TCAC July 2000 Report to the Provost

Section A -- Policy for Tri-Campus Enrollment Management

Introduction:

In the February 24 TCAC meeting, under the agenda item "Continued development/refinement of the definition of the three-campus university", the focus of discussion returned to a key topic never far from the committee's central charge, namely providing a vision for the three-campus university. In this conversation, joined by Dean Fred Campbell and Associate Provost Debra Friedman, the twin issues of enrollment planning and the FTE drivenness of the new campuses emerged spontaneously. This, in turn, made obvious the significant connection between the vision for the three-campus university and policy adopted by the university for managing enrollment. In fact, the choice of policy cannot but reflect a vision for the three-campus university. In its next nine meetings the TCAC became fully engaged in considering relevant issues surrounding the development of enrollment policy with a view to providing useful advice on this subject (Appendix A). Twice Dick Thompson, Director of the UW Office of Government Relations, met with the TCAC and provided valuable insight about how leaders within state government view and consider enrollment policies. Joanne Taricani, the UW Faculty Senate Legislative Representative, was also a visitor and helped the TCAC capture those perspectives.

To keep the discussions about future enrollment policy focused within a manageable set, the TCAC recognized several boundary conditions within which any acceptable proposal about policy would most likely reside. These conditions are:

The general character of the three-campus university has been identified by President McCormick as falling somewhere near the center of a spectrum, the limits of which are defined as integrated (e.g., WSU) and autonomous (i.e., mutually independent) (Appendix B).
An established organization of the UW exists and is characterized by one board of regents, one president, one provost, etc. (Appendix C).
Key assumptions common to any effective enrollment plan are readily identifiable (Appendix D).
UWB and UWT generally are restricted to offering only upper-division programs for undergraduates. Thus, they cannot address enrollment issues by attracting freshmen and sophomore students and then providing them with suitable 100 and 200 level courses. Also, because they are "two-year schools", the annual replacement of graduated students is more challenging than for a four-year school with a similar mix of full-time and part-time students (Appendix E).
Because of their rapid growth over the last ten years, the number of qualified students waiting for admission to current programs offered at UWT and UWB generally is very small. This fact, coupled with experience showing that newly offered programs tend not to fill to capacity the first year or two, makes "tuning" enrollment at the new campuses very difficult.
The current mode of financing enrollments in higher education, as set by the legislature, has two components which, taken together, provide clear disincentives for universities either to be under-enrolled or over-enrolled vis a vis legislatively set targets. The general fund portion of student FTE support is neither provided (1) on the high side for student FTE's served beyond the target, nor (2) on the short side for the difference in FTE's served and targeted even for institutions that achieve 95-99% of their target. (An equivalent scheme, in personal terms, would be to inform a student that the only acceptable grade for him or her to achieve is an A. If he/she earns an A- there will be a penalty, and if he/she earns an A+ there will be a penalty.)

From various discussions, including the ones with Dick Thompson, the TCAC learned of at least one other "price" to be paid for falling short of an enrollment target. That price is a diminished credibility in the eyes of the state's lawmakers for any institution, which, first having agreed to serve a certain number of student FTE's, then does not and misses the target on the low side.

Absent a major change in policy in Olympia (e.g., allowing general fund support within a band around the target enrollments (i.e., plus or minus 5 %) or even by providing general fund support for every FTE enrolled including those beyond the target), it is prudent for the UW to suggest a management proposal which minimizes fiscal penalties and maximizes the UW's credibility in the eyes of the law makers. Thus, two goals any successful UW policy proposal must achieve when put into practice are evident. First, the UW must plan to err on the high side when striving to achieve its enrollment target(s), and second, it also should plan to be as close to the target(s) as possible in order to minimize the fiscal penalty associated with over-enrollment.

Discussion:

The university administration began discussing the 2001-2003 budget request with the regents at the May 19th Board of Regents meeting, at which time the Float Plan (see below) was presented as a strategy for Enrollment Management. Thereafter, the administration made the decision that the Float Plan would be an intrinsic component of the budget proposal to be considered in the coming legislative session. Armed with this knowledge, the TCAC continued its discussion of another plan for enrollment management, the Three Point Plan, TPP, (see below) at its June 19th and 28th meetings, with the assurance that if it recommended this plan (or any other) for consideration, that recommendation would become a serious part of the discussion in the next round of budget requests. In fact, progress toward developing a recommendation about the TPP stalled at the June 19th meeting. Nevertheless, the committee elected to forward the commentary below summarizing its discussion of the TPP in the firm belief that the various perspectives contained therein clearly help to illuminate key challenges associated with developing an effective policy for enrollment management. Any effective policy should:

position the UW to be able to provide future access to members of the baby-boom-echo cohort and to others wishing to earn a UW degree,
serve the needs of students at all three campuses,
distribute the burdens of doing so fairly across the three campuses,
minimize the impact of the disincentives built into the enrollment policy established in the most recent legislative session, and
allow the UW to expand the scope of academic programs at UWB and UWT to address unmet student demand.

The Float Plan

Request from the legislature a UW 100 FTE Float along with specific minimum FTE enrollment targets each for UWS, UWT and UWB.

The Three Point Plan (TPP)

Request that the legislature continue to set the FTE targets for the individual campuses and fund those targets based upon four-year costs for undergraduates at UWS, upon upper-division costs for undergraduates at UWB and UWT and upon graduate costs for graduate students at all three campuses.
Request that the accountability metric of FTE performance for the UW be one number, reflecting the degree to which the UW has achieved the sum of the targets for the individual campuses. Please see the last column of the table (Appendix F) for the ten-year history of this "metric".
Request that no general fund support be lost by any campus as long as the net FTE's served by the three campuses met or exceeded the sum of the individual targets and as long as UWB and UWT each achieved no less than 95% of their targets.

Pros and Cons of the Three Point Plan:

Having the general fund portion of the targeted FTE number guaranteed is an important aspect of the TPP for the new campuses, in part, because of the special challenges they face in effectively serving students when the ratio of headcount/FTE is larger than it is at UWS (Appendix G). The significance of the guarantee is clear as noted in a recent memorandum written by UWT Chancellor, Vicky Carwein (Appendix H). "Any enrollment planning/legislative strategy MUST include some mechanisms that allows flexibility in "meeting target" and must not include punishments and penalties for missing the mark by a few percentage points. A non-punitive mechanism to assure flexibility in meeting targets remains our most pressing and important concern. Given our current target, if UWT is only 2% short (98% of target) we will lose approximately $220,000 in state funding."

With the TPP, the new campuses are assured general fund support (at the upper-division and graduate level) of their targeted number of FTE's as long as 95% or more of their targets are achieved. Some TCAC members feel that the new campuses will continue to aim at 100% enrollment while being strongly motivated to achieve no less than 95% of their targets. Others wondered about the 5% window being a "disincentive" to achieving 100%. Whichever of these views prevail, most TCAC members agreed that the 5% window would relieve UWB and UWT of setting overly conservative targets and would provide some flexibility in managing growth, thus allowing them to be a bit aggressive in addressing demand/need for increased access and for expanded program offerings. Absent this window, the hiring of faculty and staff into these rapidly expanding campuses can only be done after new programs (often absolutely novel to the campuses) are in place, thereby ensuring inadequate planning.

With respect to point two of the TPP, it seems reasonable to expect that the UW can continue to meet or exceed the net student FTE targets of the three campuses if the method of setting the individual campus targets remains similar to those employed in recent years. In fact, the ten-year enrollment history of the UW reveals that it exceeded the net target on average by more than 200 FTE's each year and did so without the benefit of any conscious effort whatsoever directed at achieving the net of the three-campus targets (Appendix F).

However, at least two members of the TCAC strongly felt that conducting admission business as usual would not be the case, and they presented the following perspective. Because the TPP focuses a spotlight on achieving one net target for the UW, and given the loss in credibility associated with being low, it is likely that admissions at UWS will be increased beyond the historic levels to assure that the UW meets or exceeds the three-campus target. Also, not meeting the net target would mean that, for at least one campus (probably UWS), qualified students would have been turned away even though "spaces" were unfilled somewhere in the UW. They argued that this situation, were it to occur, cannot be defended and, therefore, must be avoided. In their eyes, the bottom line then is this: there probably will be a tendency to enroll even more students at UWS than the historic levels suggest. For UWS, that will mean providing educational opportunities to even more students than in the past without benefit of general fund support. In all likelihood, UWS faculty will find an added burden of this sort very unwelcome, especially given the feeling by some that other, extant fiscal measures already have ongoing negative components.

Further, some TCAC members are concerned that having any campus below 100% of its target still will draw undesired attention and will, thereby, harm the UW's credibility even when there exists apparent general agreement (with OFM and the legislature) on a single measure of FTE accountability (point two of the TPP).

Another aspect of the TPP has to do with its likely impact on coordination and communication across the three campuses. The TCAC feels that having the entire UW tied to one net target undoubtedly will be a force that tends to stimulate added coordination and/or communication between the admission offices of the three campuses. In fact, some would argue that a coordinated effort well may be central to the goal of achieving a combined enrollment just above the net target. The mounting of a coordinated effort, in turn, will be a force that tends to modify the decision making process for setting the target of each campus. Because the TPP allows over-enrollments achieved by one or more campuses to compensate for under-enrollments on any other campus, each admission office at least will rightly want to understand the justification for setting the individual targets of the other two campuses.

In summary, developing effective policy for managing reasonable growth across the UW in the current political/fiscal climate inevitably will also define the three-campus university and, thereby, may tend to move UWB and UWT either toward greater autonomy or deeper integration with UWS, i.e., to the right or left of center in President McCormick's diagram of a Governance Spectrum Including the New Campuses (Appendix B). However, generating a three-campus consensus supporting a given policy clearly will continue to be a significant challenge centering around (1) understanding the unique aspects of the environment in which each of the three campuses operates and (2) achieving the "proper balance of central and local administration". Seeking this balance was a major theme in the 1999 TCAC Report, wherein a broad vision for the Three Campus University of Washington was offered:

The Three Campus University of Washington must continue to provide key components of the intellectual, artistic, educational, technical and social service bases for the economy and culture of the Puget Sound region, the state and beyond. Achieving these crucial goals consistently over time will require (1) sufficient central coordination to facilitate effective, efficient collaboration of faculty and staff across the campuses, and (2) sufficient local autonomy such that the distinctive portions of each campus' contribution to the whole can be effectively and efficiently managed. The success of this federated model will depend on achieving a proper balance of central and local administration. The committee understands that finding this balance will be very challenging, particularly because it undoubtedly will shift with time. However, the rewards of finding the correct balance will be significant.

(1999 TCAC Report to the Provost--Executive Summary, Page Two)

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