terrapinsanity.com

Amidst all the discussion of doomsday budgets, hiring freezes, new furloughs, new cuts to already stripped health benefits and more, there’s one thing Main Admin is happy to have lost on the radar just now. Being almost out of sight …

What's that just peeking over the trees?

But not quite.

It’s construction on the new President’s Mansion, and as you see below it is coming along swimmingly.

Never mind staff furloughs. Think of all the construction jobs we're making!

The General Assembly is set to convene in special session starting tomorrow morning, and likely will implement a mug-the-rich plan to cover all the other expanded spending priorities (none of which unfortunately seem to involve paying full employee health benefits or effecting emergency repairs on classrooms.) We’ll soon know whether budget negotiators will reach a compromise – maybe they can raise taxes and implement more furloughs. But won’t the party for campus leadership just be grand when the check arrives from Annapolis and their new facility is done?

And if they let the foliage grow just a little more, then Presidential Partiers won’t be distracted by the sight of the great unwashed when they look back in our direction, in whose name they party.

Last month the average balance of outstanding student loan debt carried by Maryland residents topped $33,704 – the most in the nation. This is according to the most recent quarterly report from Credit Karma, a consumer credit management company.

Count us as not surprised. For all practical purposes the flagship campus, which should have been pumping top talent into the state over the last decade, has been touted by Admissions as a great party school, and Maryland’s best young talent has responded accordingly – they increasingly go out of state for their education, and often don’t come back to pump their correspondingly superior economic benefits into the state. While we spare no expense to recruit foot coaches for appeal to jocks or top food courts to appeal to entertainment-oriented youngsters, anything which might appeal to scholars has been cut. The present report is consistent with a view that we’re giving kids a great time when they are here but not doing much to help them get on with a career that helps them paying bills later.

We need a Provost who cares about scholarship, and that caring would start with a full re-org of Admissions.

The Sun reports that Delegate Rosenberg’s proposal to allow denial of access to campus research information is withdrawn today – a move we applaud (as you might have guessed from our previous blogging on this topic, panning the measure as Orwellian.) The outcome is good for openness in scholarship and government, though still a bit awkward for UM in the near term, since UM first went on record with UM’s VP for Research Pat O’Shea testifying in support of the bill. Yet the withdrawal of the bill today was described as taken after UM’s Office of General Counsel writing a letter pointing out how such measures actually weren’t needed.

In other words, this was the classic UM “ready, fire, aim!” approach to advocacy.

The other news out of Annapolis today is that UM will lose a few hundred thousand dollars out of its budget because of the antics of its environmental law clinic, which got just a little too aggressive on the taxpayer’s dime – overboard some senators said – in matters of strong interest to the senator’s constituents. The system pays a price accordingly.

One of the regular compilations at the Chronicle is updated and worthy of your consideration – the comparison of college graduation rates.

Some points truly stand out (and are tragic): The District of Columbia’s rate is a small fraction compared with others. Granting that DC has a comparatively small pool of campuses to draw on for this average, there are still as many such schools there as available in ‘fly over’ states. The 7 percent rate is appalling, and all the more so since its cost per completion is the highest in the nation by far. $150,000 per graduation?

Maryland does generally well overall when compared with other states’ 4-year public universities.
Maryland beats DC – everyone does – but nationally is slightly back in the pack for overall performances.

In state, Coppin State pulls up the rear with 16 percent. (Technically UMUC is lower but we see that as a different animal and not on the same spectrum.) Leading the pack, the Naval Academy (go squids!) followed closely by College Park at over 82 percent. That’s quite a spread – 16 to 82 – and the same disparity in cost too: $75,000 per completion at College Park versus $140,000 per completion at Coppin.

These are very different campuses and so should be held to different standards, but the cost differential should give pause. From a clinical point of view, places like Coppin are clearly paying immense overheads for low values (successful outcomes), never mind the relative value of the degrees themselves. They draw on different applicant pools for the most part, so what we’re really seeing here is how expensive it is to back-fill an unsuccessful high school preparation. By the time you deliver it again in college, even to get to the point of being able to start real college work, the price of that high school degree becomes astronomical.

A great deal of College Park’s overhead comes from trying to be all things to all people, so we have extensive – and expensive – support infrastructure to back-fill high school preparations too, but it is not as pervasive as at other sites. Focusing the campus only on acceptance of prepared applicants – as we do not – would allow the campus to unbundle a great deal of our remedial apparatus, reduce the cost per outcome even more and of course improve our graduation rates.

Even perpetually up-beat faculty around campus are coming to a shocked stop in their tracks today, pole axed by David Rieger’s memo to employees “Important Information Regarding Anticipated Health Plan Changes for FY2013″. Warning: reading details of this memo could cause symptoms of anxiety, cramping, migraines and constipation.

The state’s plan for balancing the budget in next fiscal year entails employees picking up a big – and we mean big – piece of the bill. If you aren’t in one of the few HMO programs that already ration coverage, then plan on paying 10 percent of non-co-pay expenses (meaning about everything) up to an annual cap. That’s on top of co-pays themselves going up.

Yup, these health plans are now ideal for people who don’t need health plans, but the moment you need one (X-rays, most lab work, any kind of procedure) then gosh, these plans aren’t for you, you need to pay your fair share. For a family that must use a procedure out-of-plan, that could be up to $6,000 more out of pocket (above co-pays) before hitting the cap.

The folks in Annapolis are debating (even as we blog) about whether to give a little pay bump to “make up” for all the furloughs in recent years. Leaving aside the insult of presuming we would not notice how a fixed (potentially pro-rated) gratuity is the smallest fraction of what we lost, this contemplated bump (if it shows up at all) won’t even cover the increase in co-pays in most cases for families that need any amount of health service.

We guess these officials have decided they are beyond ever needing votes from anyone employed in the state again.

Last year the state cut $4M from the USM budget, saying they could recover expenses for services given to the individual campuses. Apparently business as usual continued so Annapolis would like to do it again, and the hearing about this wasn’t all fun and games for administrators.

So much for that “we’re doing more with less!” strategy. People paying those bills like to hear it. Maybe a “we’re doing less with less” message would have gone over better, where officials got to hear about the effects of their cuts, which might have to be ‘splained back to constituents.

What’s really going on? The original deal was simple: keep serving the governor’s political needs and the state will keep supplying the cash. USM correspondingly has optimized to shoulder an ever-increasing load of workforce training (not education) for tech industry (making workers commodities that are less-expensive for gubernatorial backers to hire at need), and ensured that the campus community is readily at hand to support whatever social measures seem trendy on the second floor.

Obviously Annapolis doesn’t seem to feel like it is getting best value on that deal any more. The budget hearings are a chance for political saber rattling to remind those uppity academics just who’s in charge. Look for a fiscal accommodation to be quietly worked out once the Metzerott Road crew has kowtowed and genuflected appropriately – backed by promises of some more support to come from campuses in the coming year.

We often write about budget ironies – administrators who raise tuition or donations in the name of excellence or student opportunities, but who then spend out on exclusive buildings, exclusive parties or expensive sports programs before going off to celebrate victory (of their shakedown, not sports.)

One of the expensive assistant coaches hired in the last year may have celebrated just a little too much. The Baltimore Sun reports assistant men’s basketball coach Dalonte Hill has been arrested for DUI.

Here’s a man paid more than almost all faculty members in the state of Maryland to work on something completely unrelated to (if not at odds with) educational programs. Now he won’t be working even at that, at least for the near term. The same article reports he won’t be with the team in the upcoming games, pending a campus review of the situation.

Everything in Maryland will soon get more expensive once Governor O’Malley gets his way in the recently-proposed budget just submitted to the General Assembly. For those keeping score, that includes tuition. Campus tuition would go up three percent under his proposal.

They have it this morning, as the Washington Post reports on campus plans to build a new president’s mansion … in spite of budget cuts, slashed athletic programs and languishing efforts to provide for immediate student needs. (You’ll recall that we reported on this last month in the same article congratulating Freeman Hrabowski on successful student projects.)

Front page no less. They must be delighted. Except … they’re letting Brodie Remington take point on this. The reason is obvious – he’s walking wounded already, so let the guy who is already a known short timer be the face to unpopular moves we’re driving through.

What’s not obvious until you look a little closer is how hard the administration is trying to keep President Loh out of this entirely. As the Post reports, spokesmen have repeatedly denied requests to reach Low for comment, and the same has been true in other reports. Central has scrambled former President Mote to give some weak justification for that which he never came out on while on the job. No credibility there … he’s just saluting and trying to draw a little heat away from the kitchen.

The prevailing mood is simple: weather a little PR for one news cycle and we’ll get what we want regardless of how it looks.

UM Physics Professor Joe Reddish on NPR on Sunday: “With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don’t need faculty to do it. Get ‘em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.”