A University of Arkansas at Little Rock faculty and staff committee has made recommendations on how to better run the university amid enrollment declines and tightening budgets, after a review of 241 programs.
The report by the Institutional Effectiveness Committee, composed of 24 faculty and staff members, focuses on efficiency and aligning university operations with the school's overall strategic plan.
A big part of that strategic plan is enrollment, which Chancellor Andrew Rogerson wants to raise 42.5 percent by 2022, from 10,525 this school year to 15,000. The committee recommended developing a strategic enrollment plan as its top priority.
"The good news is, we've got all these reports, which are written by different pieces of the enrollment pie," Rogerson said.
The chancellor will take the report to his Cabinet in the coming weeks. Leaders will be able to see what's working and what isn't, and devise an enrollment plan from there, he said.
"We will turn the enrollment corner here in a year," he said. "We're just getting everything in order."
The report is the first of the committee's four phases. The committee is designed to create a "clearinghouse" for university planning. Later this year, the committee will form policies and procedures for budgeting in accordance with its plans and recommendations. Then, this year and in 2020, the committee will implement those policies and procedures for fiscal 2021. The final phase will start in the spring of 2020, integrating the university's research and reviews into its planning on a regular basis.
The committee, and the idea for the Strategic Resource Allocation Study released this month, stemmed from a July seminar on strategic budgeting, Rogerson said. About four dozen people heard from a consultant, Larry Goldstein of Campus Strategies, and suggested creating a group to examine the university's operations.
The school has 241 programs that have their own budgets. That includes curricular programs and noncurricular programs, and each were reviewed by each program's staff. Their reports, some of which were dozens of pages long, were then turned over to the committee, which scored them from zero to 3 with 3 being the best score.
The categories for which they were scored were: value (program quality), vision (potential for growth) and efficiency. Cost also was evaluated, though not scored because of data limitations, in terms of how increases or decreases in resources would affect the program and if any resource requests had been made.
Rogerson said the scores will not be the sole basis of any decision-making.
"Something might not score well but is of great value to the university, and it's scoring poorly because we've under-resourced it," he said.
The committee report will be used to determine priorities and whether resources should be shifted, Rogerson said.
"I think that was received well," said Amanda Nolen, a committee member, faculty senate president and professor of education.
Nolen attended a forum that Rogerson hosted on the report in the university theater on Feb. 6. She said the audience was interested in how the scores would be interpreted but otherwise did not raise any major concerns.
The committee found that the need to increase enrollment was "most critical" but lacked a coordinated effort across the university.
"Insofar as UA Little Rock's revenue is largely tuition-driven, all programs are hurting from lower-than-anticipated enrollment and voiced support in addressing the campus enrollment issues," the report reads. "In response to a lack of strong centralized recruitment and retention efforts, many academic and nonacademic units have sought to address these issues on their own, often resulting in redundant, uncoordinated efforts."
A strategic enrollment plan would include more targeted marketing -- of different programs and to different populations -- and should "reaffirm" the university's education of "underrepresented, non-traditional, first-generation and lower income students of Central Arkansas."
For in-state students, the university is the most expensive of the public four-year colleges in Arkansas, when considering only tuition and fees.
Rogerson said he wants to distinguish the university from other nearby colleges and emphasize the cost savings from living at home while attending school.
The school is the only doctoral university with a physical location in central Arkansas, per the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Enrollment in the fall of 2018 was 10,525, down from 13,176 in 2010, according to Arkansas Department of Higher Education comprehensive reports.
Last fall, the university cut maintenance budgets and temporarily placed a cap on travel while facing a $9 million budget deficit for the 2018-19 school year, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette previously reported. The school has had a hiring freeze for positions that are "non-mission critical."
Universities are largely funded through tuition and fees but receive money from the state, as well. The state's new outcomes-based finding formula, versus the enrollment-based funding formula, has schools "jockeying" for the money, Nolen said.
In addition to enrollment concerns, three "critical" programs, some dealing with recruitment, had "low effectiveness," according to the committee report. School leaders should examine "low stakeholder satisfaction and high turnover of trained staff" in human resources, the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships, and the Office of Admissions and Recruitment, the report said. Human resources received a score of zero in each of the three categories.
The Office of Admissions and Recruitment scored a 2 in value but only a 1 in vision and efficiency, meaning the information provided was not meaningful, goals were unrealistic or efforts were minimal.
The Office of Financial Aid scored 2.5 in value but only 1.5 in vision and efficiency.
Recommendations largely consisted of coordinating various efforts across the university and aligning resource allocations with strategic planning. Current budgeting favors unproductive and nonessential programs and is not aligned with the university's mission, the committee determined.
Additionally, the committee recommended a faculty workload policy, calling current workloads "unreasonable and inequitable."
Faculty recruitment and retention are also problems, according to the committee. Too much interim leadership leads to high turnover and hurts the university's identity, the report reads.
The committee also said that several curricular and noncurricular programs served a single person. The report did not specify the programs, and Nolen declined to say what they were, cautioning against saying any program received too much money.
"You'd be hard-pressed to find a program that's over-resourced," she said.
Information for this article was contributed by Rachel Herzog of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
State Desk on 02/17/2019