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It's hard to deny the downward trend that started when Sharp became Chancellor. When he took the job A&M was ranked 58th in U.S. News & World Report.

Since then it's been a downward spiral.

2012 - 58
2013 - 65
2014 - 69
2015 - 68
2016 - 70

http://publicuniversityhonors.com/2015/06/13/u-s-news-national-university-rankings-2008-present/

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Seems to corelate with our football program.

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We seem to be keeping good company regarding distance education:

http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/best-online-masters-engineering-programs/

I'm not convinced online education is always effective, but I'm fairly sure there are more effective ways to convey instruction than relying heavily on the traditional lecture. From everything I've read, A&M limits online degrees from the College of Engineering to non-thesis masters degrees.

It's hard for me to find fault with the University finding ways to control costs and prices. I also flat out reject the premise that a former student or a current student can easily detect or track a change in quality. And USNWR doesn't have a direct measure for tracking instruction quality either other than essentially word of mouth.

None of this excuses indiscriminate growth. But planned growth to grow revenue and manage via scale can be done. And, yes, there will be more adjuncts and more carefully selected tenured faculty moving forward.

As a specific example: a friend of mine from either my class or the class behind me graduated with a P.E. from A&M, then took a J.D. from Stanford focusing on intellectual property. He's taught at Tulane for quite a while and when I heard the law school was bolstering their intellectual property faculty I thought "they should hire him."

Turns out they did. He's an example of a strategic, fully tenured hire. And there's little doubt those kinds of resources can be recruited and it sounds like Dr. Young is providing insight to the BoR on how to accomplish this.

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Your premise is false. This has nothing to do with saving money or cutting costs. It has everything to do with freeing up the faculty for research. Period.

Not saying that's good or bad, but undergrad is NOT the priority for Texas A&M. It isn't even in the top 5.

Here is the criteria for the US news rankings

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights




My only question about this is, what objectivity did they use to come up with the weights? Determining the weight of criteria is subjective, and can be manipulated.

The graduates are in the stands, with the audience in the center area.

Doing the UC system model won't benefit the A&M main campus.

Do you want to follow UT-Dallas model?

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It's hard to deny the downward trend that started when Sharp became Chancellor. When he took the job A&M was ranked 58th in U.S. News & World Report.

Since then it's been a downward spiral.

2012 - 58
2013 - 65
2014 - 69
2015 - 68
2016 - 70

http://publicuniversityhonors.com/2015/06/13/u-s-news-national-university-rankings-2008-present/

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There are 3000+ 4 year colleges in the US. We have dropped 12 spots. That's a 0.4% decline and still in the top 2.3%.

I think downward spiral might be a little over the top.

You may not agree with "Downward spiral" but it is concerning that the trend has been downward since Sharp took over. If it were trending the opposite and we were twelve spots up to 46 then we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

I'll also add this again. Watch and tell me which chancellor you would rather have. Sharp or McRaven.

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Sharp testified in front of the Texas Senate higher ed committee.

Link

It seems Sharp's strategy was to increase enrollment to get more money from the legislature, although, to his surprise (expressed in the video), the increase in funding that A&M received in the last session didn't even cover inflation because of enrollment growth. So the strategy backfired and A&M received less money per student

Sharp's testimony starts at 1:31:00 and McCraven starts at 2:58:00.

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There's more to being an aggie than getting an online degree. laughable. the aggie network has slowly become more and more irrelevant from my personal perspective. I can't remember the last time I actually had a solid business connection because the fella on the other end was an Aggie. Maybe it has worked for some.

and Florida and Texas both have only one university in the Top 20 despite their states' huge populations. UC has six ahead of the one from TX and FL.

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Top 20 Public Universities

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University of California - Berkeley
University of California - Los Angeles
University of Virginia
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
College of William and Mary
Georgia Institute of Technology
University of California - Santa Barbara
University of California - Irvine
University of California - San Diego
University of California - Davis
University of IllinoisUrbana - Champaign
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Pennsylvania State University - University Park
University of Florida
Ohio State University - Columbus
University of Texas - Austin
University of Washington
University of Connecticut
University of Maryland - College Park

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With an $11 billion endowment the TAMU System doesn't have a single top 20 public school and the UC System has six. We're clearly doing it wrong.

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Maybe we can move the campus to where the weather is good and the venture capital $$ flow like a fine Napa wine.

Trying to compete with UC is hopeless my dude. Improvement? Always. Equivalent to Berkeley and UCLA? Better set some more realistic goals my dude

Watered down eggs

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OP...

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I don't know about the OP, but there are a number of Aggies that could have started this thread.

Anyways, while I know anything said here is quote unlikely to matter, indiscrimately dismissing any and all criticism of Texas A&M and Texas A&M related things isn't helpful.

Sid,

Would you say a goal to pass t.u. and UF are realistic goals? Because that's not happening either. We are slipping farther behind them.

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He hired hundreds of faculty, reduced class sizes, and had A&M moving up in the USN&WR rankings.

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You can do that and still have the school grow exponentially. You know another way to make our USN&WR ranking go up, give every professor a million dollar salary. The USN&WR rankings are crap because they can easily be gamed with no benefit to the actual institution..

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good grief.

Of course when we consider peer reviews in academia, it helps to frame the result with at least a little perspective:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/24/survey-finds-professors-already-liberal-have-moved-further-left

Btw: Sid is defending A&M because he loves the school and likely feels the difference between #1 on the USNWR list of public schools and #25 is largely undetectable by a current student or a former student. Other than perhaps the link I just put up.

Political bias is a popular excuse on this board when it comes to academic rankings. The facts always show otherwise.

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Since fall 2012, Young said the number of students has increased by 16 percent while faculty and staff have only seen increases of 12 percent and 6 percent, respectively.

In fall of 2014, the student-to-faculty ratio was reported as 23.1 to 1 as compared with the 22.1 to 1 statewide average for that year.

As a reference point, Young said the University of Texas had a 19.1 to 1 ratio. To achieve that, he added Texas A&M would need to add nearly 450 additional faculty members.

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SAT scores for incoming students

2010 - 1207
2011 - 1207
2012 - 1197
2013 - 1192
2014 - 1189

http://dars.tamu.edu/Data-and-Reports/Student#AdmissionsandPlacement

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More facts that get in the way of the political bias excuse..

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Doing the UC system model won't benefit the A&M main campus.

Do you want to follow UT-Dallas model?

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It would help the Main Campus in that it would allow other campuses to tackle a very real area of need; providing access to an affordable, yet quality, education.

That would allow the Main Campus to focus on maintaining, if not improving, its academic rigor and research quality. The Main Campus could grow its enrollment as growth of infrastructure and faculty allow for---rather than playing catch-up with faculty and facilities as we know has happened.


I'm all for increased opportunities for prospective students, but that's not always best served by growing enrollment at the flagship institution.


College Station shouldn't follow the UT-Dallas model in so far as disregarding athletics, et. al., Extracurriculars do and should be a positive for the campus and its alumni. I think Main Campus can continue to have and foster fantastic athletic and extracurricular programs and atmospheres while also improving its academics and research.

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Doing the UC system model won't benefit the A&M main campus.

Do you want to follow UT-Dallas model?

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Texas copying the UC system will effectively make A&M the clearly inferior Cal State system by comparison, but it appears thats what we aspire to in current trends. The way to counter that is to make attending in college station more elite, not more inclusive. If i had kids today i would not be discouraging them to look at Texas.

The problem with having your kids look at Texas would be that even if they have the grades and ACT/SAT scores they could be turned down based on their race or differing extra-curricular activities . Both my son's best friend with lower scores and a female non-white student in his class that isn't even graduating with honors got into Texas while he did not.

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Yep, all current policies maintained, I would be unsurprised by UT-D surpassing A&M in our lifetime as a prestigious school. The UT System is copying the UC System and it seems to be working. A&M seems to have accidently picked up the wrong play book.

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Yet the UT system, with UT Dallas in particular, is at the forefront of delivering online education. Online education will only expand, and is already offered by many highly respected universities that we would live to be in company with. It is not one of our problems.

Thank you! I really appreciate that!

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Yep, all current policies maintained, I would be unsurprised by UT-D surpassing A&M in our lifetime as a prestigious school. The UT System is copying the UC System and it seems to be working. A&M seems to have accidently picked up the wrong play book.

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Agree 100%