<p>"Just over half of University of Texas at Austin undergraduates earn their bachelor's degrees within four years. This rate has been increasing steadily for two decades but can and should be higher. To that end, President Bill Powers has set a goal of graduating 70 percent of our students within four years and appointed the Task Force on Undergraduate Graduation Rates to develop strategies to achieve this goal."</p>
<p>I was going to skim through the report this weekend. I feel like it’s going to be tough to meet that 70% goal in 5 years. The changes I’ve read about so far seem beneficial but 5 years seems a little too rushed. Making orientation mandatory sounds like an easy fix but I’m pretty sure that those who skip normally have very strong and unavoidable reasons to do so in the first place. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t want to go to orientation…</p>
<p>On the other hand, a lot of students could use some better advising (my EE adviser was terrible) so I am pretty interested in the new partnership with myEdu. Even though Powers seems to disprove of it, myEdu has been great for me and I don’t mind giving them access to my records. The interface they have is much more user friendly than the Registrar’s. It annoys me to great end when I have to click the buttons every time I search for a class because it won’t accept the ‘enter’ key…</p>
<p>But back to your question. Four years should be pretty doable for me even after transferring. I was pretty much shunned from every CNS advising office because they “can only see students who are already in the College of Natural Sciences”. It was very frustrating and made the process a lot more difficult than it should have been. Registering for classes in a new major without any advising is pretty dangerous in my book.</p>
<p>I’m so glad to see President Powers addressing UT’s graduation rates. Graduation rates are used to determine the “Top National Universities” by USNews, the most widely used college rankings. UT comes in at a mere 45 on that ranking in part due to the horrible graduation rate. I’m glad to see that the administration is taking steps to improve this (and the ranking). </p>
<p>Hopefully over the next decade or so, we can see UT jump in the rankings to a more well-deserved spot.</p>
<p>Powers is addressing the problem with a bunch of hot air. Only one of his proposed ideas actually does anything about alleviating scheduling problems, and it doesn’t even promise to do that – he only said they’ll “identify bottleneck courses.” UT has known for years that the introductory chem classes (which serve something like 12% of the undergraduate student body) are major scheduling bottlenecks, but that hasn’t stopped them from laying off lecturers and combining classes. In response to state budget cuts, UT has cut the colleges’ instructional budgets – that’s the money that goes toward giving UT students the best education UT can provide – resulting in layoffs of non-tenure track faculty and consolidation of classes. CH301/302 used to be 200-250 students, now they’re routinely 400+, each with fewer TA’s than the smaller classes had. If Powers wants to alleviate the bottleneck in chemistry that affects so many students, he already knows exactly how to do it – just go back to 2008 staffing levels.</p>
<p>The Top 9% rule is also a major impediment to 4-year graduation rates because UT is required by law to accept students that they know will flunk out the first year. The entire CAP program is based on the knowledge that unprepared students were accepted in preference to qualified students. The CAPed students simply have to wait for the unprepared Top 9% to flunk out so they can take those open seats. Powers managed to get the Top 10% rule reduced to Top 8%, which will help the problem, but that’s a big part of the low graduation rate and it’s not going to go away.</p>
That’s because this movement was forced upon him by the board, if I remember correctly. Powers is more focused on improving UT’s top end than picking up our back end. Here’s what he said in response to using the increased tuition to improve 4-year graduation rates:
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Completely agree. UT is a great school and we have potential to become much better, but so long as 75% of our massive undergraduate body is accepted nearly blindly, there will continue to be a steady influx of under-qualified students. Power’s has a vision of turning UT into a truly elite research institution and I believe that we have the resources to accomplish this, but we’ve got some fat that will never go away and will always dilute our numbers. You just can’t accept 75% of your undergraduate body based on 1 number and expect them to all be high quality students. </p>
<p>In Cockrell and McCombs, where applicants are actually reviewed thoroughly, we’ve already achieved great success in terms of rankings and it goes to show that we have plenty of top-notch students accomplishing great things here. But I believe that the mandates imposed on the admissions process will never allow those top-end numbers to fully show through at the university level- they’ll continue to be diluted among the mass of students swept in by UT’s indiscriminate top 8/9% net. And who wants to graduate early at a perennially ranked top party school anyway?</p>