UNM President's Blog

The Importance of Quick Strategic Decisions

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:10:00 -0700

The landscape of higher education is changing rapidly. From financial and regulatory pressures, to new teaching and learning models, to new mission and tasks, we need to become more dynamic and fast paced. Actually, we need to be start making strategic decisions faster. As one of my mentors recently told me, you only need to be exact in tactics, while strategy can always be refined as more data become available. It is no longer acceptable to take 2 years to add or remove a course, when the world is creating universities and others are designing new course delivery models in less than half that time. If nothing else, the founding fathers point the way. It took them less than 4 months to construct the US constitution, a document that has since been amended multiple times but survived largely intact as the best strategic plan for any country.

Do you believe higher education institutions, and UNM in particular, can become more nimble at making strategic decisions under their current structure?

Efficient vs Perfect Decision Making

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 14:06:00 -0600

Universities have a different relationship with decision making than most organizations. In general, fast decisions are made at the local level, while the global level makes slow decisions. At universities, the administration would like to move fast, but the university governance structure remains distributed and deliberative. In many ways, governing a university, fast and slow, is an almost perfect paradigm, but during times of great change, it may hinder how the university responds to its challenges. Are we able to make efficient versus perfect decisions? The answer in my opinion lies in a very old currency, that of trust. How do you think the administration can regain the trust of all constituents in order to become more efficient in decision making?

Future of Universities

Tue, 4 Sep 2012 07:53:00 -0600

"Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities" is a recent book by Richard A. DeMillo, an ex-CTO of HP and an ex-dean of the Georgia Tech College of Computing. The book paints a bleak picture for the future of most colleges and universities unless they are able to take advantage of some of the forces shaping higher education. Chapter 20 contains 10 specific recommendations on what to do (but not HOW to do it):

1) Forget who is above you,
2) Focus on what differentiates you,
3) Establish your own brand,
4) Don’t romanticize your weaknesses,
5) Be open,
6) Balance faculty-centrism and student-centrism,
7) Use technology,
8) Cut costs in half,
9) Focus on your own measures of success,
10) Adopt the new Wisconsin idea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Idea).

What do you think of the recommendations, specifically number 1 and 6?

Research Metrics

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:38:00 -0600

The State of New Mexico is currently funding UNM and other state institutions using a base budget, topped by funds due to outcome measures that include course completion, degrees awarded, STEMH degrees and degrees earned by students at risk measured by their Pell grant eligibility. The thinking is that such measures will encourage universities to focus on retaining and graduating more at-risk students in majors that the State anticipates high employment demand. This year, the State is attempting to also measure research productivity by the 3 research universities (UNM, NMSU, NMT). Research metrics should be meaningful (measure true research productivity), beneficial to the State, and easy to audit and compare across colleges (within the State and outside). What do you think are some metrics that fit the above criteria? Research expenditures? Patents awarded? Companies started? Publications cited?

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Mon, 6 Aug 2012 14:49:00 -0600

I personally believe that MOOCs are here to stay but that a model of how to provide high quality education efficiently while maintaining a viable financial model for public universities is yet to be invented. Information wants to be free, and faculty members would love nothing more than to teach for tens of thousands of students. State governments and officials love to point to the efficiency in a model where you can have one person teaching for an ever increasing number of students. The public university funding model - which however remains largely dependent on the number of paying students and the quality of delivery, let alone the quality of the material and academic support - is yet to become scalable. Moreover, at a time whenÂ fewer high school graduates come to college prepared to do college-level work, will MOOCs make a dent in the cost structure since they are targeted to those advanced and more mature students? What do you think a viable model of delivering higher education might look like in ten years?

The Role and Future of Universities

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 01:00:00 -0600

Many of our faculty colleagues have been closely following the saga at Mr. Jefferson’s university (see for example http://chronicle.com/article/What-If-Sullivan-Is/132517/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en.) The discussion within the University of Virginia has broad implications on the role and future of universities as seen by the various constituents. For example, many of you are aware of the so-called 100,000-classroom talk as described for example in: http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_norvig_the_100_000_student_classroom.html , where a couple of Stanford University professors taught a computer science class to more than 100,000 students. Similar efforts to put higher education within the reach of everyone are being launched by public & private universities as well as for-profit entities.

My question to you is: Should we embrace the proposed models, and if so, how do we continue to fund our traditional education model while controlling the quality of massive online education?

How should we pay for Higher Education?

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 01:00:00 -0600

Presenting a different perspective on many recent studies and my own posts, the attached article (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/more-student-debt-please-why-college-students-dont-borrow-enough/258205/) makes the point that students who borrow more may actually have better completion rates. In our own analysis, we find that students’ who maintain their lottery scholarship and their federal financial aid awards, persist and graduate at a much higher rate than those who lose their lottery scholarship. In fact, the main reason that our students fail to return to UNM for a third semester is financial need.

So my question is: how do we keep UNM students from dropping out because of financial need, in the face of current and future cuts in state and federal financial aid? Keep in mind that some of the cost pressures are global in nature (market for faculty, technology, facilities) while others are local (efficiency in funding higher education within the state and the university).

College Affordability

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:47:00 -0600

College affordability is a major concern...