USF promoted to ‘pre-eminent’ status

The University of South Florida will join the ranks of Florida's “pre-eminent” state universities, USF President Judy Genshaft said this week in her fall address at the Tampa-based school.

She said USF, which has more than 49,000 students on three campuses, has met 11 of 12 performance measures set by the state, enough to reach the top tier of the state schools, which now only includes the University of Florida and Florida State University.

The designation will bring not only more prestige but more funding for the university. UF and FSU each received $17.3 million as pre-eminent universities this year, while USF and the University of Central Florida each received $8.7 million as “emerging” pre-eminent schools.

“Finally, amazingly, we have reached pre-eminence,” Genshaft told the crowd, which broke into applause and cheers at the Marshall Student Center.

“Since our first student enrolled in 1960, we have turned a well-regarded regional university into one of the top, pre-eminent, public research institutions in the nation,” she said Wednesday. “We have become the university that other institutions look up to as an aspirant peer.”

USF’s performance will have to be certified by the state university system’s Board of Governors before the pre-eminent designation becomes official.

Genshaft said USF’s rise is part of an overall strategy to make the school one of the top public research institutions in the country.

She noted that the university generated more than $475 million in research funding in the 2016-17 academic year, a 3.6 increase over the previous year, trailing only UF in research funding in the system.

The one pre-eminent performance metric where USF fell short was failing to achieve at least a $500 million endowment for the university. But she provided some context for USF’s $441 million endowment, which is at a record level for the school.

“This is an extremely difficult metric for any university, especially one as young as ours,” she said, noting USF ranks third in its endowment size for schools founded after 1950, trailing two institutions in the University of California system.

The last measure USF achieved was pushing its six-year graduation rate to more than 70 percent. Its graduation rate became a point of contention in the last days of the 2017 legislative session, when a final version of a higher-education bill revamped the graduation metrics — putting USF’s rise to pre-eminence in doubt.

But the bill was vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott. A new higher-education bill (SB 4), filed for the 2018 session, would not affect USF’s preeminence designation in the coming year, although the school will eventually have to meet a 60 percent four-year graduation rate.