style, so it’s not looked at as a way to abolish them,” he said. “If any entity can [defend its existence], institutions of higher education would be those.”

Lindsay said the TPPF is currently examining different ways to review universities as they piece together what will ultimately be their recommendations for the 2013 legislative session.

Those proposals, when they come, will likely be pored over carefully by the higher education community both in Texas and elsewhere. “I think some people look to Texas with befuddlement,” McClendon said. “They understand that the questions being asked there are being asked everywhere, but some of the solutions being raised seem a bit extreme.”

Bottom line: Technically, it's feasible, but university leaders and some higher education experts say it's not realistic.

UT Faculty Productivity Gets High Marks in New Report

Check out Musick's full report, "An analysis of faculty instructional and grant-based productivity at the University of Texas at Austin"

-Patricia

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
November 13, 2011

Despite the arguments of critics in recent months, Marc Musick, the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts associate dean of student affairs, makes the case in a new faculty productivity report that his institution provides “an incredible return on investment for the state.”

Using data from the 2009-10 academic year made public by the University of Texas System this summer, Musick found that UT professors generated revenue of more than twice their compensation of $257 million in state funds for salary and benefits. By combining the amount of money paid by the state via a student enrollment-based formula and external funding for academic research, Musick concluded that the UT faculty generated about $558 million in total revenue for the university.

Musick’s report is the latest in a series of similar productivity studies that have been released over the course of a year marked by questions about the effectiveness of the state’s higher education system. The studies have come from a variety of sources using differing methodologies and reaching a wide range of conclusions, some of them strikingly negative. The latest release comes at a time when many of the key players in the state’s ongoing debate over higher education are poised to take the discussion on how to measure faculty productivity to a national level.

The topic became a hot-button issue in the spring, due in large part to a set of seven controversial proposals for higher education written by Austin businessman Jeff Sandefer in 2008 and promoted by Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank of which Sandefer is a board member.

On Friday, Sandefer and others tied to the TPPF are participating in a higher education conference in Washington, D.C., put on by the Cato Institute, a prominent national conservative organization. According to information the institute posted online about the event, “One key question the conference will take on is how to assess the productivity of faculty members, including examining the groundbreaking — and highly controversial — efforts recently undertaken in the state of Texas."

An early December closed-door gathering in Indianapolis organized by UT President Bill Powers for the presidents and provosts of public universities in the Association of American Universities, an elite organization of research institutions, will also tackle the subject. “In particular, I would like to explore how we might foster richer deliberations about higher education productivity than we have seen recently in Texas and other states,” Powers wrote in his invitation.

While Musick’s new study demonstrates a high level of faculty productivity at the university, he acknowledged that it omits key elements of professors’ workload. “All it’s doing is measuring two things that the faculty do,” he said. “It’s measuring grants and its measuring teaching. But faculty do lots of different things. The data we have are extremely limited in what they can tell us.”

Still, Musick saw in the data opportunities to encourage more productivity. He recommends enhancing offerings for faculty mentorship, since the strongest-performing faculty tend to be more experienced. He said the number of students in some mid-size classes could be increased without sacrificing quality, freeing up resources for more of the smaller classes that students prefer. He also recommended that the university provide greater incentives for professors to pursue grants and more assistance with their submissions so that less of their time is spent on paperwork.

Most importantly, Musick said, faculty need to be evaluated based on accurate, comprehensive data that conveys their productivity over time as opposed to a single year.

“I completely agree with the idea of going out and getting data and analyzing it,” said Musick, who also released a report on university efficiency in September, “but it’s got to be helpful, it’s got to be thoughtful, its got to be done in the right way to make sure we are finding the truth and not just doing what’s easy to find quick answers.”

A&M Chancellor Sharp Making His Mark, Cutting His Pay

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
November 6, 2011

Eight weeks after he was put in charge of the Texas A&M University System, Chancellor John Sharp is shuffling the top staff, hiring management consultants to streamline the administration and cutting his own pay.

So far, none of the changes are as dramatic or headline-grabbing as his sudden firing of Deputy Chancellor Jay Kimbrough in September. In fact, they are all telegraphed in a report by his transition team (attached below).

That team included System General Counsel Ray Bonilla, Sharp's former comptroller's chief of staff Tom Duffy, former Deputy Comptroller Billy Hamilton, and E.J. Pederson, a former executive vice president of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and a close friend of the chancellor.

"Our overall conclusion is that while some organizational changes are needed, the Texas A&M University System has enormous potential to achieve sustained greatness as one of the premier public university systems in the nation — and in the world," they wrote in the introduction to their report. They said their findings are not definitive but are designed to quickly address needed organizational changes.

Sharp told The Texas Tribune he concurs with nearly all of the recommendations. One called for placing all communications and public relations staff throughout the system on annual contracts so that the system's overall messaging could be reviewed frequently. Instead, Sharp and the A&M System regents decided that such personnel will simply serve at the will of the chancellor and their respective president.

Many of the recommendations have already been met or are about to be. The report calls for an outside management review of the administration, and this week it was announced that MGT of America — which Sharp has called upon in the past — has been secured for the project. Frank Ashley, the current vice chancellor of academic affairs, has been moved into the newly recommended role of vice chancellor of diversity. A new vice chancellor for government affairs who will coordinate their federal and state relations had also been selected. Greg Anderson, previously the system's chief investment officer, is now the system's new chief financial officer.

While it was not recommended by the team, Sharp has also cut his own salary by 5 percent. He said he was inspired by Prairie View A&M University President George C. Wright, who responded to current financial difficulties to returning to the classroom. Sharp said he's not a good teacher, but hoped this sacrifice — which takes his salary down to $507,000 — might strike a similar symbolic chord. He described it as "good for the goose, good for the gander."

Ultimately, Sharp said he hoped the changes he has made — and those that are on the way — have sent a message to the A&M, legislative and Texas communities. "We just want to get everybody on the same page," he said. "We want the Legislature to know we're being inclusive all over the state of Texas. We will have our organization in place to where it's doing the most efficient job possible."

Here's the full transition team report, including what members say should be done about the system's airplanes.

UT agreement lets MyEdu see students' education records

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz and Eric Dexheimer | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, Nov. 3, 2011

An agreement between the University of Texas System and MyEdu Corp. designates the Austin-based company as "a UT System official" with permission to see students' education records.

The agreement also lets the company display trademarks and logos of the system's 15 campuses on its website, which offers a free service that students can use to plan courses, track their progress toward a degree and rate professors.

Administrators at the Austin flagship and other campuses say implementing these and other details of the agreement is a work in progress.

The members of the UT System Board of Regents voted unanimously Aug. 25 to invest $10 million in privately held MyEdu and to sign on with it for customized website functions for each of the system's nine academic and six health campuses. The American-Statesman has reported on several unusual aspects of the partnership this week.

The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act allows colleges to release publicly so-called directory information about students, such as name, phone number and address. But individual student grades and schedules are considered private under the law.

Although he said he could not speak to the arrangement between the UT System and MyEdu specifically, Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, said the law permitted schools to designate contractors to view and gather otherwise private student information.

"As 'school officials,' these outside parties may inspect and review students' education records and are under the same obligations to protect the information as internal school officials," Bradshaw said.

Steven McDonald, general counsel for the Rhode Island School of Design and an expert of the privacy act, said contractors given access to otherwise private student information must meet a series of legal tests, including being under the direct control of the school.

The contractors also must use the information only for matters pertaining to student education, he said.

UT System officials said student information will be protected with security safeguards, system oversight and campus-by-campus authority to decide what will be shared with MyEdu.

But officials at the system's campuses, who were not consulted in depth before the MyEdu deal was struck, said it was not yet clear exactly how all this will work.

"If we can make MyEdu a useful advising tool for faculty advisers, that could potentially be helpful to us," David Daniel , president of UT-Dallas, said Thursday. "However, we have to do that in a way that is FERPA-compliant. We do not yet know precisely how that will work."

A spokesman for the Austin flagship said no other contract or partnership is precisely comparable to the one involving MyEdu.

But, Gary Susswein said, "We believe the framework exists in this agreement for us to protect student privacy and safeguard our brand in a way that is consistent with our operations."

MyEdu did not respond to a request for clarification.

Barry Burgdorf, the UT System's vice chancellor and general counsel, said individual education records wouldn't be shared with MyEdu without a student's permission. Patti Ohlendorf, UT-Austin's vice president for legal affairs, said that was her understanding, as well.

"The application will not even access a particular student's information unless he or she signs up for the service," she said. "If a student wants to use the advising application and UT-Austin has decided to offer it, the student can sign on for the application and only then can it access that particular student's record."

S tudents around the country use tools on the company's website, myedu.com, to help them plan their schedules and then log on to official university sites to confirm class and scheduling information. Students and faculty members have occasionally complained that information on myedu.com has been inaccurate.

Regents and UT System officials said the partnership with MyEdu would ensure greater accuracy, and they predicted that the website could become a kind of one-stop shop for degree planning. But if campuses decide not to share some educational records with MyEdu, students might still have to check with their schools to ensure that their educational plans are on track.

Carisa Neitsche , president of UT-Austin's Senate of College Councils, the voice of students on academic affairs, said past surveys show students are concerned with protecting their privacy. Regarding the MyEdu deal, she said: "There are so many question marks at this point. None of us knows what this will look like."

John Davis Rutkauskas , the UT System's nonvoting student regent, said students at many of the campuses want expanded and enhanced advising services. "As an undergraduate student at UT-Austin and a user of MyEdu, I can personally attest that the service works and has enhanced my student experience," he said.

The system's partnership with MyEdu came together in an unusual fashion. Investments from the multibillion-dollar Permanent University Fund are normally made by money management firms chosen by an arm of the UT board, the University of Texas Investment Management Co.

The regents made a direct investment in this case, without competitive bidding, because they saw MyEdu as a unique and innovative tool to help students plan their educations and thereby improve graduation rates, system officials said.

The regents and other system officials did not disclose the fact — nor were they apparently aware in some cases — that William Cunningham, the system's chancellor from 1992 to 2000, is an investor in MyEdu and that his son is the company's senior vice president of information architecture and a co-founder. No law or rule required such disclosure.

System officials said this week that the son of Regent Wallace Hall held an unpaid internship at MyEdu from Aug. 1-12 and was invited to return this fall, also for no pay. That does not constitute a conflict requiring any action, Burgdorf said.

UT-Austin President William Powers Jr. said this week that the decision to partner with MyEdu "was a decision of the board not a decision of the campus."

He added that he would have had different priorities for the $10 million.

The system later issued a statement defending the investment: "This purchase was a literal 'gift' from the Board of Regents directly to the 211,000 students matriculating in the system's institutions. In time the board is hopeful that administrators, faculty and staff at our institutions will find the MyEdu software that is customized for their use to be very helpful and useful in improving advising and improving help to their students."

rhaurwitz@statesman.com; 445-3604

edexheimer@statesman.com; 445-1774

Texas Board Requires the Phasing Out of 64 Degree Programs With Low Enrollments

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

Harold W. Hahn (left) and Fred W. Heldenfels IV were among the members of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board who determined which "underperforming" degree programs to cut. They are shown at Thursday's hearing, where college officials sought reprieves for some programs.

By Katherine Mangan | Chronicle of Higher Education
Austin, Tex.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board voted Thursday to phase out 64 degree programs that failed to attract enough majors under stricter enrollment guidelines the board enacted last year.

Another 145 programs the board deemed underperforming are also being voluntarily cut.

The board's decisions came program by program over four hours in which a parade of higher-education leaders pleaded with the board to spare their programs.

Board members say the cuts will allow the state to use its resources more efficiently, while critics counter that the board's actions will disproportionately hurt predominantly minority colleges and programs in mathematics and science.

Thirteen of the state's 25 undergraduate physics degree programs, for instance, were judged "underperforming." The board voted to phase out or consolidate six of them.

In all, the board identified 545 programs statewide that were underenrolled according to its new, more-stringent standards. For a bachelor's or associate degree, a program is defined as being underenrolled if it produced fewer than five majors per year, averaged over five years. The threshold for a master's degree is three per year, and for a doctorate, it's two per year.

Eliminating low-producing majors won't prevent a college from offering courses in that subject, board officials said.

"We're not losing anything. We're telling institutions, Either make all of your programs robust and successful, or concentrate on the things you do well," the state's higher-education commissioner, Raymund A. Paredes, told reporters during a conference call before the meeting. He was asked whether the move was related to calls from some regents and allies of Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, for greater productivity in higher education.

"This process of accountability is something we're going to see more of," Mr. Paredes said. "We want to be able to report to Texas taxpayers how their money is being used."
Appeals for 'Core' Programs

Texas Southern University, a historically black institution, appealed the proposed elimination of five majors, in chemistry, math, physics, English, and art. (During Thursday's board meeting, the physics and math appeals were denied, and English and chemistry were given a two-year reprieve.)

Another historically black institution, Prairie View A&M University, appealed cuts in physics and chemistry. (The physics appeal was denied and chemistry was given a two-year extension). "The courses offered in the programs targeted for deletion are core components for engineering, nursing, and biology," the university's provost, E. Joahanne Thomas-Smith said in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

After being notified that they had programs that were underenrolled, Texas colleges agreed to cut 145 of those majors. The coordinating board, after an initial appeals process, then decided that colleges should be forced to phase out 95 more programs. For the rest of the programs that were deemed underenrolled, colleges were allowed to consolidate them with other departments or were given temporary reprieves while they try to increase their enrollments. Of the 95 programs that the board has recommended be forced to close, colleges made appeals to the full board to keep 44 programs.

The coordinating board has had the authority to cut low-performing majors since 1971, but this is the first time it has looked at every major at every state college and university and recommended widespread cuts.

Mr. Paredes denied criticisms that the cuts will undermine the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math. Between the 2006 and 2010 fiscal years, the programs slated for closure graduated 1.7 percent of the state's physics majors and 0.7 percent of its STEM graduates, the coordinating board reports.

Recent research also shows, Mr. Paredes said, that paring down the number of majors students can choose from can help them focus and graduate faster. "Students have so many choices and majors they can get confused," he said.

Analysts with the Texas board said their thresholds for identifying "low-producing" degrees are more lenient than those of several other states that have been analyzing enrollment and completion numbers, including Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina.

In April, the State of Louisiana Board of Regents voted to eliminate 109 degree programs that had low rates of completion; for bachelor's degrees, that meant that fewer than eight people completed the program per year. The Louisiana board had deemed more than 400 degree programs to be "underperforming," many of which ended up being consolidated into other departments.

Affirmative-Action Critics See Texas Case as a Vehicle for a Supreme Court Victory

By Peter Schmidt | Chronicle of Higher Education
Washington
October 31, 2011

Leading critics of affirmative action say they are optimistic that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up a lawsuit challenging the race-conscious admissions policies of the University of Texas at Austin and hand down a ruling that curtails, or even ends, the use of such admissions preferences by colleges around the nation.

In briefs urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, the lawyers for two white students rejected by the university have been joined by several conservative advocacy groups and other foes of affirmative-action preferences in arguing that colleges have strayed far beyond the limits on such policies set forth by the Supreme Court when it weighed in on them in 2003, in two decisions involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

All of the briefs filed on behalf of the two students ask for the Supreme Court to overturn an appellate-court ruling that upheld the University of Texas's race-conscious admissions policies, and several argue that the case presents the high court with an opportunity to revisit its 2003 rulings and further restrict, or even eliminate, the use of affirmative-action preferences by colleges.

The University of Texas has remained silent, so far, on the question of whether the Supreme Court should take up the case, and no one has yet submitted any other briefs on its behalf to urge the justices to leave alone the lower court's ruling in its case.

The university's deadline for submitting a brief on its own was October 19, but the Supreme Court cannot decide to hear the case, Fisher v. the University of Texas at Austin, without offering the university an opportunity to argue against its doing so. If the Supreme Court asks the university to submit such a brief, those who support the university's policies will have another opportunity to submit friend-of-the-court briefs on its behalf.

Officials of the University of Texas and the state attorney general's office, which is helping to represent it in the case, declined last week to comment on their reason for not having already filed a brief urging the court not to take up matter.

Although several lawyers with expertise on the Supreme Court said the university's failure to volunteer such a brief on its own, without an invitation by justices, will not matter, Michael A. Carvin, a lawyer for Jones Day who has argued several cases before the high court, characterized the move as a "mind-boggling" strategic mistake.

"The only times you don't file a response are if they are low-visibility cases where there is no chance" the Supreme Court will decide to hear them, Mr. Carvin said. "Texas' decision not to file," he said, "is inexcusable and insulting to the court."

Among the lawyers for groups likely to file friend-of-the-court briefs on the university's behalf, Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, said her organization has been "waiting to see how this would play out."

Damon Todd Hewitt, who oversees litigation related to education for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said his organization is prepared to argue that the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions policies is "settled precedent" and there is "no need for further review by the Supreme Court."
Source of Division

If the Supreme Court does take up the case, a key question before it will be whether the University of Texas needs to have race-conscious admissions policies to achieve sufficiently diverse enrollments, or had taken in adequate numbers of students from various minority populations under a state law guaranteeing admission to any public university to students graduating from a Texas high school in the top 10th of their class.

Texas lawmakers adopted the admissions guarantee, widely known as the "top 10 percent plan," in 1997, in response to a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in a legal challenge to the use of race-conscious admissions by the University of Texas' law school.

The Fifth Circuit's decision in that case, Hopwood v. Texas, was interpreted as barring the state's colleges from considering applicants' race or ethnicity, but the law guaranteeing admission based on a high-school class rank helped black and Hispanic enrollments at the University of Texas rebound, reaching levels above what they had been before the Hopwood decision.

Federal appeals courts in other circuits around the nation upheld the consideration of race in admissions, however, and the legal landscape surrounding them changed significantly when the Supreme Court ruled on their constitutionality in two landmark 2003 decisions involving the University of Michigan, in the cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger.

In the Gratz case the Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 to strike down the admissions policy of the university's main undergraduate college, with the majority opinion holding that the university put too much emphasis on race in using a point-based admission system that automatically gave substantial bonuses to members of certain minority groups. In the Grutter case, however, the court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the race-conscious admission policy of the university's law school.

The Grutter majority's opinion strongly endorsed the idea that the law school had a compelling interest in using affirmative action to enroll "critical masses" of black, Hispanic, and American Indian students because of the educational benefits such diversity was said to provide.

It also concluded that the law school's policy was "narrowly tailored" to achieving such a goal because race and ethnicity were considered among several factors in the course of the law school's holistic evaluation of applicants. The Grutter majority's opinion cautioned, however, that colleges, before adopting such policies, should give "serious, good-faith consideration" to race-neutral alternatives.

Based on the Grutter ruling, the University of Texas returned to considering applicants' race and ethnicity in 2005. Lawyers for the Project on Fair Representation, an organization opposed to affirmative-action preferences, responded by mounting a legal challenge to the move on behalf of Abigail Fisher, a white applicant for undergraduate admission that the university had rejected.

A U.S. District Court judge tossed out the lawsuit in 2009, arguing that the university's policy was constitutional because it was narrowly tailored. Although a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit unanimously upheld that decision in January, one of the three judges, Emilio M. Garza, heavily criticized the Grutter opinion that had served as the basis of the panel's decision as a digression from Supreme Court precedents and as having little basis on concrete evidence of the educational benefits of such policies.

In voting 9 to 7 in June to deny a rehearing of the case by all of its members, the full Fifth Circuit was even more bitterly divided. Its chief judge, Edith H. Jones, was joined by four others in issuing a dissent that said the three-judge panel had actually strayed from the requirements of Grutter by showing too much deference to the views of college administrators, failing to consider the success of the state's "top 10 percent plan" as a race-neutral alternative, and accepting the university's argument that it needed race-conscious admissions to bring about diversity at a classroom—and not just institutional—level.
Judging Ripeness

Speaking strictly in terms of numbers, the odds of the U.S. Supreme Court hearing a case are tiny—it typically grants fewer than 1 out of 100 requests for it to take up legal disputes. But, in interviews last week, several legal scholars said the Supreme Court was much likelier to take up the University of Texas case than most.

Among the reasons they cited was that the composition of the court has changed significantly since the Grutter decision, with the justice who wrote for the Grutter majority, Sandra Day O'Connor, retiring and being replaced by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who appears to take a much dimmer view of affirmative-action preferences.

"Given how much the justices care about this issue, and given the perception of the conservative justices that they can at least cut back on Grutter if not overrule it with their new majority, I suspect they'll take it," says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine.

Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at New York University who helped represent the University of Texas in Hopwood, said the high profile of the latest case, along with the Fifth Circuit judges' deep division over it, "certainly increases the likelihood" the Supreme Court will take it up.

But Michael A. Olivas, a professor of law at the University of Houston who examines Supreme Court cases dealing with higher education in his forthcoming book Suing Alma Mater: Higher Education and the Courts, last week predicted that the Supreme Court will turn down the case as "not ripe," especially since federal circuit courts do not seem to be in disagreement over how to interpret the Grutter ruling.

"It does not present any fresh issue," he said. "My guess is that the court is tired of this."

If the Supreme Court does take up the case, Justice Elena Kagan may need to recuse herself if, in her former capacity as solicitor general, she played a role in the Obama administration's submission to the Fifth Circuit of a brief siding with the University of Texas. Although Justice Kagan is a member of the court's liberal wing, which is unlikely to have a majority with or without her, as a former dean of Harvard's law school, she could be a powerful voice arguing the perspective of such institutions.
Dire Warnings

In their brief asking the Supreme Court to take up the case, the lawyers for the white students who were rejected said the Fifth Circuit panel erred in relying too heavily on the university's "good faith" in accepting its assertions it had tailored its policies to be constitutional.

They also argue that the Fifth Circuit judges were mistaken in accepting the university's arguments that its admission policies needed to take into account the state's demographics and that it needed to have racial and ethnic diversity at the classroom level. Achieving classroom diversity, it argues, would require the university to make major changes in the curriculum, steer students into certain schools and majors, or make race such a dominant consideration in admissions that "a flood of minority students would solve the problem."

Six friend-of-the-court briefs urging the justices to take up the case have been filed on the plaintiffs' behalf.

Among them is a brief submitted by Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles who has published studies questioning whether race-conscious admission policies achieve their goals, and Stuart Taylor Jr., a lawyer and journalist.

It argues that "a growing volume" of research suggests that racial preferences in higher education undermine minority achievement. Such students are often ill-prepared for the demands placed on them and respond by segregating themselves into easier majors, they say, which calls into question the argument that affirmative-action preferences can produce classroom diversity.

They also argue that elite colleges' failure to do more to bring about socioeconomic diversity—which would help increase racial and ethnic diversity as a side effect—calls into question the institutions' assertions that their race-conscious admission policies are narrowly tailored.

Among the other friend-of-the-court briefs submitted, one from several organizations that have played a prominent role in fighting race-conscious admission policies, including the American Civil Rights Institute and the Center for Equal Opportunity, says the court should take up the case "because universities nationwide have used Grutter as a blueprint for employing racial criteria in university admission policies, instead of treating it as a warning to scale back reliance on race."

A brief from the Asian American Legal Foundation, which is at odds with other Asian civil-rights groups in its opposition to race-conscious admission policies, accuses the University of Texas of discriminating against Asian-American applicants to meet its diversity goals and argues that allowing the Fifth Circuit's decision to stand will leave not just colleges but public schools feeling free to exhibit bias against Asian students.

Straus criticizes tone of higher ed debate, questions value of state's job funds

"One of the real disappointments of the session to me was the assault on higher education and I’m hoping that that tone of wanting to tear down some of our very fine institutions of the state is over,"

Amen.

-Patricia

Aman Batheja | Star Telegram PoliText Blog
November 1, 2011

In a wide-ranging interview with the Star-Telegram's editorial board Tuesday, Texas House Speaker Joe Straus touched on several hot-button political topics including the state's jobs record, higher education reform and the state's program of offering in-state tuition rates for illegal immigrants.

Straus criticized the tone of a recent debate revolving around reforming the state's universities as "negative" and "almost demeaning" in tone.

"One of the real disappointments of the session to me was the assault on higher education and I’m hoping that that tone of wanting to tear down some of our very fine institutions of the state is over," the San Antonio Republican said.

An intense debate on the future of public higher education in Texas erupted earlier this year when Gov. Rick Perry appointed a new chairman to the UT System Board of Regents with a record of being dismissive of much academic research.

Straus said he agreed with many of the goals touted by critics in the debate such as promoting greater efficiency at the schools but was concerned about how its tenor impacted the state’s image.

"I think that our state’s image to the rest of the country and the world really is important and nowhere can we make a stronger statement about what’s good about Texas then having strong higher education institutions," Straus said.

When asked if he felt Perry deserved some of the blame for encouraging the debate, Straus said, "I'm not really blaming anyone. I'm just disappointed that it occurred but moving forward. I want to see us more productive in our discussions when it involves higher education."

Straus expressed optimism that a new joint committee devoted to higher education reform issues launched earlier this year will address the issues brought up in the debate while still attracting the best minds to Texas.

Straus' title, if not his name, has come up on the national stage in recent weeks as Perry has pointed to the oversight the Texas House Speaker and Lieutenant Governor provide to the state's Enterprise Fund and Emerging Technology Fund. On the campaign trail, Perry has touted the two programs as key job boosters but has faced questions that some grants went to campaign donors.

Straus said he has no concerns about how the programs have been governed but questioned their effectiveness.

"I’m not sure that the Enterprise Fund is what it needs to be to be competitive going forward," Straus said. "I'd like to see what other states are doing to encourage job growth...If there’s a better way to attract business here and create jobs, we ought to try and do that."

Added Straus: “I think not having a state income tax has been a lot more powerful incentive than the Enterprise Fund."

Straus has been outspoken of late about the need to tackle the state’s structural deficit. He said he and other House leaders were upfront about the state’s financial issues at the start of this year’s legislative session.

"I’m not going to name names but others were out there talking about how rosy the economy was," Straus said. "While it’s better than other states, we were under no illusion that our budget was going to be a simple task to balance."

Along with the deficit, Straus said lawmakers are also likely to see efforts to repeal in-state college tuition rates for illegal immigrants next session. Perry has defended the program in recent weeks in the face of conservative criticism.

Straus would not say whether he supports repealing the program, a position recently voiced by some local Republican candidates for the state senate.

"My understanding is most of the children of illegal immigrants who are eligible for the in-state tuition are going to community colleges, helping them be trained for the work force...for the most part," Straus said. "I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

"We just have to take a look at what the facts are and how it’s working."

-Aman Batheja

Read more: http://blogs.star-telegram.com/politex/2011/11/straus-criticizes-tone-of-higher-ed-debate-questions-states-job-funds-.html#ixzz1cW2iV7OL

Statesman Investigates: UT regents invest $10 million in startup with ties to ex-chancellor, governor

Follow-up to an earlier article titled, "UT president: School didn't seek MyEdu deal" also posted to this blog.

-Patricia

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz and Eric Dexheimer | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 10:36 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011

The governing board of the University of Texas System invested $10 million in a privately held company with close ties to the system's former chancellor, the chancellor's son and associates of Gov. Rick Perry.

The allocation of proceeds from the Permanent University Fund, a public endowment, was extremely unusual, if not unprecedented, in that it was made directly by the Board of Regents rather than by money management firms chosen by the board's investment arm.

The regents voted unanimously at a public meeting Aug. 25 to invest in Austin-based MyEdu Corp. after a brief discussion with no debate and no public input.

The regents and senior UT System staff members did not disclose publicly — nor did some of those officials apparently know — that former Chancellor William Cunningham is an investor in MyEdu and that his son, John, is the company's senior vice president of information architecture and one of its founders.

The company's chairman and CEO, Michael Crosno, served on the governor's statewide re-election finance committee last year.

MyEdu adviser Bob Pearson, who holds a stake in the company, donated to the governor's re-election campaign and is a former Perry-appointed chairman of an advisory panel that recommends proposals for state funding through the Emerging Technology Fund.

Margaret Spellings, who was secretary of education under President George W. Bush, is also an adviser to MyEdu.

The company operates a website, myedu.com, where college students can plan course schedules, track credits, rate professors, calculate costs and exchange comments with professors and fellow students.

Along with its 22.5 percent stake in the company, the UT System will get customized website functions for each of its nine academic and six health campuses under an agreement with the company concerning such "private-label services."

Crosno said that neither Cunningham nor Pearson had any involvement in negotiating the deal with UT System officials and that neither knew anything about the arrangement until it was completed — an account echoed separately by both men.

Gene Powell, chairman of the regents, and Francisco Cigarroa, the system's chancellor, said they were unaware of the investment by the former chancellor but that, in any event, they were under no obligation to disclose it.

Powell, who co-chaired Perry's re-election finance committee, said he didn't know of Crosno's and Pearson's ties to the governor.

"I have no knowledge of that, either. Nor was it pertinent to this agreement. We felt comfortable with exactly how this agreement went forward," Cigarroa said, adding that it was thoroughly vetted by the system's general counsel.

Josh Havens, a spokesman for Perry, said the governor's office was not involved with the matter.

In 2000, Texas A&M University graduate John Cunningham started the online service with a partner as Pick-A-Prof, a site where students could rate and exchange information about their teachers.

Crosno said he started MyEdu in 2009 by purchasing Pick-A-Prof.

A veteran of several successful Internet startups, he said he saw huge potential in a one-stop online destination where students and their parents could lower college costs through better planning. Studies show that students are taking longer to earn degrees, causing families to waste thousands of dollars.

The solution, Crosno said, is treating students as informed consumers so they can more efficiently navigate their time in college.

"There's one way to save money in college," he said. "Take the right, exact number of courses to get a college degree, and do it in the least amount of time."

MyEdu doesn't offer users any information not already publicly available; the company collects details about individual schools and teachers through open records requests and by scraping schools' websites.

Many universities, including Texas, offer their own schedule- and career-planning tools and post summaries of student evaluations of faculty members.

But Crosno said MyEdu arranges and presents the information better, and in a single location. "We deliver the technology in a form that students accept," he said.

Cigarroa said MyEdu, with its customized approach for each campus in the system, would help advance his plan to improve graduation rates.

"Simply put, MyEdu is, as they advertise, the best way to manage college," Cigarroa said. "For many students, it is their virtual college adviser and a specialized forum for communicating with each other and giving input about all aspects of student life."

Powell agreed. "This is a product we are going to make available for free to students on 15 campuses," he said. "We don't believe there's any other product out there that comes close to doing this. We wanted to do it as quickly as possible" because improving graduation rates is an urgent priority.

"It was not an issue we felt was controversial or required public input," Powell said.

Steven Leslie, UT-Austin's executive vice president and provost, said the school looks forward to embracing MyEdu's features but anticipates some challenges in integrating the company's systems with those in the registrar's office.

Not everyone has been impressed.

Though students like the visual course scheduling feature that allows them to plan their semesters, MyEdu's "tools are not always the most accurate," said senior Carisa Nietsche, president of UT-Austin's Senate of College Councils, which represents students in academic affairs. "The university also already has a lot of the tools available on MyEdu."

Kim Krieg, assistant dean for advising at UT-Austin's College of Liberal Arts, said a committee of university advisers and administrators convened by the registrar's office last spring examined MyEdu, as well as schedule-planning sites at other universities, in an effort to see what improvements UT could make.

"It's fine, but it wasn't anything that blew anybody away," Krieg recalled.

The site also has been criticized for pandering to students interested primarily in using it to identify faculty members who reliably give high grades. A UT-Austin student survey conducted last year confirmed most students used the site to check professors' grade distributions.

"As an educator, I'm not sure that's what we want students to focus on," Krieg said.

Still, Crosno said, the company, which earns money from advertisers, such as textbook publishers and computer companies interested in tapping the student market, has grown quickly, thanks in part to recent cash infusions from a handful of private investors.

He said MyEdu boasts 500,000 members who actively use the site's tools to plan their college education and an additional 3 million members who log in occasionally. Part of the company's growth has come through informal deals with student associations, some of which the company has donated money to in exchange for each new registered user.

It has forged partnerships with a handful of organizations and schools directly as well.

This past summer, the California Virtual Campus, a state-funded portal for nonresident college students, announced it was working with MyEdu to help students plan their schedules, although no money was exchanged, said Tim Calhoon, director of technology for the system.

'Shocking' invitation

Crosno said he wasn't actively looking to partner with any schools in a more formal way when MyEdu received an email in February from Art Martinez, the UT regents' director of board services, asking the company to come to UT and "present what we do."

At a meeting attended by a roomful of UT System officials, including a handful of regents, Crosno said, he made a "very challenging" presentation.

"I said the technology you offer students wasn't very well-used," he recalled. "I was shocked to hear everyone in the room say: 'This is cool. Let's have another meeting.'\u2009"

Following more gatherings over the next four months, Crosno said, the university in June asked if MyEdu would be interested in forming a partnership with the UT System.

"They said, 'We're willing to make an investment in you,' " he recalled.

Crosno said he resisted at first. "I said, 'We've got plenty of cash; I don't need your money.' " But, he added, "Cigarroa convinced me."

The result: The UT System's $10 million "unrestricted, unconditional" investment, which Crosno said will be used to build new platforms for MyEdu's tools, such as apps for tablets and cellphones.

Crosno said that he handled most of the negotiations with system officials himself, keeping only his four-member board of directors informed.

Cunningham, the former chancellor, who is also a former president of UT-Austin, said he is not a major shareholder in MyEdu and knew nothing about UT's investment until it was publicly announced.

Pearson, who said he advises the company on its social media strategy, said that's when he first learned of the partnership as well.

Barry Burgdorf, the UT System's vice chancellor and general counsel, said no law or regulation required public disclosure of the financial interest of Cunningham or his son. Nor did any general sense of ethics require such disclosure, he said.

Steve Hicks, a vice chairman of the regents who helped negotiate the MyEdu deal, said he wasn't informed of the Cunninghams' interest.

But "I do not feel it is a material matter," Hicks said. "It would not have influenced my vote."

Specialists in higher education governance, however, say transparency is always better than opacity.

"These things are often undertaken with positive purposes and good people, but when they're not fully disclosed, it really hurts them," said Aims McGuinness Jr., a senior associate with the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a nonprofit policy center in Boulder, Colo. "It's much better to be transparent about it, and then you don't run into conflict."

Transparency has been a running theme for the UT System and its governing board in recent years. For example, the system has posted voluminous data on each of its campuses on graduation rates and other measures of student success.

But the MyEdu deal was struck almost completely behind the scenes. Indeed, the first public clue came when the regents posted a one-sentence agenda item about a forthcoming recommendation for "a business arrangement" with MyEdu regarding online academic data.

A regent's initiative

The idea to partner with MyEdu came from Regent Alex Cranberg, who learned about the company through informal conversations with UT-Austin students, Cigarroa said.

Regent Brenda Pejovich credited Cranberg for bringing the idea to a task force on excellence and productivity of which she was chairwoman and he was a member. Task force meetings, including a July presentation by MyEdu officials, were closed to the public.

Impressed by the company and its website, Cigarroa approached Powell, who agreed that a partnership could benefit the system's more than 215,000 students.

"So everybody will know, we had another unofficial committee," Powell, the regents' chairman, said at the August meeting. "Regent (Wallace) Hall, Regent Cranberg and Vice Chairman Hicks formed an unofficial committee for the chairman several weeks ago and have met continuously with MyEdu and have done a very good job of helping Barry Burgdorf bring this to fruition."

Before the board's vote on MyEdu, Powell described the company as "one of the most transformational things that we saw as a board, and the board is, I think, unanimous."

Burgdorf said officials settled on a $10 million stake to ensure that projects benefiting UT System campuses would be a first priority. "We didn't want a controlling interest because it's not our business to run MyEdu," he said.

The regents' investment arm, the University of Texas Investment Management Co., conducted a "due diligence" review to ensure that MyEdu's "people were good and financials were as represented," Hicks said.

UTIMCO CEO Bruce Zimmerman said he met with MyEdu officials, examined the company's financial statements and found no evidence of fraud or "smoke and mirrors."

Zimmerman said he advised regents and system staff members that direct investments, particularly in Internet startups, are risky, with a reasonable probability that all of the money would be lost and a small chance that huge gains would be made.

Zimmerman said he knew about the Cunninghams' involvement in the company but couldn't recall whether he mentioned that in the course of his review, which did not result in any formal report.

The former chancellor, who teaches corporate governance at UT-Austin and sits on several corporate boards, said he has made three investments totaling $175,000 in MyEdu.

Asked whether his stake should have been disclosed publicly by the regents, Cunningham replied: "I don't think so. I'm not a major shareholder in the company. I have no administrative input. I don't think that's relevant, and obviously they didn't think it was relevant."

About this story

Ralph K.M. Haurwitz, who has covered higher education since 2004, and Eric Dexheimer, a Statesman investigative reporter since 2006, examined the University of Texas System's partnership with MyEdu Corp. as part of the newspaper's ongoing focus on transparency in dealings between taxpayer-funded entities and private businesses.