ANYWAY YOU SLICE THE PIE, UTB-TSC STUDENTS SHORTCHANGED

By Juan Montoya

Even as we are numbed by TIME Magazine and other organizations (the local Zonta Club, for example), showering plaudits on UTB-TSC President Juliet V. Garcia for being everything from Woman of the Year to one of the Top 10 College Presidents in the country, somber numbers in black and white reminds us that all that glitters is not gold.

And as we learn that Garcia was one of two finalists in the race for the presidency at Trinity University in San Antonio, the Education Trust, a national nonprofit that works for the high achievement of all students at all levels from pre-K to college, informs us that UTB-TSC has posted a sorry record of graduating local students.

And despite posting some of the highest tuition and user fees for its students in a poverty-stricken area (and in line for more), there's no hiding the fact that academically it lags behind most every comparable college in the country.

In its latest comparison of UTB-TSC with other similar four-year institutions applying an algorithm or "recipe" that uses student and institution characteristics to determine similarity, Juliet's mansion on the hill has been found sadly wanting.

Using data for the six years prior to 2007, the Education Trust has ranked UTB-TSC 12th in comparison to 15 other colleges of similar characteristics. To add insult to injury, some of these colleges are predominantly black colleges in the Deep South and Appalachia and from the inner cities.

Ready for this?

UTB-TSC has tallied a graduation rate of 16.2 percent in the six years prior to 2007.

Above it are academically superior institutions like noted scholastic heavyweights such as the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (18.6%), Cameron University in Oklahoma (24.5%), Davenport University in Michigan (24.9%), Louisiana State University at Shreveport (26%), Utah Valley State College (26.1%), Missouri Western State University (29.7%), Cleveland State University (31.2%), Missouri Southern State University (32.5%), University of Akron, Ohio, Main Campus (33.9%), and Washburn University in Kansas (47.1%).

As our drill instructors used to tell us when we stood in line for inspections: "If your shoes aren't as shiny as you want them, look for someone with shoes that are less shiny and stand next to them."

So thank God for the other institutions similar to UTB-TSC whose graduation rates are worse than ours.

Those are The University of Houston-Downtown (15.5%), CUNY New York City College of Technology (12.5%), CUNY Medgar Evans College (10.3%), and Baker College of Muskegon (Not Available).

Before UTB-TSC flacks start talking about "apples to oranges," these graduation rate date were selected by the Education Trust based on information from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), through a centralized higher education data collection process called the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS).

IPEDS consists of a series of surveys through which institutions provide data about themselves on a variety of topics. One of those surveys is the Graduation Rate Survey (GRS).

The GRS graduation rates are based on the percentage of first-time, full-time, bachelor’s or equivalent degree-seeking freshmen who earn a bachelor’s or equivalent degree from the institution where they originally enrolled.

Undergraduates who begin as part-time or non bachelor’s degree-seeking students, or who transfer into the institution from elsewhere in higher education, are not included in the GRS cohort. Their success or failure to earn a degree does not influence the GRS graduation rates in any way.

They go even further. These institutions are also allowed to exclude from their calculations any students who fail to earn a degree for the following reasons:
Left school to serve in the armed forces.
Left school to serve with a foreign aid service of the federal government.
Left school to serve on an official church mission.
Died or became permanently disabled.

One telling fact in the data categories included is the "student-related expenditures" where we learn that of the 15 other colleges compared with UTB-TSC, only four spent less on students than Juliet's hybrid UTB-TSC.

In other words, the majority of these schools, including two with lower graduation rates, spent more on students than did UTB-TSC.

So as the spin masters at the UTB-TSC try to convince us that spending $640,000 for a pretty mural to enhance the academic and learning environment at the campus, we should question why these funds aren't funneled toward the education of students instead.



(Note: If you put lipstick on a pig, does it remain a pig? More on cosmetic expenditures in our next segment.)