University President Stephen T. Hulbert expressed his concern regarding the fate of the University at the hands of the Louisiana Postsecondary Education Review Commission during a press conference held on campus last week. The commission, nicknamed the “Tucker Commission” after House Speaker Jim Tucker, is a group of 13 national higher education experts and Louisiana-based officials organized to eliminate redundancies and find efficiencies in the state’s higher education facilities.
Governor Jindal said more students must attend community and technical colleges to reduce the dropout rate from universities, as well as the number of students accumulating large amounts of debt from loans. By doing this, Jindal said he believes more graduates would be able to find jobs in Louisiana rather than having to find work in other states.
“We are challenging you to figure out what we should be doing for higher education in this state,” Tucker told the commission. “We need you to take a 2-by-4, if that’s necessary, and smack us across the head.”
Hulbert said he hopes the Tucker Commission properly analyzes Nicholls as a regional university and not as a competitor to Louisiana State University, which Jindal suggested commission members make into a nationally competitive flagship university.
Hulbert said he also hopes the Tucker Commission takes the time to look beneath the surface of Nicholls’ graduation rates when making its decisions. Nicholls currently has a 28 percent graduation rate, the fourth lowest of the 13 four-year universities in the state, but Hulbert said the numbers will not reflect the current state of the University until 2012, six years after admission standards have been raised.
Graduation rates are determined by how many first-time, full-time freshmen graduate within a six-year period. The University’s current rate is based off the Fall 2002 freshmen class. Based on the freshmen class of 2001, Louisiana’s average college graduation rate is 38.3 percent.
Hulbert said LSU’s higher graduation rate of 65.1 percent should not be compared to Nicholls’, but rather to other universities of LSU’s size, in which case the university is actually 7.8 percent below the average.
Adding to the misrepresentation of the University’s graduation rate, Hulbert said Nicholls lost about 600 students and took on the responsibility of about 600 more after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged the area in 2005. Many of the students who left the University and went on to return and graduate did so later than originally expected, and the majority of students who transferred to Nicholls after the storm never intended on graduating from the University.
Renee Hicks, director of assessment and institutional research, said she anticipates the University’s graduation rate to jump 8 to 10 percent higher by the time the freshmen class of 2005 is analyzed because of higher admission standards. “For the fall ’06 class, we anticipate even higher increases because there was no hurricane that school year,” Hicks said.
Hulbert said he believes Nicholls is not being treated fairly by the state government despite the increase in admission standards. Over the past two years, Nicholls has suffered a 14.5 percent reduction in its overall budget, totaling approximately $4.4 million in cuts.
“There’s a habit in Baton Rouge to treat everyone the same, but we aren’t the same,” Hulbert said. Other universities have deferred maintenance budgets to dip into during statewide budget cuts like the one that hit schools earlier this year, but Nicholls has no such budget. “No one in Baton Rouge has helped us out,” Hulbert said.
The Tucker Commission’s final report is due Feb. 12 to the Board of Regents.
