So you're saying the world is a better place with fewer Aggies?

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Our peers are the University of Central Florida, DeVry University, Arizona State, University of Phoenix.

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Look how much John Sharp cares.

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So you're saying the world is a better place with fewer Aggies?

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What does being an Aggie even mean when they're giving away 4,000+ online engineering degrees each year.

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There's nothing wrong with online programs as long as it's just as rigorous as brick and mortar counterparts. We offered online degrees since the late '90s as well.

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.

I've done graduate work in delivery of online education in higher education. It's effectiveness depends on the student in most cases. It is quite easy to fail these courses for poorly driven or ill prepared students. Results do speak for themselves with most studies. I do believe they work better for graduate courses though. Graduate programs require students to have good GPA's and qualifying scores on the GRE/GMAT. This often almost always isn't reduced for online programs and the curriculum's match their in class counterparts. With this in mind, you already have a learning base of good students who are willing to teach themselves some of the material. And with learning management systems like Blackboard there is actually a much higher instance of collaboration between instructor and classmates then you find in traditional classrooms.

Sorry Greg and Bayside, but do I detect a bit of factual information and logic creeping into Texags? Monitor OPs, ban if problem becomes rampant!

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So you're saying the world is a better place with fewer Aggies?

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Yes.

9,000 grads in one semester is too many.

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So you're saying the world is a better place with fewer Aggies?

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Yes.

9,000 grads in one semester is too many.

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I would agree with that. My issue is placing the blame on distance education. Most graduate distance courses at A&M are usually capped at the 25 to 30 mark. Some are limited to 20. Instructors often dedicate more time to management of online classes than lecture classes.

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So you're saying the world is a better place with fewer Aggies?

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Yes.

9,000 grads in one semester is too many.

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Why does it matter how many get their degree?

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I think enormous class sizes devalue the quality of education. Also suggests we've lowered admission standards. Higher numbers of graduates are also likely to lead to poorer job placement among Aggies. The only benefit to having a ****-ton of students is more tuition $$$.

Just think how much less the degree is worth that it was when I was there in the 60's when there was an enrollment of less than 10,000. You guys must get 1/4 or less of the knowledge we did.

Man, your degrees must really suck. You must be wasting your time. You should have gone to Texas Southern; it's enrollment is only about 10,000.

I bet no Aggie has gotten a job, except delivering pizzas, in almost 30 years!

Sad. Very sad.

A couple of thoughts in no particular order...

• The OP constantly posts a false narrative and repeatedly eschews from conversing on where data actually comes from / actually means
• Nearly 1,200 of the 9,000 graduating are at other campuses, not all in College Station.
• Admission standards have increased in recent years, the fact that there are more kids graduating these days is a two-fold result of increasing the number of colleges and campuses included in the flagship university headcount and the long-term result of slow and steady growth
• There's billions of dollars of new programs and construction in the system and the leadership in place now is the best we've had in decades despite the bad rap some anti-growth dissidents liberally shower them with.

There is a thread that already addresses this very topic. That being said,















































This thread is ass my dude

SAT scores for incoming students

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

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

welcome to SEC A&M

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Admission standards have increased in recent years, the fact that there are more kids graduating these days is a two-fold result of increasing the number of colleges and campuses included in the flagship university headcount and the long-term result of slow and steady growth

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False. Admission standards have not increased when you take into account all the Blinn/JUCO transfers. And the growth of the College Station campus has been far from "slow and steady".

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There's billions of dollars of new programs and construction in the system and the leadership in place now is the best we've had in decades despite the bad rap some anti-growth dissidents liberally shower them with.

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The increase in money spent is outpaced by the growth in enrollment. Want proof? Look how much class sizes have grown. Oh, and Bob Gates would **** all over the current leadership. He hired hundreds of faculty, reduced class sizes, and had A&M moving up in the USN&WR rankings. People were much prouder of a TAMU diploma in 2007 than they are now.

http://www.theeagle.com/news/local/financial-report-to-a-m-regents-has-young-looking-toward/article_b28293a9-bca3-5ffa-bcba-5e483b429b9c.html

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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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Sharp has undone everything Gates accomplished.

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Admission standards have increased in recent years, the fact that there are more kids graduating these days is a two-fold result of increasing the number of colleges and campuses included in the flagship university headcount and the long-term result of slow and steady growth

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False. Admission standards have not increased when you take into account all the Blinn/JUCO transfers. And the growth of the College Station campus has been far from "slow and steady".

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There's billions of dollars of new programs and construction in the system and the leadership in place now is the best we've had in decades despite the bad rap some anti-growth dissidents liberally shower them with.

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The increase in money spent is outpaced by the growth in enrollment. Want proof? Look how much class sizes have grown. Oh, and Bob Gates would **** all over the current leadership. He hired hundreds of faculty, reduced class sizes, and had A&M moving up in the USN&WR rankings. People were much prouder of a TAMU diploma in 2007 than they are now.

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Oh look, the OP's other sock account.

And to repeat, there we go again with false narrative and straw man arguments. "People were much prouder of a TAMU diploma in 2007 than they are now." Bull effing crap.

Regarding the next post about the student::faculty ratios between the two flagship schools that has been addressed on the other thread, which like this one just pushes an anti-Sharp anti-growth agenda. The University can't just go to the marketplace and hire an additional 400 staff/faculty. It has to get authorization from the State to exceed employment caps, which is something the current administration is in process of doing as the Board of Regents just granted them permission to make the request to the State.

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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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People were much prouder of a TAMU diploma in 2007 than they are now.

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I'm just as proud of my degree as I was when I got it in 2005. I'm also still proud of my masters degree I finally finished in 2013. If you are less proud of your degree then you are know, you were never really proud of it in the first place.

the fact that you truly believe the USN&WR rankings dont mean anything says how misguided and biased you are. Whether you like it or not millions of kids going to college each year look up the rankings of a school and the USN&WR is at the top.

OP...

Someone posted a video from the state Senate where Sharp, McRaven, and other chancellors testified on the status of their universities. Sharp sounded like he was drunk while talking about increased enrollment and graduation sizes. McRaven briefed soon after. He sounded polished and professional and spoke about the quality of education and even mentioned the USNWR rankings. So those that say the rankings don't matter are wrong. The chancellor of t.u. definitely thinks they matter and felt like they mattered to the state Senate.

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The University can't just go to the marketplace and hire an additional 400 staff/faculty. It has to get authorization from the State to exceed employment caps, which is something the current administration is in process of doing as the Board of Regents just granted them permission to make the request to the State.

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Why not do this before increasing enrollment?

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/

Online education is vocational education and there is nothing wrong with that, but a university education should be much different.

I find it hard to believe that we have it all figured out when the largest public university in California, a state with nearly twice the population, has 38,000 students.....oh and is considers one of the top 25 best schools in the world, with an engineering school ranked higher than ours.