President Holbrook began her speech by pointing out that the role of higher education in the economic development of the state is critical, because an educated population means a higher tax base. She stressed that it’s crucial to inform legislators about this issue – that they need to understand how absolutely critical graduate education is to the state. In addition, Holbrook discussed the “2 Bold Goals” set forth by an Ohio Commission. The first goal is to increase the enrollment of people in higher education by 30% in the next ten years. The second goal is for Ohio to increase research in the state by 10% above per capita income. These are both directly related to graduate education.
While at the University of Florida, Holbrook and her administration did a a graduate education report to let the legislature know that grad education is absolutely critical. They emphasized this in at least three ways: it’s critical to the academy itself (teaching role), there’s a societal benefit (research) and there’s also an economic benefit. These three benefits were all illustrated by telling the stories of individual graduate students.
Part of the overall process of funding graduate education includes a review of doctoral programs. In about 1996 the state board of regents mandated a review of grad programs across the state in several different areas (history, math, etc.) The idea of the review was that we have too many doctoral programs in the state of Ohio. As part of the process, outside reviewers were called in – Holbrook was one while she was still working at Florida. However, nothing really happened as a result of this review – the state took away funds, and Universities filled them back in. Now, OSU is creating a process to review our own programs before someone else comes in to do it. The Freeman Committee stems from this.
Where does the graduate school stand in relation to the University – with change in leadership it seems to ideal time to ask the faculty whether the graduate student should remain free-standing or whether it should merge with the vice president of research office. Right now there’s no bias one way or the other. Clearly research and education go together hand in hand, and the two should be thought of simultaneously
Where does graduate education fit into the priorities of this University? We are a research institution. That’s our strength and our priority and graduate students are front and center. The graduate enrollment is, frankly, kind of low. We need to increase from a position of strength – get the best students we possibly can.
President Holbrook also entertained questions from the delegates.
Delegate Malik: What are you thoughts on the semester system and is that being discussed? It’s been talked about a lot. How many of you would prefer semesters? Quarters? Right, It’s really 50-50, a divided thing. Business faculty love the quarter system. Others like the semester system – the athletics program likes it. Right now we can’t do it because we don’t have the student information systems in place that we need to do it. Within 2 –3 years that’s going to be a possibility. I really don’t know. We’ll start looking at it, just like we saw here, it’s a divided thing. Financially it can be disastrous in the transition – fiscal benefits come from credit hours and you need to really think and make sure it’s carefully planned.
Del Corwin – You’ve talked about increasing both graduate and undergrad students here. How can we do that at a time when the budget is going to be cut and how can you increase graduate students without shortchanging the undergrad population? We’ll have to ask the state to put more budget money forward on the front end. If we’re asked to increase enrollment by 30% we can’t do that without raising tuition or reducing quality. One is untenable to the population of Ohio – the families. One is untenable to the University. We’ve asked the legislature to invest money so we can show them that as we increase enrollment, more money will come back to the state. That’s our starting point and I’d like to be optimistic and say that it might happen, but after talking to those folks this morning, I’d have to say my optimism is clouded. I think the place where we can increase graduate funding is in those departments that have external funding – get more training grants, more individual fellowships, more research money. I think it’s unrealisitic to do it with state money. But what about great programs that aren’t externally funded great programs in English, or great programs in theater, things that make a University great – how do you do that? It’s a difficult question, and one we’re working on.
Chair Gray: Can you tell us a little bit more about that second bold goal? The second bold goal really dealt with research. We should get more research money from the government, from foundations and especially from industy. Ohio is 21% below the national average. For us to go to 10% above, we’ve got a heck of a way to go. That doesn’t mean just us, it means keeping engineers and scientists here, in the workforce. Our goal is to try to get more money to leverage us to be in a position to contribute. We bring in 538 million research dollars – over 50% of state R & D money is right here on this campus.
Delegate Kinsey – I’ve heard you talk about inter-program collaboration and that was one of the things that really attracted me here. What procedures are in place to encourage those collaborations? Many federal funding programs require inter-disciplinary projects. One of NSF’s goals is to get people who know how to take what comes out of science and get it into the community. This is a wonderful campus for collaborative activities. If you just go through departments and look at how people collaborate – whether you see if there’s a biological process operating in psychology or in language development. The graduate school has been working on setting up inter-disciplinary minors and an interdisciplinary speaking series. We don’t just talk about it, it’s happening. Especially in science because the problems that need to be solved are so large. It is a big thrust in this campus. One of the biggest barriers is working out how to coordinate students, how departments get credit, etc.
Pres Pletz: We have a lot of international students in this body and on this campus and we’re hearing some discouraging reports about who may be able to do research, especially when you’re from certain countries. What are the concerns for international students on this campus? Well there are concerns – from Visas through the research restrictions you were talking about. International student numbers are down. There’s no doubt this is a global society and we want international concerns represented. There are people from all the major universities working with the President’s science advisor to work these things out. There is a lot of concern and interest but our hands are kind of tied.
Del Lucas: Could you give us some of the history and rationale behind the 260 credit hour cap? A lot of us came in and were told to sign up for as many credit hours as possible and now we’re losing our funding. I’m not the person to answer that.
Dean Clark: the state doesn’t pay after 260 credit hours, and that is becoming a serious budgetary issue.
President Pletz – Perhaps we can bring that up with Provost Snyder and Dr. Freeman when they come speak.
Chair Cunningham: Some of the language that you use talking about the undergraduate experience is great, but part of me was waiting for you to use that same language to talk about the grad student experience, and that was kind of absent. I know we spend a lot of time on programming and I was wondering if you could add that kind of language when you speak about graduate students I don’t talk about that for grad students. I think that’s kind of a personal thing once you’re a grad student. Many grad students want to come, work, get their education and find their own exp. I don’t even know what ought to be there for grad students as a grad student exp. Most of those experiences, I think, would relate to their Masters and Prof Programs. What are you thinking?
Chair Cunningham: I serve as events chair and my job is to come up with what kind of events would fill out our lives. As I continue to program, I think that attendance seems to increase. There’s not a lot of literature out there. I’m not really looking for an answer as much as an expression of commitment. I know that you care, but I don’t know that that came out in your speech.
President Holbrook: I hear IPC talk a lot about the kind of events they do but I haven’t heard a lot of things that happen in CGS. You bring up an interesting point and that may be something that is really worthwhile to look at.
Chair Fout: When you have students who do come into a program and they’re not encouraged to find a way to relax outside the classroom, you have a high rate of burnout and the state’s just lost the money they invested. So experience is important.
President Holbrook: That’s a good point. I’m guessing that departments do more of that programming but I think that is a great point to raise – what is the graduate student experience? I know that you’re reviewing quality of life again with the G-QUE, maybe there’s some potential there.
Unknown Delegate: Are there any plans to increase minority enrollment here at OSU? There are always plans to increase minority enrollment. Lots of individuals are working on that but they’re not very coordinated. One of the things that the office of minority affairs is trying to do is get that better organized. The university doesn’t recruit graduate students because that’s the department role and it’s their responsibility to ensure they recruit students of color. When we did some research for a chronicle article I found out a lot of exciting things. One of the things we do is reach out to assist minority students to learn how to complete applications – they come here and get trained and then train others. We also have radio messages to target minority students – come visit, then apply, we market relative to where they are in the application process. We also do that in Spanish. The biggest and most important thing is not just targeting HS students, but actually moving into the middle school so that students who think that College wasn’t in their future can have that as a goal. Last year the numbers went down. This year our app numbers are already much, much higher. The second goal is retain those individuals when they come to campus. We know that between the sophomore and junior year is when we lose particularly African American men.
Unknown delegate: You mentioned that from a financial standpoint, the impetus to retain our own grad students as faculty members, where would the funding come from for that? Well, we know that grad students go out in all kind of jobs and we also know that faculty and PhD students migrate – they leave their institution and go somewhere else. I’m thinking more of sending people out into the community. Increasing the size of the faculty, do you mean? It’s going to be harder, the NIH budget is going to have a modest raise. On the other hand, we have a lot of research funding that will keep people funded. The tenure-track positions are the ones that are hard to get. Barb said she has set aside 3 million to recruit faculty. That has to be a goal – we want to keep the salaries up, keep raises high. We can’t afford to lose the top rated faculty we already have. One of the things we’re going to try to do is ask the deans to identify what faculty we can’t afford to lose, so they don’t look elsewhere. It’s very costly to keep those people sometimes. We need more professorships as we go into the Capital Campaign, that will be a high priority for fund-raising for the University. It’s not going to come from the state. Our budget is 3.5 billion and of that, only 15% comes from the state. But we need that 15% it’s very valuable to us. This just tells you how much we do for ourselves.
President Pletz – Well, I think that’s about all we have time for. Some of you may not realize that Pres Holbrook was instrumental in getting through domestic partner benefits, health care benefits and increased stipends. The administration has been very pro-Grad students and for that we thank you.
President Pletz: I’ve been at many universities and I haven’t seen a place where CGS and IPC really do care about what goes on at their university as much as here. Thank you for inviting me here today.