UH-Clear Lake still in search of identity

Attracting — and keeping — students is seen as big challenge, along with budget shortfalls

CLEAR LAKE — Makayla Ellis didn’t expect to be part of a grand experiment in higher education. But she was won over by a deer.

Deciding where to go to college, Ellis spotted the animal when she visited the University of Houston-Clear Lake’s campus. She loved the university’s rural, “tucked-away” feel and enrolled, becoming one of UHClear Lake’s roughly 200 firstever freshmen.

Ellis and other first-ever freshmen graduated on May 20, marking the first full cycle of a four-year bachelor’s degree for UH-Clear Lake. Until 2014, the university was one of the last upper-division universities in the country, meaning it taught only juniors, seniors and graduate students. Just two — Sul Ross Rio Grande and Texas A&M Central Texas — remain in Texas, according to the state’s higher education coordinating board.

Lawmakers approved the change in 2011 after UH-Clear Lake said it would help the UH System serve more students, particularly in the Clear Lake region with employers that include NASA and energy companies. Staff expected the so-called downward expansion to stabilize finances and grow enrollment.

Four years later, evaluating life as a four-year school is a study in contrasts.

New freshmen roam campus early in the day, well before evening classes popular among juniors, seniors and graduate students begin. Undergraduate enrollment is up 12 percent from fall 2014 through fall 2017. New science labs and a wellness center will open this year. But challenges persist. Staff say the university’s identity is not clear, which has hindered recruitment. A boom and a bust of international graduate student enrollment resulted in budget shortfalls and a $2.1 million, 6 percent proposed spending reduction for the 2019 fiscal year. And admissions staff are working to better market degrees, acknowledging that UHClear Lake is still struggling to woo students like Ellis to campus.

“We kind of felt like guinea pigs,” Ellis said of university faculty and staff. “They were experimenting on us.”

Administrators and faculty members don’t attribute their deficits to teaching freshmen and sophomores. But they say

the change, mixed with declines in graduate school enrollment, forced the institution to invest, deeply and quickly, in freshmen and sophomores.

“The unknown really worried a lot of faculty,” said Brian Stephens, the faculty senate’s president. “For us to grow, we needed to transition … (but before,) the students didn’t fluctuate that much. Budgeting was an easier process.”

Faculty say the university’s new president Ira Blake, who came to UH-Clear Lake in 2017, has been open about budgeting shortfalls.

She appointed a new provost who will start in July, and faculty hope that person will re-energize professors and focus the university’s mission.

Today, Blake acknowledges that change is challenging but says UH-Clear Lake better serves the region as a four-year campus. She pledged to find new revenue sources.

But the last few years have brought some pessimism to the university.

“The idea that we’ll sit here and (students will) keep pouring in,” said Lisa Gossett, who chairs UH-Clear Lake’s environmental management program, “is not the reality these days.”

‘Strange duck’

When UH-Clear Lake opened in 1974, it was one of several dozen upper-division universities nationwide. Decade by decade, however, schools began enrolling freshmen and sophomores.

“When you’re an upper-level university … particularly in this last decade, you’re somewhat of a strange duck,” then-President William Staples reflected in a speech years after lawmakers approved the change for UHClear Lake in 2011.

In 2015, Texas politicians allocated more than $3 million a year for two years — start-up money — to help the transition, Staples said last session. The university hired dozens of new faculty to teach freshmen and sophomores, said interim Provost Glen Houston.

More than 1,700 students applied to be part of UH-Clear Lake’s first freshman class. About 230 enrolled. The university added new programs, including a psychology doctorate and a bachelor’s degree in addictions counseling. New construction began.

But by 2017, budget shortfalls were apparent. Staples urged state lawmakers to continue giving start-up money for UH-Clear Lake’s downward expansion.

That winter, he told the Houston Chronicle that without that money, UH-Clear Lake may have to return to being an upper-level university. The university faced a $13.9 million general revenue and tuition shortfall, comprising 11 percent of its operating budget, and it pledged to freeze hires and review graduate programs, university services and course schedules. UH-Clear Lake did not fill positions when faculty left, Houston said.

It started buying Facebook, Google and Instagram advertisements. Administrators said they would diversify plunging international enrollment, which analysts attribute to increased competition from universities abroad, U.S. politics with rhetoric unfriendly to foreign students, and the rising costs of American degrees.

Blake presented a gloomy financial outlook in an early address.

Without growing enrollment, she said, UH-Clear Lake would continue to run a deficit.

“This is not a viable long-term strategy,” she said. To faculty and staff, about university fundraising, she said, “I genuinely need your assistance.”

She said UH-Clear Lake is committed to being a four-year university and will diversify revenue through foundation grants, giving and enrollment increases.

UH’s government relations vice chancellor Jason Smith said continuing to enroll freshmen and sophomores would be “very hard” without supplemental money from Texas.

“I am told we’re probably not capable of that,” he said.

‘Trying to figure it out’

Faculty are hopeful that new leadership will clarify the university’s identity and update a mission statement, which they say will draw in more students. Steven Berberich, the new provost, is expected to begin in the summer.

Interim provost Houston remains bullish on enrolling students in a four-year university but says the campus must offer appealing programs.

“We don’t have enough students, (but) once we get to a certain level, it will be more selfsustaining,” he said. “It’s just not there yet.”

Houston said about 30 percent of freshmen who started in fall 2014 graduated in May, a figure the university could not confirm.

Some peers, Ellis said, transferred when they realized they wouldn’t get the traditional freshman experience with dorms, campus clubs and intense school spirit.

But she got involved in developing traditions for the university, and in helping professors adjust to teaching younger students.

“You could feel that they were trying to figure it out as well,” she said.