(09-06-2019 12:23 PM)bullet Wrote: There's a strong argument for more heavily using community colleges.
But I don't agree that anyone should be a research university. If the school is getting too big, maybe its time for another school in the area (A&M-San Antonio for instance). Texas St. has gotten big as UT has gotten more and more difficult to get into. That doesn't mean you need to replicate what UT does.
Texas, Texas A&M, Houston, UTD, Texas Tech make sense as research universities. Eventually UTA, UTSA and UTEP. As you allow everyone to get into research, you put a crimp in those trying to grow. UNT makes it harder for UTD and UTA. Texas St. makes it harder for UTSA.
The legislature was afraid to pick winners and losers (although they wrote the legislation to try to make sure TT was one of the winners) and in doing so, slowed down the progress of the eventual winners.
I an certainly not saying every university should be a research university, but there should not be a blanket ban on degrees offered based strictly on "not at this university"
Stephen F. Austin and Forestry is an example....they might not need to be offering many more PhDs than that, but that makes sense there.....or CJ at SHSU.....or Marine Biology at aggy-CC or some of the engineering at Lamar
as for Texas State specifically they still have admissions standards above UTSA and about equal to UTA and north Texas State and well above UTEP
with 35 public universities in Texas and a large number of them under 10,000 students and a large number under 7,000 students only an idiot like not-so-sharp at the aggy sytem thinks that Texas needs a university of 65,000+ students
he claims that is needed to "give more a chance at a high quality education", but all he is doing is running that university into the ground and ruining the experience for the students and ruining what made them unique (rather or not that uniqueness is for a particular individual or not)
when you are looking at California with their numerous AAU members and their large research productivity there is PLENTY of room in Texas for more universities to up their research profile and to limit their enrollment to up their stature as a university
and it makes a lot more sense to do that at a university that is already pushing the enrollment level for economies of scale before those economies reverse and the quality of education suffers
I suppose you could go around to each university and try and build up a few niche areas for them to conduct research, but the issue there is when you start raising the admissions for those individual programs if you are going to be attractive to top students you need your core university classes to be attractive as well not just those in the particular departments you built up
plus a few departments at each university being high quality does nothing to build up a larger number of overall top universities
with the UC System being 8 universities and a number of Cal State schools being respected for their undergrad and masters programs there is plenty of room for Texas to work to elevate all of the 8 Emerging research universities and not just start right out picking winners and losers
at some point it might make sense to tell some of those 8 that they just did not do enough and they are not going to continue to get more and more funding for excellence, but as of now Texas is not funding any of the 8 at the needed level and cutting a couple of them from the mix does not really help that...especially if the goal is to just let some of those schools get to 50K+ students while there are so many other universities in Texas (and idiotic system centers) that could use a bump in enrollment to get better economies of scale in terms of admin and general overhead cost
it is laughable that not-so-sharp wants that REVIS campus and is trying to have one in McAllen when 9 of their 11 system universities are 10,000 or fewer students (Corpus counted as one of them with 10,169 students) and the only one besides college station over 10,000 is Commerce with 12,300 students
and 6 of them are under 8,000 students and 3 under 5,000 students.....that is HIGHLY inefficient and the aggy system needs to immediately do a CAPS type program for college station and they need to stop relying on Blinn so much that is a joke
all the more so when not-so-sharp would be happy with 25,000 engineering students in college station and 70,000+ students there overall.....he is just a total idiot and the single most damaging thing for Texas higher ed right now
with UT and aggy and then 8 Emerging Research Universities there is no reason to start limiting the research at any of those 8 and no reason to start having them grow to be undergrad degree factories any more than they already are
and for Texas State in particular considering how much research they produce WITHOUT producing a lot of unneeded PhDs
(09-06-2019 02:54 PM)quo vadis Wrote: Yes, there's no logical connection between the size of a school and having doctoral programs.
Some big schools serve a role as undergraduate factories.
I disagree
perhaps at a private school with a large endowment where they can afford to have a very low faculty to student ratio and build up a department with a large number of high quality faculty that do not teach a large number of students
It was told to me by a well respected materials scientist that was the head of a struggling department (that they have since left) that you need at least 10 faculty members in a department to even start to be able to have a department that can be known for any particular area of expertise and research much less several
that person at the time was the chairman of that materials department and was pissed off because they were not getting the funding for faculty they were promised when they took the job (this particular university notorious under-funds departments in the STEM area and engineering in particular)
that is why he ended up leaving
you need some critical mass of faculty, infrastructure and resources to make a department gain national respect and at a public university with few exceptions you are not going to get that critical mass without a corresponding enrollment
along with that even if the enrollment for that department is small you can still use those faculty to teach other classes (engineering teach some math or physics or stats) and so you can build the numbers in that department by running students from other areas through the classes they teach
and even if you wanted a university with a few niche programs of excellence as I said above to be attractive to top students in those fields you need a core university to at least come close to matching that
in Texas in particular it is not going to be possible to go choose some smaller university and make it a "winner" and start churning through the old faculty and replacing them with research intensive faculty and bumping up the admissions standards dramatically to match that
because of the size of the state you would leave some area of the state with a lack of higher education opportunity, other areas pissed off their area was not picked for the "winner" and a lot of faculty at larger universities in decent to good departments that could be a lot better if you invested in them and limited enrollment over time and increased admissions
you need the economies of scale to make it work and at a public university that means some larger enrollments for the university overall
only New York State has tried the smaller state school with the narrow focus and that works "ok' for them, but they have about as many if not more public schools as Texas and a lot smaller geographic area and those niche universities are really not well known overall and only known in their limited area
Texas is not set up to make that happen Texas is set up to lave larger schools become more selective and research intensive and let the smaller schools that NEED enrollment to be efficient pick up the slack
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A Proposal For The PUF
