State to debate public university funding based on graduate rates

Indiana will soon join more than two dozen states re-evaluating  public university funding.

State legislators will debate new public university funding practices in a special session June 11. Some Indiana lawmakers have suggested funding should be based more on graduation rates  than enrollment numbers.

The majority of Indiana public university funding comes from student enrollment numbers but also includes degree graduation rate, which is determined by the number of first-year full-time students’ rate of graduating in four years.

The state also looks at transfer credits from two-year to four-year universities and the amount of research done at public university institutions.

The proposed legislation, supported by Gov. Mitch Daniels and Indiana Commission for Higher Education, will base the majority of funding on graduation rates and a provision for additional money granted to public universities displaying higher graduation rates for low-income students.

Roger Thompson, vice provost of enrollment management, said IU’s enrolled and graduating student rates are strong and does not foresee a negative impact if the legislation is passed next week.

“Our goal is to recruit, retain and graduate students,” Thompson said. “IU does really well in all of these areas.”

Bernard Hannon, associate commissioner for finance at the Commission for Higher Education, said a problem with the current legislation being heavily based on enrollment is there’s no way to measure the success of students in the classroom.
“One in five students drop or fail a course before its completion, and basing funding on graduate rates more accurately targets the success of the students at these universities,” Hannon said.

IU spokesman Larry MacIntyre said he’s seen a number of similar proposals throughout the years and sees a challenge in ways for the proposed legislation to be appropriately implemented.

“It would be difficult to decifer graduate rates with the university’s different schools,” MacIntyre said. “It would be challenging to decipher between four-year and six-year programs, graduation rates between different schools and graduate students into calculating the graduate rate.”

Twenty-six states are currently writing or proposing similar legislation based on graduate rates. The change was encouraged by President Obama, who is looking for American universities to be the world leaders of education after several years of poor graduation rates.

Obama has proposed $2.5 billion be supplied during the next five years to boost completion rates for low-income families.

Indiana is specifically looking to target funding for the 2010 fiscal year on graduation rates for science, technology, engineering and math degrees.