Provost Boylan Part of American Delegation at China Conference

Toward Excellence: Managing Resources in Higher Education

Elizabeth Boylan
Provost and Dean of the Faculty
Barnard College

BEIJING September 26, 2002

Institutions of higher education, by their very definition, place great value in achievement. They attract faculty and staff and students who are motivated to take advantage of opportunities to discover and learn, and who challenge each other to seek out the new and the best. The quest for the best is usually tempered by the reality that resources are not infinite, and therefore it becomes incumbent on everyone in higher education - faculty, students and administrators - to manage resources efficiently.

Colleges and universities in the United States vary substantially in their structure and funding sources: those supported by cities, counties or states are referred to as public institutions; others, like Barnard College, are referred to as private or independent institutions. Some have only a few hundred students; others have tens of thousands. Some are very wealthy; others exist on shoe-string budgets. All, even public institutions, rely increasingly on private donations and support from foundations and corporations. All face the challenge of using resources intelligently and prudently.

These resources include human, capital/physical and fiscal/financial. This morning I plan to address the following questions, all in the pursuit of excellence:

• How can institutions maximize, leverage and diversify their resources?
• What measures of quality should be used in institutional assessment?

In the United States, there is a voluntary system of regional accreditation that assures the public that institutions receiving accreditation have passed an in-depth review by their peers.

Barnard College happens to be in the Middle States region, and the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association governs accreditation of colleges and universities in this region. All the information I show in abbreviated form may be found on their website http://www.msache.org.

The primary document setting out stan dards that each institution must achieve is called "Characteristics of Excellence." Comparable standards have been developed in the other regions around the country.

Initially and at 10 year intervals, each institution must develop an institutional self study, a lengthy document setting forth how the institution addresses the standards and what its plans for improvement are. Five years after the major self-study, each institution prepares a Periodic Review Report which is subjected to committee review.

Development of the Self Study is meant to involve all constituencies at the institution, and works best when integrated into the institution’s own strategic planning process. When the Self Study is complete, the external evaluation team arrives on campus for a three day visit. Members of the team fan out, interviewing individuals and groups to assure themselves that the Self Study accurately reflects the dynamics of the particular institution at that moment in its history. The team’s recommendations and the institution’s response are then reviewed by the Commission itself.

The Middle States Association recently adopted a new set of standards divided into two general categories: Institutional Context and Educational Effectiveness. The standards under Institutional Context are:

Standard 1: Mission, Goals and Objectives
Standard 2: Planning, Resource Allocation and Institutional Renewal
Standard 3: Institutional Resources
Standard 4: Leadership and Governance
Standard 5: Administration
Standard 6:Integrity
Standard 7: Institutional Assessment

and the seven standards under Educational Effectiveness are:

Standard 8: Student Admissions
Standard 9: Student Support Services
Standard 10: Faculty
Standard 11: Educational Offerings
Standard 12: General Education
Standard 13: Related Educational Activities
Standard 14: Assessment of Student Learning

This process of self study and peer review under the supervision of regional accrediting agencies is used by colleges and universities to monitor their own progress, but it is also an important tool of the federal government, in that only institutions that are accredited may receive federal financial aid that is awarded to students based on their ability to pay. Virtually all colleges and universities, public and private, depend upon the tuition that comes from needy students, and therefore this supposedly voluntary system is financially mandatory for all but a few institutions.

Besides knowing whether an institution is accredited or not, how do prospective students and their families know the quality of the education they will be getting at a particular institution? How do they determine whether the college‚s mission and offerings are consistent with their own aims? What should people look for in assessing quality?

Increasingly, American colleges and universities, like those all over the world, have been investing in their web sites as efficient ways to get their messages out and attract attention. But America, home to competitive sports and to companies who like to make things into contests, also has a private sector interested in the big market of higher education. Many companies make their money by selling books and magazines that collect information from institutions and present the data as narrative reviews and as competitive rankings.

One special issue of U.S. News and World Report comes out each fall, hitting newsstand as the academic year begins and a new round of high school seniors and their parents are in the full frenzy of the college hunting season. Many of the criteria that U.S. News employs to develop their rankings are good surrogate measures of quality, and I thought it would be useful to run through some of the categories of data.

Surveys of presidents, provosts and deans of admission form an important core in the relative rankings. Student retention rates are also used to signal whether the students are pleased enough with their college to finish the first year and to graduate.

Various kinds of information go into the category of faculty resources, with the assumptions that more small classes and fewer large classes are better. Faculty salaries and benefits also factor in: more is better, and they are corrected for the differences in the cost of living in various parts of the country.

Other assumptions include that it is better to have more faculty with terminal degrees, a lower student faculty ratio and a lower percentage of part-time faculty. This last assumption - the lower part-time faculty ratio - is but one example of a metric which makes sense when applied to large universities which may have cut back on full time staff and have hired many, cheaper adjunct faculty to close the gap. But for a place like Barnard, in New York City, where we can get top professionals in business, law, museums, and dance companies, to teach our students as adjuncts as they continue with their successful professional careers, it is but one example of how one so-called quality measure is not a useful data point, and actually works against the College’s overall ranking. Any methodology that treats all colleges and universities according to one formula will be subject to such errors in assessing overall quality. Yet they sell many copies of the magazine.

How one college’s students match up with others who are admitted to peer institutions on what we call input measure is an important variable. Can you get the best students you want out of those who apply? Measures of student selectivity include: test scores (SAT or ACT), percent of freshman in the top 10% of their high school class, how many students accept an offer of admission, and of those admitted, how many choose to enroll. Among the elite colleges, there is a great deal of competition to attract the best students.

Another big factor in the U.S. News rankings is how rich the institution is: that is how much it spends on educating and graduating each student. One might argue that this measure encourages excessive spending, since the more you spend, the higher the recognition factor. It does reward wealthy institutions for spending more on a per-student basis.

The final variable is alumnae participation in annual gifts to the college. The assumption here is that the greater the alumnae participation in annual giving, the better they feel about the value of their college education.

Note that I have tried to identify some of the embedded assumptions in these particular measures used by U.S. News and World Report. They are controversial in their absolutes and in their uniform application to institutions whose aims and resources vary tremendously.

Now to a bit of a case study: my own institution.

Four attributes contribute to the unique character of Barnard: the College is a residential liberal arts college for women affiliated with Columbia University, and located in New York City.

Barnard’s location across Broadway from Columbia University in the Morningside Heights area of Manhattan means that other neighboring educational institutions are candidates for partnerships.

We do very well on measures of faculty quality, in terms of scholarship, grants won and highest degrees earned. We would like our student-faculty ratio to be slightly lower, but we are not as wealthy as many of our peers. We are proud of the number of women on our faculty, though this is harder and harder to maintain as elite co-educational universities now place premiums on recruiting women who were excluded systematically for many years.

One way that both Barnard and Columbia have done more with less is the long-standing partnership agreement between the two institutions. Even though there is substantial difference in the size of the two institutions, the Barnard faculty not only teach Barnard students but they also contribute importantly to undergraduate and graduate instruction at Columbia. In certain disciplines, notably the arts, Barnard and Columbia have partitioned responsibility for leading programs and maintaining the required physical facilities. The high cost of studio space and specialized facilities in the arts makes this cost-sharing particularly desirable and effective.

Barnard is dependent upon tuition paid by its students for over half the operating budget. Direct government funding is quite small, most coming from a state subsidy to private colleges based on how many students graduate. While gifts and grants plus endowment income constitute 20% of the revenue, our closest peer institutions have substantially more income from these sources. Auxiliary enterprises is a category where Barnard has a higher percent of its revenues, in part because the College rents out space to businesses at the street level of some College buildings. Our location right on Broadway makes such commercial development possible.

Two of the positive benefits of our relationship with Columbia and our New York City location are that we can maintain a small fine undergraduate library collection, knowing that the Columbia libraries can support the needs of our advanced students and the faculty. And unlike many of our peer colleges in small towns, we do not need to be the one and only cultural center. In fact we have no museum: our students use the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the American Museum of Natural History, etc, etc. More money can be directed to the academic curriculum as a result.

Barnard’s last capital campaign was very successful, and generated funds from many sources. Each year we hold a very festive dinner at a major New York City hotel and honor two major New York business people. Receipts from that one dinner, dedicated exclusively to financial aid, now accounts for over $1 million per year.

As previously noted: alumnae participation is one of the measures that U.S. News uses in its rankings, and this graph shows that Barnard has a long ways to go before we can beat our competitors on this measure.

My final point is to stress how beneficial we find it to belong to various partnerships and consortia. I have already spoken of the benefits of our Columbia relationship. Both Barnard and Columbia are members of COFHE (the Consortium on the Financing of Higher Education), 31 elite private colleges and universities that coordinate statistical studies and institutional research on behalf of all members. By sharing and aggregating data, each institution can see how its measures and expenditures stack up against those of the group, allowing the senior administration to focus particular attention in areas in need.

Within New York State, the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities is an organization dedicated to representing the interests of private institutions to the governor and state legislature. Collectively, CICU institutions teach large numbers of state students and have big impacts on the state economy. Pulling together such data allows the member institutions to have more lobbying power when seeking funding from New York State.

There are many other successful partnerships in the US, adding value and helping to do more with less so that improvements in quality can be achieved in other ways.

Excellence is always the goal just beyond reach. It represents the striving that each institution has to be the best it can be. In this address, I have attempted to do three things: provide information about our voluntary system of regional accreditation that ensures that each institution has a system of assessment aimed at quality improvement; review some of the common measures that colleges and companies who publish rankings use to assess quality in relation to others; and last, indicate some of the many ways that American colleges and universities have found it worth their time and money to band together to achieve common aims.

Ultimately however, success is a function of the degree to which an institution sets and meets its own expectations, and how closely it comes to carrying out its distinctive mission. May we all continue to strive to these objectives together, learning from and with each other as we go.