Dive Brief:
- Wisconsin’s public universities are set to use a new measure to evaluate and potentially eliminate undergraduate programs at a faster rate as the university system navigates enrollment and financial pressures.
- A committee of administrators and faculty from the Universities of Wisconsin developed the metric, which flags programs with an average of 15 or fewer juniors and seniors enrolled annually in a three-year span. The system’s policies are currently being revised to include the recommendation, Regent Joan Prince said at a board meeting last week.
- The change could lead to some 65 programs — about 10% of the system’s undergraduate offerings — being reviewed for potential elimination, according to a presentation.
Dive Insight:
The new method for evaluating programs within the Universities of Wisconsin's 13 institutions could substantially increase how many programs go on the chopping block each year.
The current rubric, which flags programs that confer fewer than 25 degrees over five years, has identified from 41 to 54 programs for review in recent years, according to a task force on program elimination that presented the committee’s findings.
“While the current metric has been useful in determining an academic program’s performance based on the conference of degrees, it represents a lagging indicator,” the task force said. “In addition, by focusing on graduated students rather than enrolled, the current metric does not fully represent the instructional workload associated with providing curriculum for a program.”
While the group honed in on a numerical measure of a program’s health, members also highlighted that metrics don’t capture its whole value.
Along with quantitative rubrics, “the value of a program is also reflected in its qualitative contributions,” the task force said. “Both measures should be included in a thorough and fair monitoring process that looks at the totality of contribution of an academic program.”
The task force and its work grew out of a review by Deloitte consultants last year of the Universities of Wisconsin, which found several of the system’s campuses were suffering from enrollment declines and structural deficits. However, the system overall logged its third straight year of enrollment growth this fall, with increases at nine of its 13 institutions.
Along with the new metric, the task force recommended that the system increase reporting about enrollment trends to the regents, quickly investigate how campuses might share their courses and programs, and to standardize term start dates across the system. The regents said new task forces will be formed to address the last two recommendations.
Several states and public college systems are using enrollment or graduation trends to determine which programs to keep and which to cut.
Regents for Oklahoma’s public universities and colleges recently voted to eliminate 41 programs and suspend another 21 using metrics based on degrees conferred and enrollment.
In its latest review, State University System of Florida institutions flagged 18 academic programs for elimination last month after identifying more than 200 deemed underperforming. The system began reviewing programs roughly fifteen years ago using minimum thresholds for degrees conferred.
This year, both Indiana and Ohio passed laws that mandate that programs be eliminated at public colleges if they fall short of graduation quotas. Those laws have so far led to dozens of planned program cuts in both states.
