FAMU improves 6 points on BOG's performance funding metric

FAMU improved in eight of twelve categories on the Board of Governors' performance based funding (PBF) goals from the 2018-19 school year to the 2019-20 school year.  However, the university only achieved two of the ten PBF benchmarks set for it.

FAMU met its goal on reducing the cost to students to earn a degree in a four-year period where year over year it showed a 64 percent improvement dropping the cost from $6,570 to $2,370, and the bachelor’s degrees awarded to transfers with AA degrees from the Florida College System where the university showed a 21 percent one-year improvement.

 

FAMU’s overall performance based funding score improved by 6 pts between 2020 and 2021 from 73 to 79.  Despite the improvement, FAMU’s score was 10^th among the 12 universities in the system. 

 

Double dippers

Three of the universities participating in the performance based funding pool --- FSU, UF, and USF--- already receive additional state funding, this year $6.15 million, in preeminence funding to hire nationally prominent professors, lower its student-to-faculty ratio, and enhance research activities.  

 

These funds, in addition to whatever performance based funding they got, were for them to standout and be better than the rest of the other 12 universities in the system.  Since 2014 UF and FSU has received a total of $61.9 million in preeminence funds, while USF has received $19.8 million since 2017.  

                                                                                                                          

When you throw in UCF, which since  2016 has received an additional $15.2 million in state funding as an emerging preeminent university, Florida has essentially created a tiered system of higher education by another name. 

 

Interestingly enough, of the three preeminent state universities only USF finished among the top three in the system.

PBF metric has never been fair

Since its acceptance into the state university system in 1971, FAMU has remained the only historically Black member institution. It’s committed to college access: Nearly two-thirds of its students have Pell Grants, far more than any other state university, and one-third of students are the first in their family to go to college.

The funding metrics Florida’s politicians have chosen don’t serve the university well, FAMU faculty members argued. Take graduates’ employment and salaries. Across the country, young Black Americans with bachelor’s degrees are slightly less likely to be employed than their white counterparts. At every level of educational attainment, young Black adults have always earned less than their white peers, on average.

These trends are tied to racism in American society, so it’s unfair to punish the university for them, faculty members said. “We can prepare our students well, but we don’t control the economy. We don’t control wages,” said Michael C. LaBossiere, a professor of philosophy at FAMU and a former college runner, in a September 2020 interview  with the Chronicle of Higher Education. He used a track-and-field analogy to compare Florida’s flagship universities, which graduated a majority-white class in 2019, and FAMU, which graduated a 90-percent Black class that same year. “Most UF graduates, they’re running on a flat track,” he said. “FAMU graduates are having to do the steeplechase.”

“We’re No. 1 in what we do, and that’s the education of Black people, primarily,” said Roscoe Hightower Jr., a professor of marketing. U.S. News has consistently ranked FAMU as among the top 10 historically Black colleges and universities in the country.  “You never hear the governor or the Board of Governors proclaiming that,” Hightower said.