UCF gets $37.5M and size questions
The University of Central Florida will receive $37.5 million in performance-based funding this year, even as leaders faced questions from state officials Wednesday about the school’s ever-growing student body.
With enrollment expected to top 67,000 this fall and continue to grow at a pace of at least 1,400 students per year through 2021, members of the Board of Governors, who oversee the Florida university system, grilled UCF’s outgoing president John Hitt and his successor, Dale Whittaker, who takes over Sunday.
The officials said they were particularly concerned because the university sought to lower its goals from ones set in previous years in seven of 10 areas the state uses to measure the success of its fouryear institutions and apportion $265 million in performancebased funding.
“Is the institution at a point where it might be getting too big?” Board of Governors member Sidney Kitson asked UCF leaders during a meeting of the group’s strategic planning committee at UCF.
All of the state’s universities had to present plans that outlined the school’s planned enrollment during the next four years and set goals in areas such as graduation rates, average cost per degree and the wages of alumni. The state uses these measures to determine which universities receive performance-based funding, and how much.
UCF’s allotment is up slightly from the $36 million the school received last year. The University of Florida, this year’s biggest winner, will receive $57 million, up from $55 million last year. Florida State University ($51.6 million), Florida International University ($40 million) and the University of South Florida ($37.6 million) also nabbed a bigger share of the pot than UCF.
The three lowest-performing schools, Florida A&M University, New College of Florida and the University of North Florida, won’t receive any of the money.
The measures that are used to determine how much performance-based funding each school will receive are distinct from the benchmarks that decide which universities are considered “preeminent” and “emerging preeminent,” distinctions that also come with additional dollars. UCF, an emerging preeminent institution, is trying to become a preeminent one. Its longtime rival, USF, officially earned the more prestigious designation Wednesday from the Board of Governors.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, each of the state’s 12 universities outlined its goals in all of these areas. UCF had previously aimed for a four-year graduation rate of 50 percent between 2016 and 2020.
But on Wednesday, university leaders said they wanted to change that goal to 47.8 percent. Between 2013 and 2017, 43.8 percent of students graduated within four years.
University leaders also said they will try to keep the average cost of an undergraduate degree for instate students to $15,843 in 2019-20, but that’s up from $14,750, the mark they set earlier.
UCF has made “excellent gains in recent years,” Kitson said, asking why the university now wanted to shoot for lower marks than the ones set previously. Whittaker and Hitt said they wanted to be realistic.
But some of the state officials said they wanted to see more.
“This is our best shot at representing to our state what the state university system in Florida aspires to, and if we’re aiming low, we’re not doing ourselves justice,” said Marshall Criser III, the state’s university chancellor.
UCF has ambitious plans for the coming years, Board of Governors member Edward Morton said, including opening a new campus in downtown Orlando in 2019. He questioned whether the school could juggle those projects as the student body continued to grow.
Whittaker said the anticipated gains, about 2 percent per year, were less than in recent years. Much of that growth is expected outside the traditional classroom setting, with 39 percent of undergraduate courses completed online by 2020-21 school year, up from about a third.
But if the school continues to add students, Board of Governors member Norman Tripp said, the state may need to think about building another university in Central Florida.
“Not necessarily to handcuff UCF, but I think at some time this board ought to think about how big it wants universities to go,” he said.