Accountability is the word in higher education, and UW is no exception

by Tom Griffin | December 1, 1997

The University of Minnesota tore itself apart over tenure when its regents demanded that faculty be more “accountable.” In the name of efficiency, the City University of New York may drop its guarantee to accept anyone with a high school diploma. In two years, South Carolina will fund all its colleges based solely on numbers—graduation rates, retention statistics and other measures.

Despite the economic boom of the late 1990s, higher education is under the microscope. Business leaders, legislators and some educators feel our colleges and universities are just not efficient. Frank Newman, former president of the University of Rhode Island, told the New York Times, “We have taken this system as far as we can stretch it, and it’s been wonderfully inventive, but less and less of what we do matches society’s needs.”

Just as downsizing, reorganization and mergers have hit American business and the health care industry, it is clear that higher education’s turn is coming under the rubric of “accountability.”

“The call for accountability reflects the national skepticism about government in general. Taxpayers are skeptical of how governments spend their money and feel governments spend too much of it,” says UW Government Relations Director Sheral Burkey.

“We’re facing the same efficiency pressures that business and other public agencies are facing,” says UW Public Affairs Professor William Zumeta, who follows higher education policy issues across the nation.

In April, the national trend surfaced in Olympia. The Washington State Legislature passed specific “performance targets” and goals for state institutions—with financial penalties for those who fail to meet certain targets.

The numbers try to measure how many students stay in school rather than drop out, how fast they graduate, how efficiently they work their way to a degree, faculty productivity and other statistics. If the UW doesn’t meet certain targets by the end of the current academic year, the state could hold back as much as $3 million from the UW operating budget in 1998-99.

“This is not unique to Washington, it is becoming more common in the country,” says Zumeta. Tennessee uses a system that gives bonuses to schools reaching certain retention levels, graduation rates, test scores and other statistics. Missouri rewards institutions for graduating certain types of students, such as “financially at-risk” students or those from underrepresented ethnic groups. Colorado, Florida and Texas are experimenting with accountability systems.

As their best, accountability statistics can pinpoint weaknesses in an institution and direct money and personnel towards fixing them. “If we do it right, it is a representation of how well we are doing,” says UW Undergraduate Education Associate Dean Debra Friedman.

“At its worst, it could mean inefficient micromanagement by a state,” adds Zumeta.

The call for accountability is nothing new. As soon as President Richard L. McCormick arrived in 1995, he pledged “a new, increased level of accountability” at the UW. Four months before the 1997 Legislature convened, McCormick asked Provost Lee Huntsman, the UW’s chief academic and budget officer, to appoint an accountability task force.

At its basic level, Huntsman says, accountability means answering to the public for what we do. “We don’t want our universities to be factories,” he says. “On the other hand, we don’t want them to be wasteful places either.”

While the UW’s mission includes teaching, research and public service, most accountability measures focus on undergraduate education. Many lawmakers and citizens are concerned about the rising costs for higher education at the same time that access seems to be shrinking. “They want us to squeeze down some of the `fat’ and teach more students,” says Burkey.

But the reality is that most of the “fat” doesn’t exist. Over the last 10 years, the UW has reformed undergraduate education and it continues to refine the system. The improvements include:

• Increased graduation rates. About 57 percent of all freshmen entering in 1986-87 graduated within six years. For freshmen entering in 1990-91, the six year rate rose to 70 percent.
• Opened up more space in “bottleneck” courses. For example, Biology 201 is required for 11 different programs. In Autumn Quarter 1994 more than 200 students were denied entry due to limited class size. After a sizable investment in faculty, TAs and classrooms, only 50 students did not get in two years later.
• Lowered the average freshman/sophomore class size. In 1986 the average class size for this group was 44 students. In 1996 it was 40 students, and more than two-thirds of all lower-division classes had fewer than 35 students.
• Strengthened retention rates. The UW reported that 90 percent of all freshmen starting in 1995 continued their studies in 1996. Associate Dean Friedman notes that this is the highest freshman retention rate for any public research university in an urban setting.
• Created new types of learning communities. This fall, more than 1,800 freshmen enrolled in Freshman Interest Groups, groups of new students who take classes together and meet each week with faculty and a student mentor. UWIRED is a technology initiative that blends e-mail, web sites and on-line discussion groups into traditional teaching. Freshman Seminars offer new students the chance to learn from senior faculty—such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Dehmelt.
• Changed academic requirements. For example, the faculty revised graduation requirements, increasing the number of choices students have to fulfill credits in the sciences, math or logic, humanities and the arts. Last year the UW also changed its drop policy. In the past students could drop anytime during the first seven weeks of a class—beginning Winter Quarter they must drop during the first two weeks.
• Involved undergraduates in faculty research. Surveys of recent graduates report that 20 percent have had a research experience with faculty during their course of study. The UW plans to push that number to 25 percent by 2005.

While the reforms are impressive, to some lawmakers it isn’t enough. This spring, the Legislature insisted that all state institutions meet accountability measures and hit projected enrollments. If students don’t show up, the state plans to hold back funding, and WSU and Eastern Washington University are already feeling the pressure. Eastern’s president recently resigned, in part due to low enrollments.

WSU has the same graduation, retention and efficiency targets as the UW, yet, as a land grant institution, it serves a different student population. For example, its five-year graduation rate is 55 percent, compared to the UW’s 61.7 percent. But both universities have to hit a goal of 65 percent by 2004-05.

“The measures that passed the Legislature won’t hold us accountable, because they are unattainable goals,” WSU’s government relations director, Larry Ganders, told the press during the legislative session.

Associate Dean Friedman says that legislatures often see all universities as one piece. “They look for a common metric for different kinds of institutions,” she warns. The search for the least common denominator is “the first place that accountability goes wrong.”

International Studies Director Jere Bacharach, who headed the UW’s accountability task force last year, is more blunt. “There is no magic number,” he declares.

Linking funding to some set of magic numbers is a new wrinkle. Provost Huntsman says there used to be two levels to accountability. First, it meant the proper stewardship of the public dollars the UW receives. It also meant that the UW must answer to the public for what it does with those dollars.

Today a new, third level focuses on improving performance. Lawmakers are setting specific targets, with financial penalties if these targets are not met. But officials at the UW, WSU and other universities are concerned about goals set in the heat of a budget session.

Public Affairs Professor Zumeta calls the goals “somewhat arbitrary.” In many cases, he says, lawmakers “chose a round number that is better than what we have now” without considering the long-term consequences.

Take, for example, retention rates, which measure how many students stay each year rather than drop out. While the UW already has a high freshman retention rate, transfer students from community colleges and other universities have a lower rate. To reach the target of 95 percent, the UW might have to reject more transfers, since their rates “pull down” the overall average. For a Legislature concerned about access to higher education, this may be the opposite of the lawmakers’ intent.

Another goal is graduation efficiency measured by a special index. Once students graduate, the UW computes their index by dividing the minimum number of credits required for their degree by the number of actual credits taken (including credits from courses that were later dropped). If the minimum to get your degree was 180 credits but you took 200 credits, your index would be 90.

In seven years, the Legislature wants UW students who begin as freshmen to score a 95. Transfers must average 90. Currently the index for graduates who enter as freshmen is 89.1 and for transfers 80.4.

These efficiency goals are too high, says Bacharach. Students need time to explore disciplines and test their majors. “It would be worse if we had 100 percent efficiency,” he states.

Even reaching a 95 efficiency index could cripple undergraduate education, he warns. “Since full-time students graduate more efficiently than part-time students, you’d have to cut back on part-timers.

“You’d also have to force students to make decisions earlier. They would have to decide on a major earlier than they do now and they’d have to stick with it,” he says. Floundering students would not be given time to get back on their feet since that would bring down efficiency ratings. “You’d also have to have a higher failure rate. It would be a university with no second chances,” he adds.

Faculty productivity goals could also backfire. To measure “quantity,” the Higher Education Coordinating Board wants the UW to report student credit hours per full-time faculty.

Currently, each full-time faculty position carries on average 202.47 credit hours; the education board’s ultimate goal is 212.6. The fastest way to reach this target would be to increase class size. “But is providing bigger classes the way we want to go?” asks Burkey.

UW officials feel this productivity statistic is flawed. “It measures input, not outcomes,” explains Bacharach. “Teaching is a far more complex activity than this. It is a number that doesn’t tell you anything.”

Associate Dean Friedman agrees. “The most important thing to measure is student learning outcomes, such as the development of critical thinking skills,” she notes. A team of UW researchers are working on an alternative that measures outcomes, Friedman says, and she hopes the Legislature will consider this alternative when it is ready.

For all these measures, the rate of change just may not be possible, warns Friedman. The Legislature wants all of its performance goals met by 2004-05. The education board has targets spelled out for each year along the way and tied dollars to them. “The changes we are making now aren’t going to pay off for five years,” she says. “We can’t move the graduation efficiency index in one year.”

“These are not measures that you can move on a short notice,” Huntsman adds. Yet lawmakers and the education board want specific targets met by the end of the current academic year.

Can the UW meet these targets? The provost isn’t sure. “We are going to do everything we can to improve these measures,” declares Huntsman. “But we’re not going to do things that penalize students.”

“The state plan needs a lot of work in terms of fine-tuning, and I think that lawmakers recognize that,” says Zumeta. A clause in the law asks institutions to report back with accountability revisions or new measures. “My perception is that this is not a micromanagement oriented state with respect to higher education. At least, it has not been so in the past,” he says.

Huntsman worries that something is missing in the pursuit of the bottom line. “How do you see the future of higher education? What are you doing to ensure that the University of Washington remains a high quality institution? How are you going to invent tomorrow’s ‘product.’ Nobody is asking us those questions,” he says.

Internally, the UW is tackling those questions. From the regents’ Strategic Planning Committee to Presidential task forces to the University Initiatives Fund, the University’s brain power is trying to develop tomorrow’s “product.”

Bacharach’s accountability task force, for example, offered a host of innovative measures that would track research rankings, public service activities by students and faculty, measure economic impacts and take longitudinal studies of recent graduates. President McCormick presented his vision in an address to the UW community in October, which included strengthening the arts, humanities and social sciences; becoming a true three-campus university; integrating more fully teaching and research; and strengthening the partnership with K-12 education.

“We can all improve,” the provost says. “But I’m proud of what we’ve already done.” Zumeta agrees with Huntsman’s assessment. “In Olympia, the UW’s performance in this area has been noticed and is thought to be improving,” he says.

It is a balancing act, admits Huntsman, with expectations from lawmakers sometimes in conflict with those of faculty, students or parents. Over the long term, he says he is optimistic. “We are embracing accountability,” he says. “We’re working hard to do the right thing.”