Six-year graduation rates are currently one part of the
performance funding metrics of the Florida Board of Governors (BOG). That’s a
problem. But it isn’t “killing” FAMU.
SUS schools that don’t meet the minimum performance
standards can lose a capped amount of “institutional investment” money that comes out of their annual appropriation from the legislature. FAMU hasn’t lost any money due to that because it has met
the minimum standards each year.
Back in August, former President Elmira Mangum wrote an
op-ed for HBCU Digest that pointed to changes to the federal financial aid
program and tighter admissions standards by the BOG and FAMU Board of Trustees (BOT)
as two of the reasons for the enrollment drop during her administration.
“In 2012, the FAMU Board of Trustees changed the
University’s policy to limit Access and Opportunity Students (profile admits)
in an effort to ensure the University admitted more college-ready students,”
Mangum wrote. “At the height of FAMU’s enrollment, almost 80
percent of FAMU’s admitted students who subsequently enrolled were Access and
Opportunity Students (AOS). However, many of these students were not
progressing academically, churned, and most did not graduate.”
Mangum didn’t mention that back when most of the admitted
FAMU students were profile admits, all the freshman classes still had 3.0+ average GPAs from high school.
That increase in “profile admits” also didn’t cause any
major change in the six-year graduation rate at FAMU, which has been around 40 percent for some time now.
The reduction in profile admits actually began at FAMU back
in 2010 (four years before Mangum became president). FAMU’s profile admit
numbers for freshmen went from 78 percent in Fall 2009 to 67 percent in Fall
2010. But overall enrollment still increased from 12,261 in Fall 2009 to 13,277
in Fall 2010. Overall enrollment went down slightly in Fall 2011 but started nosediving
in Fall 2012 after a federal financial aid program overhaul went into
place.
BOT didn’t approve $9M+ in tuition and fee loses as an
enrollment strategy
The university’s enrollment in Fall 2015 dropped to 9,920
(down from 10,233 in Fall 2014) under Mangum. That loss of 313 students, with the
rest of the student losses from that year, cost FAMU $9M+ in tuition and fees.
Mangum left FAMU with a loss of 308 students for Fall 2016.
The total amount of tuition and fee money FAMU will lose isn’t clear. But it
could still end up being in the millions.
“Every 100 students means a million dollars out of our
budget,” BOT Chair Kelvin Lawson said in an interview with the Capitol News
Service.
The BOT hasn’t ever approved a $9M+ decline in enrollment as
a strategy to reduce profile admits.
Mangum’s enrollment decline didn’t help FAMU improve on
BOG performance metrics
Mangum defended the enrollment decline as being necessary in
order to increase the quality of the students FAMU has as it tries to do better on the BOG performance metrics.
“Quantity does have to be sacrificed in order to get
quality,” she told the BOT.
FAMU did improve on the BOG performance metrics in 2014-2015.
But most of the “marks of excellence” FAMU received were based on data or work
from the 2013-2014 year. Mangum had little to do with those marks because she
was only in office during the last four months of that fiscal year.
The only “excellence” area that was entirely from Mangum’s
first full year in 2014-2015 came from “Bachelor’s degrees awarded within
programs of strategic emphasis.” That went down by 1.5 percent.
Mangum lacked Harold Martin’s enrollment management skills
The enrollment trends at North Carolina A&T University
(NCA&T), which replaced FAMU as the largest single campus historically
black college or university in 2014-2015, show that Mangum's claim that quantity must be rolled back “in order to get quality” isn’t
true.
NCA&T Chancellor Harold Martin hasn’t placed quality aside as he has expanded enrollment. He reversed the school’s decline in
students in Fall 2014 after two straight years of falling enrollment caused by
the federal financial aid program overhaul. The freshman, first-time student
classes that Martin enrolled in Fall 2014 and Fall 2015 both had an average
high school GPA of 3.28.
Martin has increased NCA&T’s overall enrollment again in
Fall 2016 and brought in a freshman class with an average high school GPA of 3.48
An effort to recruit a bigger number of college-ready
students doesn’t mean that enrollment has to decline. A university can recruit
college-ready students and grow its enrollment at the same time.
Performance-based funding hasn’t cost FAMU any money yet.
FAMU lost millions in tuition and fees under Mangum because she didn’t have the
strong enrollment management skills of HBCU leaders like Martin.