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Sunday, January 29, 2006
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UH... Here’s the first serious effort I’ve seen to respond to Hawaii’s fourth-from-the-bottom finish in the recent study of how well public universities use public funds. It’s from the interim president of the UH system - though, among his many explanations for the university’s bad showing, he nowhere points to what his own interim status suggests -- that, among UH’s other problems, there’s what one correspondent of UD’s, who teaches in the system, calls a “horrific leadership turnover.” The interim president first suggests that the study seriously underestimates the cost of living in Hawaii, which skews all the rest of its numbers. There’s probably some truth to this, but I’m not sure adjusting these numbers would have changed the outcome much. The writer also mentions “the high fixed costs of providing education at a number of small sites distributed around a state to serve a geographically dispersed population. Only three of our 10 campuses (Manoa, Leeward and Kapiolani) have more than the 5,000 students needed to fully realize the available economies of scale.” Again, even accounting for this in the study probably wouldn’t have brought UH up much higher on the list of states. UD found this concluding comment disheartening: It also might be that UH should have been more aggressive in eliminating programs and increasing support services to students to improve retention and ultimately, graduation rates. We were so committed to access to higher education and to providing a wide range of programs so that students wouldn't have to go to the mainland to pursue a specialty, that we neglected to pay enough attention to success in higher education. Clearly, while students need access to post-secondary education and training, they also need to succeed in attaining the credentials demanded in the workplace. This seems a wordy way of saying that until now the UH system has just provided “access” to itself without worrying much about what’s taught and learned. Yikes. |