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In a tremendous 60 Minutes piece aired on Sunday, UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski continues to champion his UMBC campus and programs. If you missed the original airing, then the transcript (linked above) is well worth your consideration.

The interview is noteworthy not only as another well-deserved honor for Dr. Hrabowski, but also for contrasts it paints. The difference in priorities between UMBC and UMCP could not be more stark. Hrabowski’s statistics on STEM education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) quietly speak what he does not – that UMBC is fast becoming the STEM center of the state.

Whoa, the folks in College Park might say, we have the bulk of the research and far more majors. We’re the flagship. All true, but when legislators hear about UMBC, they hear that 40 percent or more of its graduates each year are STEM degree recipients, a far greater proportion than UMCP, bespeaking a different set of priorities. They hear about overall graduation rates, the successful emphasis on undergraduate research experiences that are fostered by faculty (not just allowed to happen so long as they do not interrupt a “serious” researcher’s pace with graduate students.) They hear about how many top Maryland high school students increasingly by-pass a chance at the flagship in order to attend UMBC, which invests recruiting funds based on excellence, not race. UMCP has almost no unalloyed excellence-based scholarships or prizes for undergraduates, and appears to be moving away from merit-based support altogether – and consequently is getting what it pays for.

From the CBS interview, officials hear:

Interviewer: You had a chance to get a football team at UMBC, right? And you said no?

Hrabowski: People talk about that. Right. I mean, well– well, first of all, it takes a lot of money for a football team to win.

UMBC’s nationally competitive group is its fairly cerebral chess team, while from College Park of late officials hear about our money pit athletics program, which loses more money each year than is spent on undergraduate STEM degree programs in total.

(For all the effort UMCP invests in creating “learning outcomes” for its programs, we have yet to see any argument for how the athletics budget connects to any scholarly campus missions. It isn’t hard to see how that could be done for chess.)

And tellingly, for all that state officials hear about UMBC’s educational successes, especially in STEM, they don’t hear much from College Park itself. As we have observed repeatedly in the past, College Park is losing a political game it does not know it is playing.