WHAT HATH JULIET GARCIA'S "PARTNERSHIP" WROUGHT?

By Juan Montoya

If we are to believe all the news about the accolades heaped upon the UTB-TSC hybrid's president Juliet Garcia and her performance as lifetime president of that manufactured institution, then perhaps we will believe the urban myth that she has been spotted walking on water from her office to the old Resaca Club.
But even though myths die hard, we can believe real numbers that dispel the mist and bring the subject clearer into focus.
Earlier this year (August), the venerable US News and World Report did a regional comparison of the nation's best colleges. Included among the heavyweights are institutions like Trinity University, St. Edward's, and all the rest of the public and private universities in the country.
US News & WR stated in their article that they had included those institutions that provide a full range of undergraduate majors and master’s programs; the difference is that they offer few, if any, doctoral programs.
"The 572 universities in this category are not ranked nationally but rather against their peer group in one of four geographic regions—North, South, Midwest, and West—because, in general, they tend to draw students most heavily from surrounding states," the report states.
Our own UTB-TSC did not make the first or second tier of the rankings in their region (WEST), although others like Texas A&M Corpus Christi did (59th of both private and public schools in the region, 20th among public universities), as did Pan-American University-Edinburg (between 88th and 115th in the region).
Where did Garcia's Harvard-on-the-Rio-Grande fall?
It fell, we fear, in the category of "Unranked."
[click here, see ranking at bottom of page].
In other words, its performance did not merit a mention of either the first tier or second tiers in the region, much less the country.
So we have a college-university that fails to keep less than half of its freshman, graduates less than 17 percent in six years, withdraws in-district tuition so that the poorest students in the state pay the most of any other college in the state, and subsidizes the oil- and gas-rich University of Texas System.
Start the canonization process. We're ready to beatify Juliet with these kind of numbers.


University of Texas–Brownsville:
Peer assessment score (5.0=highest): 2.5
Average freshman retention rate: 64% (decreased to less than half)
Average graduation rate: 17%
% of classes under 20 (‘09): 62%
% of classes of 50 or more (‘09): 4%
Student/faculty ratio (‘09): 20/1
% of faculty who are full time (‘09): 76%
SAT/ACT 25th-75th percentile (‘09): N/A
Freshmen in top 25% of HS class (‘09): 27%
Acceptance rate (‘09): 100%
Average alumni giving rate: 0.2%

(Next: What UTB-TSC staff and faculty actually think of their college-university leadership.)