Task Force on Restructuring Meeting Notes
October 22, 2003

Present: Larkin, Nunes, Dobey, Spaude, Rundquist, Kang, Bayerl, Lawrence, Cogdill, Starks-Martin, Hansen, Subba, Murphy

Mahmoud Saffari presented:

As Dr. Saffari has been with SCSU for just over two months, he feels it’s probably premature for him to make suggestions regarding an appropriate organizational structure for the university. Under any circumstances, however, he will be working closely with the campus community on enrollment and retention issues.

Some Facts: According to this fall’s 30th day enrollment data, SCSU is down 22 FTEs from one year ago. (SCSU data: 0.16% less than Fall 2002), and headcount is down by 98 students (0.6% less than Fall 2002). Although the Admissions Office recruited and admitted significantly more new top 10%, top 25%, and students of color, 30 days into the semester enrollment is down almost 6% for new entering freshmen, down about 13% for new entering transfers, and approximately down by 44% for new honor students. We should take these losses very seriously. These things have generated a lot of discussions, but it is important to identify reasons and take action rather than just talk.

This year’s new students enrolled yield rate (admitted to enrolled) was the lowest in four years. Enrollment for out-of-state new transfer students was the lowest in five years. This year’s fall-to-fall retention rate for new entering honors students was the lowest in four years. Dr. Saffari emphasized that we should look at institutional enrollment management data from a different angle. It goes without saying that it is the FTE and the credit hours that generate the revenue to run the institution financially. However, he believes that focusing only on FTE and credit hours is keeping us from fully solving related problems. This has prevented us from looking at some other pertinent enrollment data/factors. Only 71.0% of all our last fall’s freshmen class returned this fall (fall-to-fall retention rate). In other words, out of every 100 new students we brought in last fall, 29 are not here at SCSU this fall. That constitutes a tremendous institutional revenue loss. Both our retention and graduation rates are below the national average.

Last year we graduated 264 students more than the year before, and we should be proud of that, but if we don’t increase our retention rates, and having difficulty competing with other institutions in terms of our very limited scholarship dollars, we perpetuate a growing problem. Recruitment and retention are the two sides of the same coin. We need to work on both in order to stabilize enrollment. The number one factor in student retention is the caring attitude of faculty and staff towards students, followed by quality of teaching, quality academic advising, adequate financial aid/scholarships and involvement in campus activities/organizations (national data collected from over 2,000 campuses). Our retention success will undoubtedly have a positive impact not only on institutional image but our future recruitment as well.

Students are in a buyer’s type market when it comes to shopping for colleges and universities. Institutions of higher education are more and more competitive and creative in recruiting and retaining students. Students are applying for more and more institutions, waiting longer and longer to find out which schools will make the best (scholarship) offers, and even which schools offer them the best freshman class schedule and ease in transferability of courses taken elsewhere. When it comes to our institutional scholarship offerings, we offer no competition with other institutions of similar size and nature.

Direction: Enrollment Management means being able to influence the enrollment in terms of size, quality and mix. It is aimed at stabilizing numbers and/or enabling planned growth. It encompasses everything that goes on from admission through graduation/alumni. The national trend indicates that it is more likely for enrollment managers to report to a Vice President for Academic Affairs or directly to the President, depending on size. This is a critical institutional position. Duties encompassed by Enrollment Management vary from institution to institution.

Recruitment and retention are critical issues related to the organizational structure of this or any university. Although Enrollment Management has been given the responsibility for both recruitment and retention (currently overseeing admissions/recruitment, registration, records/veterans affairs, academic advising, and new student/parent orientations), one thing that is difficult with the current structure is that retention efforts/initiatives are limited and fragmented at SCSU. It seems that there has been very limited communication and accountability. Dr. Saffari reported that one of the things that makes his job easier is the fact that he is reporting to the Provost and sitting on the Academic Affairs Council. It is of paramount importance to work with the entire university community and faculty in particular. The outcome of our efforts without faculty’s support and involvement in recruitment and especially in retention will be minimal.

Optimal organizational structure: Dr. Saffari would like to see a more seamless enrollment management division that would be more diverse, including the various units that should be brought together regarding enrollment management (such as financial aid/scholarships, freshman year experience, academic support services, data collection/surveys, etc). This would make it easier to have a better handle on both recruitment and retention. The result would be a more centralized coordination and evaluation of the various enrollment management functions, a more efficient and effective way to design, develop and implement/accomplish related tasks in a more timely manner, better use of limited resources, fewer turf issues, and greater accountability.

Questions:

• Is the proposed structure similar to other universities? There is really no standard. Of the different models he’s seen, the ones that really made sense were structures in which all the things relating to the first year experience were together. Retention and recruitment are key issues on this campus right now; we need to make what’s important to the university a priority.
• It seems we have problems between admissions and actually getting students enrolled. Do we know why? Scholarships, course availability and course transferability are some of the main reasons. Student surveys give top reasons for not enrolling as finances/scholarships, course availability, location, personal reasons. A common comment from students and parents was that they wanted to come here, but other institutions offered more. If we’re not willing to invest more money in scholarships, our yield rate will continue to go down.

David DeGroote presented:

Dr. DeGroote clarified that he is the interim Dean of Science and Engineering. He provided a written document of his thoughts on restructuring, which will be distributed along with these notes. He has taken a different tactic beyond answering the questions asked by the task force. There are several things to take into consideration. If we need to look at a basic construct, it is ‘what is a comprehensive university?’ He is uncertain as to whether there is any unanimity in understanding what we are. What does a comprehensive university need to function? We currently have a structure which represents five colleges; in this structure 12% of the total credits come from business, 17% from education, 24% from fine arts, 23% from social sciences, and 23% from science and engineering (with 1% unassigned). In a proposed restructuring, 70% of credits would be offered by a ‘super college’ representing fine arts and sciences. That seems like a lot. How would the structure provide for those needs, and how could an administrative component deal with the needs?

42% of all university credits are general education credits. Is restructuring going to assist in understanding the general education needs? It seems it could be more useful if each of the three large colleges had a coordinator for general education. Faculty shouldn’t have to be responsible for sorting out the number of seats needed for general ed classes. If each of three colleges had a coordinator for general education who met with an AVP for general education, there would be supervision and focus. Restructuring of the entire university wouldn’t necessarily be needed to accomplish that.

In the last five years we’ve hired a lot of new faculty, who are largely untenured. They came with expectations to be part of a college, and they seek stability. The kind of restructuring we’re looking at is scary and destabilizing. If a large restructuring took place, a number of those newer faculty might leave, and we’d be in worse shape than we are now.

This is not to say we shouldn’t do something. What he’s suggesting is that within the College of Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering and Computer Science combine into a Division of Engineering Science, that there be an Assistant or Associate Dean responsible for this, and that the Assistant or Associate Dean be an engineer, thereby providing the special understanding and support needed for such things as accreditation within the discipline.

If more engineering programs were added, perhaps an engineering college could be formed. The Nursing program is a single bachelor’s degree program; they want to move to an accelerated nursing program and get into a masters’ program and allied health, so an eventual College of Allied Health and Nursing might be appropriate.

There are some advantages to leaving Science and Engineering as it is: there is a structure of support that is in place, they are housed together under one dean, and the chairs meet on a regular basis.

Change is good but we need to understand what we’re trying to accomplish before we do it. Do we understand the unintended consequences of a large reorganization? Have we thought of the support needed? What kind of faculty need to be available for all the programs? There are lines of communication that exist between the colleges that work together; if we restructure the colleges, we need to ensure that those lines of communication are retained.

Questions:

• Is a Division within a College unprecedented in MnSCU? Not sure about the organizational structure. There is a School of Nursing within the Allied Health Program at Mankato, and that Associate Dean works directly with the Dean of Allied Health & Nursing.
• Are you thinking of two divisions - Nursing and Engineering? For now, probably just the engineering division. In the future, depending on the growth of the nursing program, perhaps moving to a School of Nursing or School of Allied Health might be necessary. This would be too cumbersome within current support structure.
• Would adding another administrative layer create a problem by creating another level of bureaucracy? Don’t think it would. For example, our current Associate Dean works closely with the engineering departments and it does provide a ‘go to’ person for the faculty. Doesn’t seem that it would be any different than what exists now.
• What about exercise science, health sciences being all in different colleges? Discussions need to take place about the infrastructure. If they’re being served by courses within the college, then all right; if not, they may have to move.
• Another element has to do with a College of Professional Studies - making education smaller and adding professional schools to that. Such a program might move CDIS, Aviation etc. into a unit that deals with them directly. What are your thoughts about that? Is it more important to have groups of programs that have licensure as the thread connecting them, or is it more important to have academic support that they find within more similar disciplines? Within the structure, having all the programs together makes it easier for chairs to work together.
• Do you know of a comprehensive university that you’d use as a model? As a nascent dean, I don’t know. {Comments: There are about 20 schools we’re regularly compared with. We can look at the organizational structure of those.} Extended conversations about underlying precepts might be beneficial in advance of making large organizational changes. There needs to be a conversation in which a lot of people can be comfortable with the reasons why.
• What about organization of academic support services like the Math Skills Center? The Math Skills Center is a subset of faculty and students within the Math Department. There is good communication and support for the Math Skills Center. It would be a bad thing if it were to be disconnected from the Math Department.. They’ve recently reevaluated how they do things with the Math Department. It seemed like a foster child a few years ago, but now it seems to be an integral part of the Math Department.

Discussion:

• The national trend is to have 70% full-time faculty, 30% adjunct (within a department unit).
• Should academic support services be housed in academic units, or is it OK to have them in non-academic units? There’s credit generation in the Math Skills Center, but not in the Write Place; that makes some difference. It seems like having the Write Place connected with English is the right place for it.
• Sharon Cogdill has been bringing up the structure of a General Education College - not pushing this idea, but it seemed like a way to get people to think about different structures. If we were going to do something like that, would we roster faculty into it? There would be a question about what those people actually do. Some departments see a College of General Education as a threat.
• With the deans coming in to present to the committee, it’s their perceptions, not the departments’, we’re hearing. For example, the Math Skills Center is not funded by Math, but by Academic Affairs. Up until this year the Write Place was funded by Academic Affairs; this year COFAH doubled their budget.
• Academic Support Services should be connected with an academic department or area rather than Enrollment Management, especially if it includes courses/curricula.
• All academic support services are not the same, and they shouldn’t necessarily be treated the same way.
• The more we’re bringing up the topic of General Ed, the more it seems we think it should be more colleges rather than fewer. Are we suggesting program coordinators?
• Subba will share an organizational structure idea with the committee.

Business:

Larkin had a conversation with Sara Grachek. She has suggestions for the web page, with links to reports & documents, notes, members, your suggestions, draft of recommendations (which we wouldn’t have ready till later). Can Dennis Murphy be liaison to Sara? Dennis agreed. How soon can it be available? Not sure. Dennis will ask.

Addendum: Written proposal submitted by Dr. DeGroote:

21 October 2003

To: Task Force on Restructuring
From: David DeGroote
RE Thoughts on restructuring

You have asked me to address four questions.

1a. What do you see as the critical issues in your area that are related to the organizational structure of the university?

1b. What in your area is difficult right now for structural reasons?
1c. What is easy because of the structure we have?
2. What do you think would be the optimal organizational structure for addressing these issues?

If we examine the seven questions that represent areas of investigation for this committee we can perhaps look at the four questions in this context:

Students need to be provided

1. General education courses in a coherent and effective manner.
2. Academic advising which meets their needs when beginning at SCSU, if undecided, when trying to make a decision, when in a major, if intending to transfer, and as graduate students.
3. A mechanism to provide a synergistic relationship between non-academic student services and academic program requirements.
4. A comprehensive first year experience that include some components of a, b, and c, listed above.

Faculty should be provided

1. A college/unit organizational structure that provides optimal student needs.
2. Consistent procedures for evaluation, promotion and tenure decisions that leads to stable and balanced instruction and scholarship.

Addressing these for faculty/departments/units would be expected to enhance our ability to address student needs.

Discussions related to organization generally begin with core issues, i.e., what works and were are the barriers. The basics related to resources. Resources can be described as: faculty, facilities, support personnel, and operating budgets. The linear answer is expansion of the resources will solve all these problems - more money. The current, I would say always, situation is that there will never be enough money! Finding effective and efficient approaches to reorganizing our existing structure means we must evaluate the flow/partitioning of resources relative to meeting the SCSU mission ---

“To excel in teaching and learning to foster scholarship, research, artistic and creative endeavors and to enhance community service and collaborative working relationships.”

At the college level the responsibility is to ensure adequate course availability to meet the needs of four basic sets of clientele; general education, service, major/minor, and graduate students. In the College of Science and Engineering each department has a different role relative to these clientele criteria [additional documentation can be provided to support this premise if needed]. SCSU is defined as a “Comprehensive University”. I don’t think we have a clear definition of what that means. We are not a small Liberal Arts College. We are not a Research One [or Two] institution. We appear to be a hybrid in which there is little agreement about what we are - the mission states we are to be many things to a broad set of constituents. Regardless of the current or any future organizational structure the salient question is to define the resource balance needed to meet the academic and non-academic needs of four sets of student clientele [all having a range of entry-level abilities and experiences], faculty scholarship, community service and to build collaborative working relationships. Small institutions, particularly private schools, limit the number and nature of their degree programs. Essentially programs are “traditionally defined” liberal arts degrees; e.g., BA English or BS Biology, etc. Large institutions provide diverse course opportunities to the breadth of students via “temporary faculty” and graduate assistantships from the wide variety of research graduate programs. SCSU does not fit well in either of these models, because we are a comprehensive university.

Let’s examine the means employed at SCSU to accomplish our responsibilities. It is expected that PhD trained faculty will offer virtually all courses serving all levels of students and “foster scholarship, research, artistic endeavors ….etc”. Regardless of the organization is this a wise use of faculty resources? Will changing the organizational structure alter this flow of instructional resources? We currently exempt students from general education courses if they transfer to SCSU with an AA degree or have completed the Minnesota Transfer Curriculum. These courses were generally taught by Master-prepared faculty at the Community/Technical Colleges.

A problem that needs to be addresses is how we deliver general education course to our entering/ongoing students outside their major. That is a critical problem not only in colleges but broadly across campus. Outside consultants have offered the possibility of creating a “super college” which includes most of the general education course which would then allow for better coordination of these offerings. I would contend that this approach may address coordination of general education at the expense of service, major/minor and graduate courses - it is not a balanced answer. Providing general education courses is a component - not the only function of a college. It would seem more appropriate to have a general education coordinator [staff not faculty] in each of the colleges who has the ability/authority to evaluate and schedule general education courses in consultation with an Assistant/Associate Vice President for General Education [in the Provost office]. This approach would provide institutional wide cohesiveness to the general education offerings. Additionally this model would provide the prospect of more closely aligning need with resources. The nature of providing a “coherent and effective” general education program would require extensive curricular discussions. That discussion would seem beyond the scope of this committee’s charge.

What is “easy” about our current organizational structure evolves around meeting the needs of degree programs. The current College of Science and Engineering (COSE) provides an array of majors that are principally supported by departments in the college. Engineering programs are primarily majors programs supported by: Computer Science, Mathematics/Statistics, and Physics. Nursing is clearly supported by Chemistry and Biology. All of these departments are under the aegis of COSE. Scheduling, conflicts, shifting course availability, do not require multiple deans having multiple constituencies in order to be resolved. Do we currently do enough to balance the needs of the various clienteles with our faculty resources? Probably not, but this discussion of who we are and how can we better meet the needs of all students should propel deans and departments to look for ways to propose a better mechanism to accomplish that task within the confines of our current structure.

Improvements that could enhance COSE might be to designate a division/school of engineering and computer sciences under the aegis of an associate dean with engineering credentials. Currently COSE has three departments which are/will be accredited by a single organization: Accrediting Board of Engineering Technology (ABET). This would include Electrical and Computer Engineering, Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Sciences. If these programs grow to “sufficient size” [which would need to be defined] the division/school could be budded off as a College of Engineering Sciences. Nursing Sciences has one degree program, a Bachelors of Nursing Sciences (BSN) with supporting courses from Biological Sciences and Chemistry. At such time that this department adds additional programs in nursing, e.g., an Accelerated Nursing Degree, Masters degree and other allied health programs a division/school of Allied Health may need to be establish with a discipline dedicated Assistant/Associated Dean. This area may, with expansion, require the establishment of a College of Allied Health at such time the size and scope of the programs deem it necessary.

The college/university has hired a large number of faculty in the past five years. Untenured faculty “need” to see the place they may establish their professional career as being stable. A drastic reorganization of the institution to meet the needs of a single clientele, i.e., general education students, in my opinion sends the wrong message. I think these faculty may “flee a burning ship” and we would be in greater difficulty than our current situation - and that would be “horrible”.

The current college organization with modification of developing focused divisions/schools having leadership at the Assistant/Associate dean level represents a potentially more effective model. Balancing the nature of the instructional faculty within colleges in coordination with an institutional wide focus on general education program should provide more effective deliver. Enhancement of specific graduate components may represent resources that accentuate the value of PhD trained faculty and provide needed resources to meet early degree program course needs and general education demand.

I would opt for a more careful consideration of who we are, what are we attempting to accomplish, and how can be balance the demands placed on a comprehensive university [having defined that] to a wholesale reorganization because it seems like it meet our needs. All of these represent only my considered opinions and not necessarily the various points of view in specific departments.