Rep. John Otto, House Appropriations Committee chairman and a supporter of the engineering "25 by 25" initiative announced he's stepping down.

Texas House budget chief to step down

These were Otto's comments after the last legislative session:

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Texas A&M seeks to roughly double its engineering enrollment to 25,000 by 2025.

"Our two primary purposes of higher education are to train our work force and also do research that benefits the entire state," Otto said. "Look at the demand we're going to have in this state over the next 20 years. We're nowhere near producing the number of engineers we'll need right now.

"I applaud Texas A&M for coming up with a plan to produce more engineers. Other universities are also coming up with programs to boost their engineering production."

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Link

Yeah. Let's just take anyone who wants to attend.
Soon the campus will be running with idiot students that have the intelligence and personality better suited for Tceh, Coog High, Angelo State, TSU, Gaylor, TCU.

Diploma Mill. Total BS.
Losing our traditions and our academic cred.

Engineering students will take a lot of their classes at community colleges so errbody can graduate

Something interesting posted here

A&M accepted 22,859 students in 2014 and 53% of those enrolled elsewhere.

I would like to see the trend of the percentage of students accepted that attend vs. going elsewhere. It's alarming that the majority of A&M admits decline the opportunity to enroll. Is that percentage going up with the drop in USN&WR rankings and the increase in enrollment?

Isn't that the definition of "safety school"?

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Engineering students will take a lot of their classes at community colleges so errbody can graduate

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They already do at crazy rates. I knew a girl who took every single engineering math class (Calc 1 through DiffEQ/LinAlg) at a community college. It's frankly ridiculous.

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Isn't that the definition of "safety school"?

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Yes

So where are the 53% going to college and why are they choosing not to attend A&M??

Actually in terms of yield that puts A&M in the top 13% nationally, comparable to the 2013 data which shows us 35th overall nationally. SOURCE

That implies that of the students we admit, far more choose to enroll at A&M than the national average of just 34%. Hardly a safety school I would think.

I prefer not to comment on whether the present enrollment size is a positive or negative - I can see arguments for both - but I do like looking at the stats. These data are for 1st time undergrad admits, fall semesters only.

Bear in mind that when A&M publishes blurbs about how enrollment is the largest ever the past couple years, we have started including other campuses and new departments in that total (e.g. Galveston, A&M Law, and Health Science Center which is in College Station but wasn't technically TAMU until 2012)

I'm curious what caused applications to surge in 2006. Regardless, overall enrollment hasn't seen the same velocity increase.



In this chart I overlaid the average SAT composite scores with the % of those admitted and those enrolled. It's a little difficult to read much correlation here. I can see a weak negative correlation between admittance and SAT scores but not sure what that implies. The trend of those who are admitted deciding not to enroll has been a persistent trend since at least 2004 with few exceptions. Not sure if that's a product of Bob Gates removing the Legacy admittance system or just a broader trend.



What's interesting to me in this chart is the story it tells. Since 2006/2007 the overall enrollment growth has been well below overall admittance growth, then in the 2013 year the enrollment growth skyrockets. I'd call that the Johnny Football effect.




And the hard numbers:




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

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Of the 17 Texas public universities that have over a 10% administrative cost 7 of them are in the A&M System and 8 when they have A&M Galveston listed independently.

A large number of the A&M System schools are wasting state and student resources and this is while building MORE system centers and buying buildings all over the state.

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It seems like Sharp would do well to focus on growing enrollment on the other campuses and making them more efficient rather than the College Station campus.

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it is A&M building stupid system centers all over Texas like in Fort Worth, Midlothain, Central Texas, and looking for a building in downtown dallas for TAMU-Commerce programs and it is A&M looking to build a campus in McAllen even though the UT System just made a massive investment in that area and MERGED two universities to CUT OVERHEAD COST....it is A&M building in Round Rock for the HSC instead of keeping that in areas they already have facilities and it is A&M that can't seem to figure out that a large number of top tier students in Texas have ZERO interest in going to school in College Station no matter how many students A&M is or is not

the UT System does not have UTEP, UTSA, UTD and UTA in the position to participate in the NRUF because they "are in the UT System" they have them able to participate in the NRUF program because UT Austin has capped their enrollment, they have made sure that the UT SYSTEM INVESTED IN OTHER UNIVERSITIES and they have made sure that universities that were suppose to be major research universities like UTD and UTSA are moving to meet that mission and they realized that when UTA stated they would not take a back seat to UTD that UTA meant it and thus UTA gets attention as well

and with the exception of the (hopefully failed) UT-Houston proposal you do not see the UT System building stupid system centers all over Texas and you do not see the UT System giving in because "south Texas wants a law school too" instead they tell south Texas to shut up about a law school and instead concentrate on things that are important like health care and on merging two universities about 15 miles apart to cut overhead

THESE ARE THE TYPES OF THINGS THAT A&M CAN DO ON THEIR OWN instead of doing stupid things like trying to grow the main campus to 70,000 students while most of their other system schools have few if any engineering offerings and most of them are a very inefficient sub 10,000 enrollment

THE A&M SYSTEM IS THE ONE MAKING STUPID DECISIONS FOR THEMSELVES

the A&M System is the one that is doing nothing to grow other campuses or to allow them to have more attractive degree programs

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IIRC there was talk about merging Kingsville and Corpus

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Something interesting posted here

A&M accepted 22,859 students in 2014 and 53% of those enrolled elsewhere.

I would like to see the trend of the percentage of students accepted that attend vs. going elsewhere. It's alarming that the majority of A&M admits decline the opportunity to enroll. Is that percentage going up with the drop in USN&WR rankings and the increase in enrollment?

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UT-Austin had a yield almost exactly the same as A&M's. 47.3% for them, 47.1% for us.

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merging two universities about 15 miles apart to cut overhead

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Brownsville and Edinburg are more like 60 miles apart, the the point still stands.

It would be interesting to know if the yield numbers includes acceptees who choose not to enroll anywhere.

I believe the yield number is simply the number of enrolled students in the freshman class divided by the number of accepted students. Don't think it matters whether a person chooses to skip A&M for Harvard, Yale, The International Nail Salon Institute, or working at Taco Bueno and living with their parents so they can stay close to their high school girlfriend.

I had assumed that, but it would be interesting to know, and would make a significant difference in what they yield implies.

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Isn't that the definition of "safety school"?

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Yes

So where are the 53% going to college and why are they choosing not to attend A&M??

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I am curious as to the Total Cost of Attendance for A&M versus some of the other options for those that were accepted but chose to go elsewhere.

And I am including scholarship dollars / financial aid in that calculation.

Certainly there are multiple factors that go into the decision to accept enrollment at an institution, including cost, proximity to family, scholarships, and institutional reputation or even something as simple as campus aesthetics - but ultimately the test is whether the entering student views the university as a good bet on their desired future. In that regard A&M does quite well.


Texas A&M is the maroon diamond

I don't think the yield statistic alone means much, unless at the top or the bottom.

The question is "which colleges are being chosen over a particular school". would do more to tell the tale. If we were being turned down for Ivys or top tier public schools that's one thing. If it UT or other Texas schools then that's different.

To really know you'd need to analyse the universe of schools each student was accepted to. Look at Dartmouth Colllege ranked right above us in yield. They're acceptance rate is much lower yet their yield about the same. However, the kids turning down Darmouth are by and large going to Harvard/Yale/Princeton/etc.

I don't think our yield is a problem as it is. It's trends that need to be looked at.

Agreed. The yield is nothing terribly noteworthy on its own - its really more a measure of preference. The previous posts were more in response to the claim that 53% of student admitted go elsewhere is disturbing, when in reality it beats the national average.

As I noted above, A&M has experienced about a 1% average annual decline in the enrollment margin since at least 2004 (the extent of available data) down from about 56.9% of those admitted enrolling. The school is arguably more visible today, but there has been so much turnover in the state economy, university leadership and national publicity in that time that I don't have a good sense for what may be driving that long term trend. I couldn't find a correlation between rankings and the enrollment margin, FWIW.

On the note of trends, one last one...and this is the one that drives the entire conversation around the growth of the school, 25 by 25, etc...

The below chart shows the historic and projected number of applications, admittances, and subsequent enrollments to TAMU.

There are two sets of projections: the higher values (dashed lines) use the last 10 years of application data to calculate a compound annual growth rate of about 6.5%. I grew the number of applications for the next 20 years by this compound growth rate and used the 10-year historic admittance and enrollment percentages (69% admitted and 51% of those enrolled).

The second set uses the projected growth rate of the state of Texas to grow the number of applications, which works out to about 1.1% CAGR. (Source: Texas Water Development Board) Again, these figures were reduced by the historic admission and enrollment rates.



Ultimately this is a conversation about what is the mission of public universities in Texas and what the citizens of the state want for their children.

• If we continue along the recent historical patterns the projections will trend towards the higher figures.
• If the mission is to educate the future workforce of Texas and maintain a basic status quo regarding number of institutions and state funding (i.e. admitting additional students in tandem with overall state population growth) then the enrollment figures will trend towards the lower projections.
• If the mission is to have institutions of the highest academic repute irrespective of the state population, then a hard cap should be applied to the enrollments at the flagship universities - in effect only educating the best qualified irrespective of the overall ability of the applicant pool to perform. This would entail negative enrollment growth and mean that proportionally fewer children of former students could get into the same school as their parents.

I can not see any state institution tracking along course #1 (no change in admittance percentages). I haven't reviewed the demographic data to see if there's a generation bubble right now, so I can't say whether this is a trend that will continue or that we should expect to see end in the near term, but if A&M were to track that route then the class size in 2035 would be upward of 40,000 and overall enrollment of around 145,000 undergrads and 37,000 graduates (using the current 75/25 undergrad/post grad ratio).

However, if we simply track with the state growth and maintain historic admission policies we would arrive in 2035 with about 56,000 undergrads and 14,000 grad students at the main campus...i.e. 70,000 students. This does however assume that the application growth come back in-line with the state population growth...otherwise we would have to start reducing the admissions rate to keep enrollment in-line with the 1.1% state growth.

As I've stated, I'm not casting a ballot one way or the other for an enrollment cap or continued growth in-line with the state. It is however clear that the current admittance percentages are unsustainable if application counts continue to grow at the same rate as the last decade.

Bear in mind these decisions need to be applicable for the next half century - at which point the state population will likely be more than double today.

Great data!

FIFY for our conversation:

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Ultimately this is a conversation about what is the mission of this public university in Texas

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Not all universities have the same mission. It's abundantly clear that we need more Tier 1 research universities in Texas.

Team Blinn students are also counted as being accepted into A&M. Don't know why, but I would guess when that change was made, our acceptance rate increased dramatically.

Those that think their Aggie degree is diminished because tu rejects so many students are stupid. A&M's rep as being a great school to attend was not made because it's entrance requirements were equal to Ivy League schools. Lol

You really don't get how this works.

Insert statistics joke here?

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Chip Brown @ChipBrownHD
No one in the know at #TAMU believes renovated Kyle Field was "on time and on budget" as John Sharp says. Open records will bear this out.

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Maybe exposing a budget cover up is the key to getting rid of Sharp?

More students means higher endowment in the future for the university and more visibility.

Sharp has turned our school into a diploma mill. A degree from A&M won't mean much when anybody can get one.

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More students means higher endowment in the future for the university and more visibility.

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Wrong.

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University of Texas System Chancellor Bill McRaven argued in two separate public appearances this week that the state should consider scrapping its top 10 percent automatic admissions rule, saying it hurts the prestige of his flagship university.

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http://www.texastribune.org/2016/01/21/ut-system-chancellor-mcraven-blasts-top-ten-percen/

back to the point I made when I commented that A&M was already watching 53% of the QUALIFIED students decide to go elsewhere

my main points on that were it pretty much craps on the idea that A&M must get larger to give more Texans a chance at a "top tier" education because there is a large chunk of students that are "qualified" for that education that are already making a CHOICE to go elsewhere

and I can pretty much guarantee that 100% of those students that made a CHOICE to go elsewhere did not do so because they had a desire to go to a university that was LARGER than A&M is now because that only leaves them with about 4 choices in the USA

and I would bet a massive number of them if they were ask would say that A&M would have been more appealing if it was SMALLER than it is today

perhaps I am wrong on that, but as others have ask "where are they going and why" is probably something that should be discovered before the decision is made t just grow larger

the other bigger point is if you already have 53% of the QUALIFIED students that were ACCEPTED going elsewhere well what in the hell kind of students are you expecting you will actually admit and get to enroll

when you have 21,000 students ACCEPTED already well hell what kind of a moron thinks "well we are just not getting applications from the right students"

again who in the hell are you selling A&M to because I can just about guarantee that you are not selling it to those 11,500 ACCEPTED students that decided to go elsewhere and I think you would have to be plum dumb to think that there are any students in Texas that are not aware of Texas A&M and that did not apply (much less get accepted) because of "oh wow I never knew about A&M if I had known about them well I would have applied and gone there"

I mean REALLY....where in the hell do you think you are going to get MORE applicants from much less qualified applicants from.....who in the hell is not applying to A&M now that anyone with a brain thinks was somehow missed or not given the chance to apply to A&M......someone living under a damn rock perhaps or with their head in their ass

and more so is anyone out there so stupid that they think "well we already had a massive amount of applications and we watched 11,500 ADMITTED students go elsewhere, but I bet we would get some more qualified students to apply if they just realized that A&M was going to be 70,000 or 80,000 students"

because I mean yea there are all those other 60,000+ student universities that A&M is competing with for students that want to go to a damn giant university.....yea all 4 or 5 of them in the USA

if you are watching 53% of the students that you admit go elsewhere and you are already getting a massive number of total applications and you are watching 11,500 (in actual warm bodies) go elsewhere well to me and in my opinion the only source of new applications and new POSSIBLE enrolled students is to lower admissions and start attracting students with lower metrics that want to freeload on the reputation of A&M and start getting them to go ahead and apply because they feel they will be admitted and allowed to enroll and they will not care about being one of 70,000+ students because they just want a piece of paper that says A&M and thought that would not be possible with the current admissions metrics

look at the chart from above again



look past the % and the talk of the % yield and look at the actual numbers of warm bodies that should stand out as much as anything and that tells you there is an issue NOW and I think only a total fool would think the answer for that issue is grow to 70,000+ students

it is 11,500 QUALIFIED students looking to go ELSEWHERE

look at the other schools Florida 6,300......Georgia 5,700........UT 8,000....LSU 6,500

the other schools are watching something like 4,000 students MAX choose to go elsewhere while for A&M it is 11,500

are there 10,000 students out there right now that are in a coma or living on the bottom of the ocean that are QUALIFIED and want to go to A&M that somehow did not get an application in

I can't figure out what fool thinks there is a pool of qualified applicants out there that A&M has somehow failed to get an application from AND that would actually enroll all the more so knowing the school wants to be 70,000+ students

I think anyone but a total brain dead idiot would be looking at those numbers and thinking that A&M was probably already driving away a hell of a lot of qualified students as it is

it is simply an absolute joke to claim that you need to expand to give more students an "opportunity" for a high quality education when you have 11,500 QUALIFIED AND ADMITTED students already CHOOSING to go elsewhere and when that 11,500 number is massively disproportionate to pretty much any other university on that list and even more so compared to any top university on that list

I think what that 11,500 figure would tell anyone that is not simply stupid that perhaps the answer is Texas needs more top tier universities because A&M and UT as the only two choices seems to be missing the mark on an extremely large number of students

and I think one would have to be pretty unintelligent to believe that expanding A&M to 70,000+ students would somehow make A&M suddenly capture the attention of high quality students and cause them to either go ahead and enroll or decide to actually apply AND enroll

I have a feeling that the opposite will probably happen and that is A&M will suddenly find themselves with a lesser and lesser pool of truly elite applicants and enrolled students and A&M will have to go lower and lower down the acceptance metrics to fill the spots they desire to fill or that they over build for

this is an extremely poorly thought out idea based on an easily disproved and highly flawed argument that Texas is missing out on top tier students that go elsewhere because there is not enough space available for them

because as we can see there were 11,500 of them that applied and were accepted to A&M that have already made a choice to go elsewhere and I would bet that number will INCREASE even if enrollment also increases and freshman metrics will decrease as fast or faster as will retention and graduation rates and other associated metrics

So UT will eventually have the highest ranked public university in every major Texas metro and A&M will have a campus in McAllen. Could the A&M leadership be any worse?

http://www.texastribune.org/2016/01/15/its-eyes-new-campus-ut-system-buys-houston-land/

UTD is almost accidentally a success story from the perspective of UT System oversight. But that article explains neatly why their president was promoted to system vice chancellor. We should replace Sharp with him.

http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2015/5/6-31542_McRaven-Taps-Daniel-as-Deputy-Chancellor_story-sidebar.html

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So UT will eventually have the highest ranked public university in every major Texas metro and A&M will have a campus in McAllen.

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That pretty much sums up the leadership of the two systems.