Testimony Before the Joint Interim Committee on Higher Education Excellence Funding
Texas State Capitol Building, Austin.
February 21, 2002
If I may, I would like to take just six minutes to make one major point with a few facts and stories.
Over the past five years, the University of Texas at Austin has produced 37,608 Bachelor's degrees, 13,098 Master's degrees, 3,802 Ph.D.s, 2,443 J.D.s, and 268 Pharm.D.s--or more than 57,200 degrees overall. This is a large contribution toward the development of the talent that our State needs. Ample evidence indicates that the degrees are highly valued by the holders and by employers. In terms of scale, value, and cost, there are few institutions in America with a comparable record of performance.
We have elevated our freshman retention rate to 92.0% and our six-year graduation rate above 70%.
We are the No. 1 producer of doctoral degrees awarded to Hispanics in America; the No. 2 producer of minority doctoral degrees; and No. 4 in the nation in Bachelor's degrees conferred on Hispanics.
During the past five years at UT:
- 2,919 migrant students from around the nation have completed their high school requirements through the UT Migrant Student Program.
- More than 300,000 students have participated in UT's distance education programs, including 50,000 police officers trained from communities all across Texas each year.
- Some 3,800 Texas managers have been trained at the UT McCombs Business School--none of whom were full-time students--including 500 managers from Texas Instruments and Motorola alone. Another 3,500 managers have been trained from other states and countries during that period.
UT students have been awarded two Rhodes, three Marshall, and four Truman Scholarships during the past five years.
The faculty who made all of that possible also attracted, over the past five years, $1.4 billion in research support--$1.1 billion from non-state sources, nearly all of that from outside Texas.
Scores of companies have been spun off from the University, including Tracor, Radian, National Instruments, and Evolutionary Technologies. In the past decade, the Austin Technology Incubator (at IC2) graduated 64 companies that generated 2,500 new jobs and more than $1 billion in revenue.
Four years ago, we were able to recruit Dr. Sharon Vaughn, a leading researcher in the field of reading, into the Texas Center for Reading and Language Arts. Over the past three summers, about 65,000 Texas teachers have had their reading teaching skills upgraded in Summer Reading Academies sponsored by her Center--almost 20,000 kindergarten teachers in 1999, more than 20,000 first-grade teachers in 2000, and more than 20,000 second-grade teachers last summer.
Three years ago, we recruited Dr. Adron Harris as the leader of the newly established Waggoner Center for Alcoholism and Addiction Research. Professor Harris attracted leading investigators and graduate students and today there are 24 faculty members from around the campus affiliated with the Center. Late last year the National Institutes of Health awarded the Center an $8 million research grant.
In the field of nanoscience, which has the power to transform the very identity of classic domains like chemistry and physics, third-year assistant professor Angela Belcher was first in a line of six young leaders shown on the cover of an issue of Forbes.
This is all evidence that we may have begun to reach the bar set by our forebears, who defined in the Texas Constitution a particular responsibility for the State to establish and maintain a university of the first class. But there are other observations relevant to any such declaration:
U.S. News & World Report ranked UT in the second tier of universities (Nos. 50-100) in 1998 and 1999. In 2000, we were tied at No. 44. In 2001 and 2002, we were tied for 49th, on the second occasion with Texas A&M. UT Austin and our partner, Texas A&M, are the only Texas public representatives in the top 50, and we are barely in. We could be out next year.
In most years of the past decade, we have lost ground in faculty compensation vs. national leaders in the public and private sectors.
For 11 years, we have not been successful in any competitions for new Science and Technology Centers sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
It has been six years since the last time one of our faculty members was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Neither we nor any other institution in Texas has a place at the agenda-setting table in a host of fields that will transform the future, such as high-performance grid computing or global climate change.
Angela Belcher, the young faculty member whom I mentioned as being on the cover of Forbes, is now being recruited by MIT.
In these same years, Illinois has committed substantial new investment toward its internationally regarded organizations relating to information technology, Michigan has committed $1 billion toward a biotechnology and bioscience initiative based at four of its universities. California has dedicated $400 million toward four new collaborative centers on biotechnology, information technology, nanoscience, and telecommunications involving the University of California campuses.
While I celebrate what we have achieved for Texas, I also recognize signs of limits on the role that UT Austin and Texas A&M now play among the leaders of American higher education. Although these two universities have achieved much for our state in the last four decades, including places among national leadership, we are newcomers and we are not assured of remaining there.
The single point that I want to make right now is that the top of American higher education is a tough, competitive business. Every day, Texas is sized up by agenda-setters everywhere, both inside and outside our state, to see whether we have the brainpower, the skill, the facilities, the organizations--the competitiveness--to meet the challenges of the day. Like any other competitive business, this one requires the right talent, continuous reexamination of resource commitments, and strategic reinvestment. It requires benchmarking on a national scale, and constant testing of program quality. We are attuned to all of that at UT Austin. It is also what you should expect.
The concept of "excellence funding" in Texas higher education is intimately linked to the idea that a university would become or remain competitive for a position of leadership in a national context. It seemed to me useful to offer this testimony as a way of illustrating what that really means. Thank you for the opportunity.
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