State University of New York Minutes of a Briefing of the Academic Affairs Committee of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York January 10, 2011 The committee meeting was convened by Trustee Warren-Merrick at 12:40 P.M Members present were Trustees Gerri Warren-Merrick, Marshall Lichtman, Cary Staller, Ronald Ehrenberg, Julie Gondar, and John Murad Others present: Carl Hayden, Chairman-Board of Trustees Joseph Belluck, Trustee David Lavallee, Senior Vice Chancellor, Provost John O’Connor, Senior Vice Chancellor Elizabeth Bringsjord, Vice Provost. Tina Good, President Faculty Council of Community Colleges Marti Ellermann, SUNY Counsel’s Office Johanna Duncan-Poitier, Vice chancellor for community colleges. Ken O’Brien, President of the University of Faculty Senate Robert Kraushaar, Associate Provost Carlos Medina, Assistant Provost Denise Bukovan, office of Community Colleges Jill Lansing, office of the Chancellor’s Deputy of the Educational Pipeline Kevin Railey, Associate Provost at the College at Buffalo Trustee Warren-Merrick greeted the committee members and guests. The Committee agenda included: 1. Approval of minutes 2. Resolutions * Degree Authorization for The State University of New York College at Buffalo The resolution reads, Resolved that the chancellor be and hereby is directed to seek the authorization of the Board of Regents for the State University College at Buffalo to confer the degree of Master of Public Administration. Approval of this resolution will authorize the State University College at Buffalo for its Master of Public Administration degree subject to the approval of the Board of Regents. Degree authorization is necessary as the award represents the college’s first use of the MPA degree. Authorization by the Board of Trustees and the Board of Regents will allow for the approval of an advanced program of study in public administration of non-profits. So just by way of background, this proposal is an excellent degree program. The proposal has been reviewed for mission, market and quality. Providing all approvals are met we are hopeful that this program will begin in the fall with about 15 students. The degree has two branches, public administration and human services. The human services branch we have already in the County, and those students get tuition support from the agencies that they work for in order to come to Buffalo State. So this is an ongoing situation that we are trying to influence the government ability to make good decisions in the local western New York region. And there is no program in western New York in public relationship or human services and non-profit management Brockport, Albany and Empire State have similar degrees. The Buffalo program is designed very closely to the Albany model and because of the geographical nature of the degrees there is not a lot, if any competition in Buffalo and surrounding communities. The resolution was approved. 3. Informational Items * Community College Report – Johanna Duncan-Poitier Just to get started, I am going to give you just a sort of laundry list of some of the things in which we have been involved. Now our new governor has seen that SUNY can be a strong economic engine, driver, and much of the work that we are looking at is about access, access to college, college readiness and completion so that students can get meaningful careers when they graduate. We have many, many students who are going to colleges and therefore are there because of open enrollment, and so strengthening the education pipeline for our students in community colleges is absolutely essential. This is actually my fourth official month but I actually started the job about six months ago withthe responsibility for community colleges, and the first thing that we believe was really important is to actually speak to those who have such an essential role in really having a stronger workforce, having those students graduate. So the first thing I was involved in was really site visits. But let me just give some very quick observations. How community colleges are very different than the senior colleges if that’s the appropriate term of four year colleges or the comprehensives. I will say that 22 years with the State Education Department and working with community colleges, I don’t think I understood how different they really are. Very different funding, very different governing structure, very different in size. If you go to Long Island perhaps one of the biggest issues is the size of the parking lot. There’s Suffolk Community College, Nassau Community College very large, diverse population, very active and then you go to some of the more rural parts of upstate and transportation is an issue in a very different way. Getting the student to the actual campus having smaller populations, not being as diverse, not getting as much support in terms of sponsors in counties, etc., just how different they are. Small, urban, rural, etc. How success is measured. We still measure success, first time, full-time, and again community college students very different. The transfer challenge. Students graduating from community college and being able to transfer to a four year institution and really how important the mobility work that the provost’s office is doing with the SUNY trustees. Without exception everyone is dependent on that as a critical transition point. The real challenges of our community colleges as well as the opportunity associated with open enrollment. I didn’t have an appreciation for how big an employer our community colleges are, especially upstate. Secondly, how important community is in the term community college. Many, many folks in the various communities not only see the community college as an employer, but the hub of a lot of activity. Where if they didn’t exist, communities would be very different. It was a very enlightening experience for me. The last piece, as I was looking at our challenge with the education pipeline and the students who are going into our community colleges, because it’s not just the student that doesn’t have a Regents diploma. We are enrolling students who don’t have a Regents diploma, don’t have a local diploma, don’t have GED, they don’t have a diploma at all. If they do pass an ability to benefit test, they can become a student in our community colleges. So that’s a real challenge. And all that goes with that in terms of development, developmental education and supports, etc. Our focus is in recognizing that they are very different entities, but that we have an opportunity like we’ve never had before, as Community colleges are being seen as a viable, option for getting America back to work. They are seen as a viable opportunity for more students graduating from college. and so it’s a wonderful opportunity, but we have to seize it, otherwise it will pass us by. First piece is completion by design. The Gates Foundation has a $35 million grant opportunity which will help with much of what I just described. Bringing in the student who may not be what you’d considered your honor student or the student who is absolutely going to go to college and succeed, but rather to put in place certain supports for college completion. They are starting with community colleges and they are only funding one student per state. Monroe Community College is the lead, the managing partner. The Lumina Foundation has actually given us a little under a million dollars for planning grant to start with our community colleges for this very cooperative initiative. The Lumina Foundation has commonly referred to SUNY as well as the other eleven recipients as the Lumina Twelve and they are looking at putting all of the resources focused on workless preparation, and college completion in this group. We are partners with the American Association of Community Colleges, Jobs for the Future, many different commissions even as a small enterprise. We are perhaps I think the best in the enterprise, but we are in very, very good company. The last piece, and we didn’t mention it the last time we met and I thought it was really important is some work that we did with TAP which is the Tuition Assistance Program. Earlier this year, there was going to be a change in the standard for student eligibility for TAP. For our community colleges alone, it would have affected 2700 students who otherwise least could afford to have the standards changed a few weeks before the beginning of the college semester. Looking at our four year colleges as well as our two year colleges, we know the numbers are double that. So, right now we are working with the State Education Department and others to make sure that the standards are correct. So students aren’t in remediation forever. * Diversity Report Access to Success - presented by: Carlos Medina, Assistant Provost and Acting Director of the Office of Diversity and Educational Equity and Robert Kraushaar, Associate Provost and Access to Success Project Coordinator. Carlos Medina: Dr. Kati Haycock, the President of the Education Trust made a presentation to the Chief Academic Officers on the A2S Trust initiative. A2S stands for Access to Success. Access has actually steadily grown over the last 25 years for all groups. But with the growth, has also come some gaps within the groups. A majority of students have increased their access to higher education by 22 percentage points in the last 25 years. African-American students have gone up by 32 percentage points. Another major indicator to see the economy growing has been family income. Family income is really pretty serious when it comes to how students go on to college and how they succeed. So, if we look at the low income column you’ll see that there’s been a steady increase along the years there as well. But, even with the increases, you’ll see that in 2007 only 58 percent of students with low income groups have gone onto higher education whereas they haven’t even reached the numbers of high income groups in 1977, 20 years ago. It’s important to mention that the low income is the population that continues to grow and currently there’s probably about 25 million low income students attending post secondary education in this country. The overwhelming majority of those low income groups come from radicalized communities. Meaning that African-American, Latino students take up 2/3. So, as you’ll see in a minute, those are the population again for most of the country. When we look at attainment of graduation completion, when we look at age 24, those who have obtained a baccalaureate degree, you’ll find that the overwhelming majority have come from the highest income group, 77 percent and the lowest 10 percent from low income. It could be those students that take advantage of Pell and Pell is usually around 200 percent of funding or something like that. We can assume that a large proportion of difference is related to financial matters and preparation When we look at the population growth, the projection for the next 30 or 40 years, you see that the least amount of growth will be made by a majority of students now and the Native American students. The explosion is in the Latino community. You’ll find that by 2050 over 80 million in population in this country. Unfortunately the Latino population in current homes is the least prepared educationally to benefit from and even contribute to society and to take advantage of the economic growth that is seen today. This is a result of factors. Its language, its poverty, it’s where you come from many in the urban centers of America, lack of opportunity. New York statistics are very similar to the national statistics. Robert Kraushaar: Carlos set the stage but I’m going to talk today about the actual program. This is a program that has been put together by the Education Trust that Carlos mentioned with NASH which is the National Association of System Heads. Between them the systems agreed to join in on this includes CUNY as well, Cal State, Maryland, Ohio, almost all of the big systems you could think about. Together they include 2/3 or our education role in some manner and shape. The question was, is there’s a gap now between access and success of under-represented students and the general population. The goal is, can we by 2016 half that gap competitively? There were two groups, one was the under-represented which is basically blacks, Latinos and maybe Native Americans, the other one was low income. Our focus is the under-represented. We look at first time transfer students. In using the access to success model does our entering class reflect the diversity of the state? Our community colleges to a certain extent do better than the state average and so the goal there is obviously to keep doing what we’re doing at the community college level. Now success is the question of once we get students in college how do they graduate. Do we graduate the minority students with the same percentage that we do the general population? We don’t, we’re not quite as tight in terms of the percentages that we need to get to as we were in terms of access, so we have our work cut out for us in terms of success. These measurements may be even more difficult for us at SUNY, they use a standard model for all the states and therefore for New York they use standard New York data. So it’s, even though SUNY is high, mainly not in a city and much more upstate than downstate, the data pool we’re looking that we’re judging ourselves against is the entire state of our under-represented students. Part of the education trust report was to say that some of these issues of gaps are because of the incomes we talked about, or because of the educational systems they go into. But there are still differences of what colleges do themselves. So part of what we’re doing is giving goals to each of the campuses in working with chief academic officers in this regard to best practices. These best practices apply to the retention and graduation rates, but I think the issue of who we’re attracting to these schools is a separate issue. I would think that on that level if we could somehow work better as a coordinated system all these guidance counselor offices and really marketing the system better in these schools, then I think we’d attract many more of these students. I mean personally, I do scholarships for a bunch of under-represented schools and some of the guidance counselor offices are better than others. I would just like to point out to everyone that one of the quickest ways of changing the overall access and success pattern for baccalaureate degrees is to be very mindful of the success rate of community college graduates in baccalaureate programs. Because the retention and graduation rate for incoming transfer students is higher throughout the system than it is for 4 year schools. Transfer students are more successful and that applies to minorities as well as majority groups and that emphasizes once again the importance of the mobility project and making certain that there are no false intents to students as they go from community colleges to baccalaureate programs. I think another point I’d like to make is that if you look at how many successful programs we have at SUNY one would be the educational opportunity program. If we could get more funding so we can return to prior services numbers of 3 or 4 years ago, we would have at least 100 thousand students that we can bring to that program. If you look at first year retention rates for example, across the country, it hovers around 73 percent. But EOP students at SUNY its 84 percent, 10 or 11 percentage points higher. 4. Report of the Sr. Vice Chancellor Update on Mobility Project – Demonstration of website As you all probably know from my periodic presentations about the mobility project which is very dear to my heart and Tina’s and Ken’s cause we’ve been working on this for three and a half years, that we, we began with, with two resolutions. We had a Board resolution November 2009 and this was for transfer of courses in the major and this is the course that are typically taken in four year programs and I will mention that we learned a lot in this process that will be, the results will be on this website. The first thing is, despite our trepidation at the beginning of this I think, that these programs would be so different from one school to the other that we really had a hard time finding common courses the students could take. That evaporated pretty quickly. Because we took the courses from the majors that students most often transferred in and graduated from and circulated for those majors we asked the faculty if at the four year school, “What do your students typically take in their first two years” not by number, don’t give us a list of one hundred courses and two hundred courses. But actually look at what they take and we also talked with the IR departments at these schools because they had course records and our people had course records. It all came out very similar. And that some disciplines are very, very structured as you might imagine in the sciences and mathematics for example. And those students pretty much took that series of courses. In other areas most other majors, students would take one or two courses that were the same for all students, but then they would typically take three other courses that sampled in that area. And so what we ended up seeing is that five courses, either fifteen credits in most disciplines where they had three credit courses, were up to twenty credits in the sciences. It was really very typical. And a lot of it was elective so you have some, some wiggle room in terms of choice. The second thing was but of course many disciplines also had other courses that you need to take. So if you’re in engineering, of course you need to take mathematics and physics and so on. And when you add those up, you actually have sometimes a whole thirty credits worth of credits that count toward your major, they’re required that are taken in the first two years. In January the other piece was we made the transfer a lot easier for general education courses because rather than having had one each of everyone of the ten areas for thirty credits, you can now have to do thirty credits but they can be in five areas plus mathematics and basic communication. But in the other, in the other eight areas you choose five out of eight and that’s okay. You can do all ten or you can do seven. What this really helps is that a very large percentage of our transfer students transfer in AS programs and in AS programs it’s very often extremely difficult to get all ten areas in because you have a quite a concentration in your major. But these students, it turns out those majors, since they are transfer degrees are almost always in an area where they are probably going to major in that later on and they are in general education, so they get to count as part of their thirty credits. On the 24th of this month, we are going to launch, after making all the revisions that we’ve gotten. And what we’re going to do is put a lot of extra data behind it which is the course to course. I will say that the people who’ve used it so far the suggestions they’ve given us about changes are detailed. They’re not on the general usage. We have sent these lists now to all of our campuses to review to make sure we have the right courses selected. These are selected basically from the catalogues and matched the course description that the faculty had put together. All the course descriptions were done by faculty committees. We had approximately three hundred faculty, they’ve done that for a little over twenty majors. These constitute the ninety, 90 percent of the most common transfer and it’s just shy of one hundred courses. There are about ninety eight common courses but these are also, I want to say, these are course types as well. So in English for example, American literature, British literature, Women’s literature, literature of the other, which is ethnic groups and non-minority authors are all categories. So some campuses have ten of those courses. And those courses that meet the guidelines, which in that case has to do with the survey courses that cover certain period or a certain number of authors, anything that meets those guidelines would then be on these lists. So a student was, is able now to really be able to get a great deal of information. We also have a course transfer planner that is part of this and that’s where students can download an editable file which has a form that they can keep putting their information in as they go along that has their gen. ed. requirements and their requirements in the majors. So they can download the courses that they need and basically check them off by semester as they get them done. So, I just wanted to let you know before we get together in March this whole thing should be live. Strategic Planning: Academic Excellence, Innovative Instruction and Strategic Enrollment Management On January 6th we had a face to face meeting of the implementation teams and the transformation teams. The three with which we’re most directly involved were Academic Excellence, Innovative Instruction, and Strategic Enrollment Management. These groups have had conference calls or technologically mediated meetings, Illuminate. I think are coming along now with the process of formulating the metrics and then the kind of projects we would need to improve against those metrics. Most of these groups have divided into subgroups anywhere from two to four, so that they can attack specific areas. So, for example, in Academic Excellence, we’ve done it by working on pre-college preparation and developmental education; a second on associate degrees and certificates; a third on bachelor degree at level education; and one that’s on graduate and profession. And they’re all reporting it. So, others may have things that they’d like to say but I think I’ll just cap it at that and give you a bigger explanation at the March meeting. 5. Other Business 6. Executive Session * Honorary Degrees The meeting adjourned at 1:58