FAYETTEVILLE — University of Arkansas officials learned recently that the school’s six-year graduation rate topped 60 percent for the first time, the provost said Wednesday after asking faculty senators for input on how to keep improving that rate and advance toward four other top goals.

“We’re very excited about it,” UA Provost Sharon Gaber said of the news, adding that it’s no time for the university to rest on its laurels.

“We have so much more work to do,” Gaber said.

When G. David Gearhart became UA’s chancellor in July 2008, he set out 15 conceptual goals in a “transparency and accountability”document he posted on the university’s website.

“We can’t work on all those at once,” Gaber said Tuesday as she was preparing her regular report for the UA faculty senate. The list she took with her Wednesday covered five goals.

Some have specific targets, but Gaber said sheexpects that others will be fleshed out with specifics after UA leaders get feedback from the faculty.

Topping the list is driving the six-year graduation rate to 66 percent by 2015, and 70 percent by the time of UA’s sesquicentennial in 2021.

A second goal calls for increasing research spending and awards - particularly federal ones.

Goal three covers increasing the number of doctorates produced, as well as increasing the number of graduate programs ranked in the top 20 by U.S. Newsand World Report’s annual rankings.

The fourth goal Gaber presented is increasing the number of classes with 19 or fewer students. The cost for adding additional sections would need to be considered, along with faculty ideas on how to make it happen, she said after he presentation to faculty.

“What is it that my department and your department should be doing?” she asked the senators.

The fifth goal is increasing UA’s reputation among opinion leaders and others.

UA’s leaders hope that achieving the five goals would help UA break into the top-50 ranking of public research universities, based on U.S. News’ rankings, Gaber said.

“I’ve had some people ask me: Is this the time to start thinking about being a top-50 university?” she told the faculty senate Wednesday. “And I say: I guess I think it is.”

Good news regarding enrollment and graduation rates are reasons to think positively despite hurdles, she said.

“We all know we are struggling to find space for students; we are struggling to keep up with the demand of our jobs,” she said.

In 2012, the Fayetteville campus saw a 60.4 percent completion rate for firsttime, full-time degree-seeking freshmen who began classes there in fall 2006.

That compared with 52.9 percent eight years ago forthe fall 1998 freshman class after six years, according to a database that UA’s institutional-research office posts on its website.

The six-year graduation rate is UA’s primary measure of academic success and has been a focal point of UA leaders for more than a decade as a means to help Arkansas attract more industries.

The rate is the main gauge the federal government uses to hold an individual, public university accountable for efficiently using taxpayer and tuition dollars to produce graduates in a reasonable amount of time from start to finish on its campus alone.

In recent years, Arkansas legislators have been talking more about state institutions’ retention and graduation rates and diploma production and less about the college-going rate, which measures enrollment alone.

And in January 2011, Gov. Mike Beebe called for the state’s higher-education leaders to double the number of Arkansans holding bachelor’s degrees by 2025.

Some faculty members have already gotten a jumpstart on thinking about the goals, Gaber said.

For example, she was copied on an e-mail Monday from Kevin Hall, chairman of UA’s civil-engineering department, she said. It was a “musings on a Monday” style e-mail that Hall hadsent to other faculty members in his department saying the graduation rate was a good place to start.

“He started looking at what they could do,” Gaber said.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 11/15/2012