TIER emphasizes reduced competition
By Cindy Garcia
A company hired by the regents to give Iowa’s universities another look asked them to stop the competition for students.
Pappas Consulting Group provided an update of the state Board of Regents’ ongoing TIER efficiency study at the regents’ meeting on Wednesday in Iowa City.
Pappas presented a report of its academic review over enrollment management and e-learning.
According to the regents website, TIER is an independent review of the academic and administrative expenses across the three regent universities in order to transform them to become sustainable.
“Times are changing, and I need not tell you that, because this TIER program has really been designed to address that,” said Alceste Pappas, the president and CEO of Pappas.
Pappas said key changes to worry about are the leveling off, or possible decline, of the future traditional college-age population in Iowa, declines in state and federal financial support for higher education, and competition from online and private institutions.
“The competition out there is growing more and more fierce,” she said.
One of the recommendations the group made to the regents was that the three regent universities stop competing against each other to recruit in-state students. Competition ramped up after the regents controversially proposed tying state dollars to the proportion of resident students last year.
“Frankly, just doing the math, there is no way that every one of these three public universities can just have a preponderance of Iowa residents,” Pappas said. “The math isn’t there in terms of the demography.”
Pappas said the universities should develop detailed enrollment-management programs because they all draw different types of students.
“We’re trying to get away from comparing each of the three to each other, but rather each of them to their own peer group,” she said. “It’s a different way of thinking, a different way of looking at data, but we would really encourage you to begin to do that so the competition between the three institutions for the same students is diminished.”
However, Regent President Bruce Rastetter said there was no way for the universities to know when a student has been accepted to another university. He also said many students apply to different universities because they like to have several options.
“I’m kind of a big proponent of student-parent choice within the public system. Why would we would want to stop that competition?” he said.
James McCarthy, a senior consulting associate for the Pappas consulting group, said the biggest reason to stop the competition is because of cost.
He also presented several recommendations for e-learning at the regent universities. Among those recommendations was a unified and visible presence online.
“You don’t see [Arizona State University] or the University of Southern New Hampshire or Phoenix type marketing for Iowa’s universities online and related to that, not a unified web presence online across the three regents universities,” he said.
Another recommendation was to scale up e-learning aspirations, with increased annual goals in e-learning enrollment and revenues.
McCarthy also said growth could be based on online summer school courses, online versions of general education courses, along with a collective course on “how to learn online.”
“We don’t actually teach students how to learn online. We teach them how to write, we teach them how to critically think, we teach them how to do math. I think we need [to teach] how to learn online as well,” he said, adding that the course could be developed with the cooperation of all three universities.
