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UHV follows competition, issues with Chronicle of Higher Ed
By TimHudson in Hudson On Higher Learning
September 30, 2009

Like any “trade” or profession, higher education has its “go-to” publication for all that’s fit to print. In our case, it is the Chronicle of Higher Education. If you are interested in such recent topics as the characteristics of successful new faculty members, university grading policies and the graduation rates of students, this is the magazine for you. In the higher education world, the Chronicle, as we call it, is all things rolled into one: the grapevine, the crop report, the obits, the job ads and even the comics. Yes, they often take a stab at “academic” humor. Sometimes it’s not pretty, and it’s rarely very funny: “Descartes is on a plane. The flight attendant says, ‘Sir, would you like coffee?’ He says, ‘I don’t think so’ and disappears.” Well, I warned you.

And it is a hugely successful enterprise with a total readership of 350,000 and more than 70 full-time writers and editors, as well as 17 foreign correspondents. The magazine is published weekly in tabloid format, and now, of course, it is available online to subscribers.

The point of this is that here at UHV, we “keep up” very well with what is happening in higher education elsewhere, and we constantly are monitoring our protocols and progress against what we read in the Chronicle.

Once a year, the Chronicle publishes an “almanac” chock-full of data and information about states, students, faculty, money, etc. – everything that impacts our business from the germane to the arcane. It is 70 pages of tables with titles like: “Proportion of 18- to 24-Year-Olds Enrolled in College, 1997-2007”; “Range of Tuition at 4-Year Institutions, 2008-09”; “Average Faculty Salaries by Field and Rank at 4-Year Colleges and Universities, 2008-09”; “Attitudes and Characteristics of Freshmen at 4-Year Colleges, fall 2008”; and my own personal wish-we-were-on-it one, “Largest Endowment per Student, 2008.” (I’ll bet you a dollar you can’t guess who tops this list – and no, it is not Harvard – fourth – or Yale – third.) By the way, you’ll notice that all of these tables show data for four-year colleges. When UHV adds freshmen and sophomores in the fall of 2010, it will be a lot easier for us to see how we stack up to our peers since, while I DID select these particular tables, there are NONE in this report for upper-division institutions only. We’ve shed that “unique” status now, and it’s for the better.

So, analogous to our own internal culture where, often unlike the corporate world, we all know a lot about each other, budgets, salaries, etc. – we also know a lot about our “peers” and competitors around Texas and the U.S.

And what about UHV? All things considered, UHV is faring well, and we have made great progress in moving “up” various tables where one wants to move up (enrollment, for instance) and “down” those where we want to move down (average “tuition,” for instance).

Let me give you one important example. Our enterprise is dependent on the quality of our faculty. You can’t have a high-quality academic institution without high-quality professors, and you are always competing for this talent with the other thousand-plus schools in the U.S. According to the Chronicle Almanac, the average salary by rank in the U.S. last year for “public master’s institutions” like UHV was: professor, $84,000; associate professor, $67,000; and assistant professor $57,000. At UHV, the same ranks averaged $88,000, $75,000 and $65,000 –ALL above national norms. Not too shabby considering we also are among the smaller (and less expensive) of our peers. We’ve closed this “gap” and now compete successfully for the very best talent – and you can read all about it in the Chronicle.

P.S. Send the dollar to UHV unless you guessed Rockefeller University for the largest endowment – a whopping $9.7 million per student compared to Yale’s measly $2 million!

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