double b said:
aggie93 said:
double b said:
Also, based on your logic , you are perfectly okay with having 100k enrollment someday. Our state's population is not slowing down and if anything, is growing at an accelerated pace beyond many others.
Perfectly ok? No doubt there are costs and benefits. A&M is a unique blend though of having the money and size to be a school of that size that can produce a large volume of high quality graduates. Essentially the school will continue to become more compartmentalized and be a collection of colleges. As long as we have the money to build and staff at a high level and we have the space to make it work feasibly there are worse things and there are definitely significant benefits. There are also a lot of savings and efficiencies by having all of those colleges in such close proximity and under the same University. A&M also has a centralized location directly in between the main population centers, 75% of the population of the State is within 200 miles in every direction.Even then it's crazy we are pushing 70k students and 94% are from Texas. Compare that with large public schools outside the State where 60% is often a big number.
The negatives are perception of a school that large and the loss of a closer knit feel. Lots of logistical issues to work through as well. If your goal is solely that you want A&M to become a Georgia Tech or maybe UF then you will be disappointed, that just isn't our mission and it isn't what is best for Texas as a State.
The UT System has already taken the burden of creating Tier 2 schools on a broad scale. They have almost 250k students in all of the UT System schools and they qualify for PUF money. They are helping with the regional issues. The A&M System schools help as well but most are Tier 3 or even Tier 4 but that's ok as well. The real problem is that none of those schools have a real chance at being Tier 1 in the next 20 years. UT Dallas is probably the most likely. Texas has 3 Tier 1 Schools in this State (Rice being the 3rd) and A&M is basically filling the void for offering Tier 1 for population growth. Texas and Rice aren't going to grow. Thus continuing to grow A&M in a smart manner makes a hell of a lot of sense.
It's just a very big picture to look at.
Again, you are failing to address my point. By your logic, you are completely okay with the status quo our system school and relegating the entire system to second place of UT. I am not okay with that. Our flagship campus is meant to educate the very best within our state's borders and some beyond. I am perfectly okay with that mission. However, you are of the mindset that we can continue to grow and that the quality of the student's education experience will not come as a sacrifice. So hell, why don't we grow all our high schools into mega high schools and host 100 + students into of each class, cram a 1000 + students into each lunch hour, etc. We all know this is a not sustainable model of growth and the return on one's experience diminishes with respect to its size.
My biggest pet peeve is that Texas A&M decided a long time ago to shift their focus into another direction, I know because I was largely there a part of those conversations and did my best to redirect them as best as I could. Since I have left, things have progressively moved further and further into that direction.
If you want to talk about big picture, let's make an effort to grow our system into the best in our state, and eventually the nation. Our state has a lot of resources, and with the right type of foresight, the TAMU system has the opportunity to build up the other institutions instead of letting them wilt away into permanent cellar status. Right now, the Galveston campus (which is truly a diamond in the rough), is the only other campus that is comparable to another regional school in the state. However, from your attitude, you are content with retaining our "second" tier status in the state and cannot see that they are bigger opportunities ahead of us than the bragging rights of having 100K Aggies.
First off, I'm not advocating anything I'm simply discussing the pluses and minuses to each and the political reality. Texas A&M has a mission and serves the State of Texas as a Tier 1 Public Research University. It does not have a mission to become the most elite Public University in the country. That has opportunities and limitations
There is nothing about A&M growing that "relegates Texas A&M to second place". Texas has nothing comparable to our Engineering building for instance and there are many majors that we offer that are far beyond anything at Texas and that isn't changing. We also have a significantly higher average salary for our grads at every stage.
If your goal is prestige or USN Ratings then those areas are going to be difficult to do well in if we continue to grow. Those aren't part of our mission though. FWIW we could do some things in terms of our admissions (especially how we report admissions) and recruiting that could make a much larger difference than limiting size btw. You seem to look at limiting size as some panacea and to put way too much value in subjective rankings. I prefer the objective ones. Endowment. Research spending. Average salary for graduates.
As for building up institutions that will take a Constitutional change to the PUF. Right now only 4 schools in our System get PUF money (CS, Galveston, Prairie View, and Tarleton) and none of them are ever going to be of significant size for different reasons. I completely agree with you on Galveston btw and it looks like my eldest is going to go there and study Marine Transportation (the trivia answer to "What major at Texas A&M has the highest pay for graduates with a Bachelor's Degree?" that very few people know). Galveston is awesome but it's physically very limited in size and mission. The reason it is awesome is because it acts as an adjunct offering specialties not available at CS and is basically just an extension of CS. The more you offer majors that are also offered at CS at Galveston or anywhere else they simply won't carry the same weight, it takes decades to build up a school. That's why I brought up the UT System example and UT Dallas and UTSA for instance. UT has been pouring money into those schools for a long time but they will likely never get above 2nd Tier outside of a few specialties (UTD in Comp Sci for instance, maybe).
I think there are good arguments that they should have done things differently when they set up the Public University blueprint in Texas long ago but that blueprint isn't easily changed. Look at other states and how they came up with their systems and there are pluses and minuses to each. Texas as a State has a very unique blueprint. Most states have either a Flagship University system where one school is far superior to everyone else (Florida for example) or they have a split specialty Flagship system where one school has the Liberal Arts, Business, and Law School and the other is Engineering and Ag focused (Alabama or Georgia for example) or they have a two tier System like California with the UC System being centralized to offer top level education and the State system to serve the rest of the populace. For many reasons the State of Texas doesn't fit any of those models and the PUF makes it even more complicated. Private schools also have traditionally filled a lot of the Tier 2 needs in Texas.
In the end it's not about what I would like or be happy with, it's about what is reality and making the best of it. There is no realistic way for there to be a 3rd Tier 1 Public University in Texas in the next 25 years and the demand for Tier 1 Education is huge because we have hundreds of thousands of HS grads every year in the State and some outstanding HS's that are superior as a whole to anything within 1000 miles from our state borders. Those numbers are only increasing as the State continues to add more highly educated workers in multiple industries. So the options to serve that need are limited. You simply can't look at A&M in a vacuum and prioritize purely based on what would be in the interest of the University and it's alumni no more than you can do that for Texas or any other Public school, those Universities serve the needs of the State and not the other way around.
As I stated, there are ways to improve our standing and to manage our growth that will continue to improve our status. There are also very real benefits of growth to go along with the challenges of it. Change is the only constant and that is especially true with the growth of our State. When I was accepted to A&M in '89 there were fewer than 17 million in Texas, we will soon be at 30 million. We have to deal with that reality and make choices based on that.
A&M has always changed btw for good and bad. My Dad was Head Yell in the '50s and it was all male/all military with 5k students. The school was poorly rated but the culture was far stronger than it will ever be again, I remember going to his 35th Class Anniversary with him (he was Class Agent) and out of a Class of around 1000 originally they had over 250 in attendance. For their 35th, not exactly one that people look at as a milestone. A&M was 43k when I went to school with 2k in the Corps and at that time we were growing in reputation but not in the AAU or anything close to the research powerhouse we are now. Things evolve and change.