Oregon universities open to record enrollments as they step up efforts to help students succeed

[depakid]

Source: Oregonlive



Oregon's public universities open their classrooms Monday to a record number of students -- more than 92,000 -- and they will be doing more than ever this year to hold on to them.

The seven campuses are under financial and political pressure to ensure fewer students quit and more graduate. The most recent figures available from 2008-09 show about one in five freshmen in the Oregon University System quit within a year and about three in five earn a degree after six years.

To help freshmen succeed, the universities are enlisting more advisers, tutors, and mentors.

They are expanding summer orientation programs for freshmen, offering more core and college success classes, and creating learning communities where groups of freshmen share courses and study sessions. They are helping students study, manage their time and finances, connect better with college life and chart academic paths to their degrees.

Read more: http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2010/09/oregon_universities_open_to_re.html

[utopian]

1. At the same time, budgets are being slashed

I teach English at a local community college. Every week or two I get an email from above informing faculty of the latest budget cuts. To be fair, tax revenues are way down, but it seems counter productive to slash budget in a time of record enrollment.

[mike_c]

2. I don't know what Oregon State is doing, but Google "Deliverology..."

...for a hint of how the California State University is attempting to confront the same issue-- graduation rates. Deliverology is a management philosophy whose primary cheerleader, the UK's Sir Michael Barber, absolutely loathes public employees, e.g. professors and university staff. The central tenant of Deliverology is that managers must be forced to focus on narrow objectives that are quantifiable as "targets." Thus, UK citizens have had to endure such absurdities as being left to wait in ambulances at the curb rather than brought into emergency rooms in order to "reduce" emergency room wait times, and police arresting parents and children in domestic disturbance calls in order to improve their arrest rates.

In the CSU, some of the Deliverology plans that have been floated for "improving graduation rates" are downright exclusionary-- they promise some success by excluding students who are less likely to graduate in four years, e.g. minority students, ESL students, first college attendees in immigrant families, working poor students, etc.