SPEAKER_01
ASEE's Race and Ethnicity and Higher Education Project has released the 2024 STAVIS report and updated the accompanying website. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the report provides an updated overview of key topics in higher education, including undergraduate and graduate student enrollment, completion, student debt, and financing, by race and ethnicity. Explore the findings and download the report at www.
equityandhirehead.org. Hello and welcome to .edu, the Higher Education Policy Podcast from the American Council on Education.
A little bit later in our episode, we're going to be joined by Kelly Danfuss, the President of Texas State University. He'll be talking to us about his remarkable journey through higher education as well as some of the initiatives and the work they're undertaking on his campus. But before we get to Dr.
Danfuss, I am joined by my most important, most appreciated, most valued co-host, Mushdak Anjou. Mushdak, how are you doing today?
SPEAKER_03
I'm looking around to see where Sarah is because I am certainly not the more important of your co-host. I know that because you spend more time with Sarah than you do with me.
SPEAKER_01
When you're on the episode, you're the more important of the co-host, right? Absence in this case does not make the heart grow fonder.
SPEAKER_03
John, your logic and intelligence astounds me every time.
SPEAKER_01
I notice in which direction it astounds you, you do not indicate, but thank you, Mushdak. I appreciate it nonetheless.
SPEAKER_03
John, how are you doing and what is happening in Washington and higher ed these days?
SPEAKER_01
Oh, so I think the thing that's happening the most, or at least that I'm spending the most time on, isn't frankly a higher ed specific thing, but it's the debt limit and trying to understand what happens if we don't raise the debt ceiling. And what that means for higher ed, frankly, which since we've never defaulted on our obligations, nobody's entirely sure. But it's looking increasingly likely that we might.
So it's becoming a pressing concern of late.
SPEAKER_03
So let's set the scene, right? So it's Tuesday, May 16th, around 2.30. I think that President Biden and Speaker McCarthy are set to resume their negotiations today at 3 p.m. But I think President Biden is off on some international diplomacy starting tomorrow. Secretary Yellen told us earlier this week that June 1st is a real deadline and don't mess around.
Don't know if that's exactly true or not, but she said don't mess around. June 1st, let's get something done. And the House did pass some piece of legislation, sorry, that would extend the debt limit and also would have pretty devastating cuts to all things non-military, non-entitlement, domestic spending.
And what, John, what do we know about the impacts that that bill, if it were to be signed by President Biden, it won't be? What impacts that would have had on higher education?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and it's important to note that that bill is less relevant as a piece of legislation and more as a marker of where particularly House Republicans want to start these negotiations. In fact, that has been as the president and what we call the four corners, the leadership of the House and the Senate, minority majority from both sides who have been part of these negotiations, primarily their staff have been the ones handling the negotiations rather than the principles themselves. That's what they would like to see.
If that were to go through, they would raise the debt ceiling by about one and a half trillion dollars or until March, whichever comes first, to do that they would ask for about five trillion dollars in spending cuts and through a variety of different ways, two biggest things, frankly, would be that they would want to cut spending this year. We're looking to do fiscal year 24, that would start October 1st of 2023, to set the spending levels for that at the FY22 levels. Sounds kind of, you know, Beltway, Wonky, whatever, but essentially what that would mean is about 130 billion dollars less spent on government programs next year than we spent a year and a half ago, or then we're currently spending, I should say.
Since Republicans have also said that they don't want any of those cuts to come from Homeland Security, Department of Defense or Veterans programs, all 130 billion of the cuts would come from other parts of the budget, including education, so financial aid, scientific research, healthcare, lots of everything else the federal government does. If you were to do that at those levels, like they've asked for, it'd be about a 30% cut across the board for those other programs, so when you think about Pell Grants or Work Study or NIH funding, you're talking about a budget that would cut those by 30%. For the first year, then for the next 10 years, they would cap an increase in spending at 1%.
It's about 19% below the average generally, so not only are you making massive cuts, but then going forward, you don't have the opportunity for really meaningful increases to restore what those cuts have taken away. So it would be an extremely draconian series of cuts to programs that we care about. In addition, they had a bunch of provisions in there, they would block student loan forgiveness plan, the Biden administration's before, they block the income based repayment plan that the Biden administration is putting forward, it would be very generous to borrowers, it would block any efforts by the Department of Education to do anything on loans that make those programs more generous.
It really has a pretty heavy focus on higher education, the way that you often don't see, I mean, again, we're talking about the debt ceiling, this is a major national political issue, the rolling into it of a lot of higher education pieces, is somewhat unusual, but also indicates just how central to a lot of the policy debates
SPEAKER_03
higher end is right now. All right, so John, President Biden is not, that's the starting point for negotiations, I mean, President Biden is not going to agree to all of those cuts, but we're a couple of weeks away from June 1st. How do you see this playing out? I mean, I guess one thing, one observation that I might make is, I cannot imagine that President Biden is going to sign anything that doesn't extend the debt limit past the next election.
I mean, I would assume that this has got to be at least a couple of year deal, at least. What's your sense of how this
SPEAKER_01
thing actually, where we go from here? I think you're completely right about that. Generally, what we've seen in the last years, it used to be that when they would raise the debt ceiling, what they would do is they'd say something like, all right, we'll raise it for trillion dollars, or we'll raise it $3 trillion. They don't have to raise it by an amount, that's just how traditionally it had been done.
What they've been doing in most commonly recent years is to say, we will raise the debt ceiling until X date. And March of the year following an election tends to be the most popular time for doing that, in part because it allows you to get through an election, allow whatever the change of government is to settle in before you have to begin negotiations on raising the debt ceiling again. So I would imagine that was the first and probably most important concession, the administration would like to make that said, it's probably not that hard a one for Republicans to grant.
They aimed for March of the following year. There are members of that caucus that would love to have another debt ceiling fight that close to the election. Most of the Republican Party in Congress doesn't want to have another debt ceiling fight.
You look at the Senate, the Senate, particularly Senate Republicans have been very low key on this. They've essentially tried to stay out of the debate. It is not a winning argument for a lot of people, especially in a very tight election year.
That said, the president has made a number of other accommodations. If you take the reporting on the table, he's agreed to rescind COVID relief money, which had previously always been off the table. He's agreed to look at possibly and sort of countering accounts of this yesterday, whether they might tighten work requirements around federal benefits programs.
He might be open to putting spending caps in place seems to be yes on that, but the debate is how many years those caps will be in place? 10 years is where Republicans won. Currently it seems Democrats are asking for two. You know, who's that going to wind up at five? You don't know, but we are, as you pointed out, two weeks away from June 1st, the president leaves tomorrow for a very important diplomatic trip to Asia with the G7 summit, which considering the tensions with China, the importance of that economy and security arrangements over there, that is not an insignificant, you know, sort of trip abroad.
He can't really cancel that. And the other thing is any bill you put forward has to go through Congress. Congress doesn't move these things quickly.
Speaker McCarthy has promised his members that they would have three days to review any bill. They'll have to figure out a way to get it through that chamber. There will be members who on the Republican side who will not support it, no matter how many concessions the president makes.
And they can only afford to lose four, possibly three votes, depending on the status of the recently indicted member from New York. It's a tough path forward without a lot of clarity. And the clock is ticking, ticking,
SPEAKER_03
ticking, ticking. We're getting very close. On that happy note.
I haven't even got into what happens
SPEAKER_01
when we default, which is the really depressing part. We're not going to default right, John. Hmm. It does. You know what it feels? I'll tell you this.
Logically, you say no because the consequences are so drastic that you think cooler heads ultimately prevail. The other thing is the financial markets desperately would want to avoid a default and they tend to have an outside influence in policymaking, right? Yeah. So yeah, I think probably the safe money is we'll get close and we'll avert it somehow.
That said, this reminds me a lot of the last round of shutdowns about a decade ago with the Obama administration, where people seem to have forgotten the lessons from the first round of shutdowns they went through during the Clinton administration. And there seems to be at least a cohort of people who don't feel the fear of what might happen the way that they probably should. So we'll say, you know, there's always a few reckless actors.
And unfortunately, given the margins we have in Congress, some of the more reckless actors have an outside
SPEAKER_03
influence these days. You know, it's funny that we observed, you know, five months ago how difficult Speaker McCarthy's job is going to be. And it is going to be difficult, you know, on this work requirement business and increased work requirements for federal benefits.
There's reporting this morning that there's a set of House Republicans that are not interested in having that debate in conjunction with the debt ceiling. And I'm sure there are going to be and there are more than five of them. You probably only need four, but there are more than five of them.
So I mean, for, you know, it's all well and good to talk about enormous sort of big priorities and big cuts. But when you get down to individual instances of, you know, exactly what is going to be cut, it's going to be, I just don't know if you're going to have 218 Republicans, you know, over and over on each of the pieces of this thing. So, I mean, not that it will get broken out that way.
I mean, you would think that maybe there's some deal to be had around around the COVID relief money around some caps, maybe around some student loan forgiveness. I mean, I could see some higher ed stuff getting thrown in into a eventual deal. I mean, given exactly what you're saying about the about the weird focus on higher ed in these negotiations, I guess it just goes to show we've been, we've become sort of a little bit of a cultural lightning rod, I think.
But I guess we will see. When do we record again, John? We'll have more information in a couple
SPEAKER_01
of weeks, I suppose. Yeah, a couple of weeks will be right past the deadline. So who knows, we might be doing it from our bunkers hoarding gold much die.
You've prepared your bunker, right?
SPEAKER_03
I haven't. What should I put in that bunker? I mean, I have a boombox with like my favorite
SPEAKER_01
Desert Island discs in it. Sure, batteries, some sort of, you know, what are those things called,
SPEAKER_03
that electric generators? I'm actually not a very good prefer. We are toast. If we go down,
SPEAKER_01
John, I think they're coming after us first. Don't go to each other's house. We have to find a better prepared third party we need to meet at.
My wife bought a karaoke machine a couple of months
SPEAKER_03
ago. So I mean, we can, we can at least, we can sing. Well, I can't, but I can speak into the microphone.
The other big thing that happened this week was down in Florida, where Governor DeSantis signed into law something sort of prohibiting the use of or the discussion of diversity, equity, inclusion in Florida State colleges. John, what do you know about that? What should our listeners sort of know about what what Governor DeSantis just signed? Yeah, I mean,
SPEAKER_01
and you covered it a little bit with the headlines. This is, you know, certainly doesn't stand on the sound. This is part of a piece of efforts, particularly by Governor DeSantis in Florida, you know, and certainly it has been raised before by people other than me that a lot of this is less about what he sees as the best policies for Florida and more about positioning national profile for presidential race.
He was also in Iowa last week speaking. He's he's been doing a tour of the sorts of things you do as you prepare for presidential run. So some of this very clearly is intended for national political audience.
That said, it has actual ramifications. Most Florida institutions, public institutions have sought to promote diversity of their student bodies have looked at being inclusive to all, you know, perspectives and populations on the campus. This is one of the things that I think, you know, you and I, I don't want to speak for you, but that we tend to find very frustrating with these efforts to target DEI that, you know, DEI on a campus looks like a lot of things, but it looks like supports for rural students and it looks like supports for students with disabilities and it looks like programs that assist veteran students in acclimating to a campus and reentering education.
It is not necessarily the the, you know, efforts that it is portrayed as by its critics. And so going forward, Florida institutions won't be able to allocate funds towards DEI initiatives. They will not be able to use DEI as a consideration in terms of hiring or student recruitment.
And then you really, I think the concern is how this bleed, well, frankly, all the above is a concern, but the other concern that I think is going to be unclear is how this leads into curriculum and treatments of discussions of race, particularly, I tend to think I'm a history graduate, most history majors and undergraduate, the treatment of race within history, particularly systemic racism and other aspects of American history that are especially problematic and that Governor DeSantis has clearly shown some hostility to embracing as part of an academic curriculum. So it's not a great sign. I will say, you know, Florida seems to be the most far forward in terms of advancing these kinds of legislation in other states.
And we're talking with a president from Texas later. Don't know if we'll get into this or not, but Texas had a similar bill that has since been subsequently modified and reduced. It has other contingencies around DEI that include relevance to federal grants or other things.
So that bill seems to be moving in a much more, again, I don't know that we'd necessarily be supportive of its current form either, but in a form that's a little bit more amenable, a little bit more understanding of the traditional role of academic freedom. But this is not new, right? We I feel like we've been talking about this for a little while. This is happening across state levels.
There was a clearly coordinated effort across states to push legislation like this. And while not all of those bills, in fact, the majority of them aren't being adopted, you see in the case like Florida, in some cases they are, and they will have profound
SPEAKER_03
implications for campuses. Yeah. Yes, it's such an, I feel like it is relatively easy to pass these things. And it's relatively easy not to see what the ramifications of some of the, the, these measures might be, right? So I'm really curious about what this might mean for accreditation, right? Where, you know, accreditors have traditionally sort of required some level of academic freedom and academic quality.
And, you know, we'll have to see how that sort of plays out. You know, on the inclusion side, you know, DEI, the I stands, of course, for, for inclusion. And, you know, in a world in which so many institutions, especially public institutions serve in a very diverse and every sense of the word diverse population, but a whole set of, students that are not used to being on college, first generation students, I mean, you know, part of student success is, I think we know from the research is, you know, having those students feel like the institution is a home for them, you know, and that comes in so many different forms.
I mean, a blanket prohibition on DEI is, I mean, just so, it feels so counterproductive to what we know that so many of these legislatures sort of care about, which is, you know, student outcomes, completion and ultimate sort of job placement and success. Like, you know, it's not like you just wave a magic wand, and then all of a sudden, like some student is going to be able to come in, do great at the institution, graduate and then get a good
SPEAKER_01
job. I mean, colleges have a role in that. Oh, and we have, I mean, so much evidence of the fact that different student populations learn in different ways, require different supports.
And you can say, you know, if you are a critic, you can say, well, this emphasis on DEI gets away from the car, you know, the exact opposite is true, right? We know the exact opposite is true. If you're worried about students coming back to school, if you're worried about students completing, working their way through school, then regardless of what their, you know, demographics are, finding ways to support them and encourage them and assist them in meeting their goals, is a role of university. And when you take a really key component of how you identify those efforts, how you use them to distinguish the students who need what kinds of supports, you're undercutting the institutional effectiveness, and you're hurting those students, you're hurting the institution, you're hurting the students, frankly, as a public institution, you're hurting your state.
These are not policies that will benefit the students, they're not policies that will benefit the institution, not policies, again, that will benefit the state or the taxpayers who have sent people in place to support those policies. So,
SPEAKER_03
all around a bad outcome. Yeah. Well, we'll see if we'll see how much of it sticks, we'll see how much of it gets walked back, we'll see how it gets implemented, you know, I mean, some of the broadest reach of the implementation could be quite drastic, but, you know, potentially, there's some way in which, you know, institutions might be able to find their way to some sort of middle ground here or something that's a little bit more watered down. Let's cross our fingers, otherwise we'll be reporting back to our listeners sometime soon.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely. And we do know institutions remain committed to doing the best by their students and they find ways, regardless of the constraints, put on them. So, I am sure we'll have good outcomes, happier outcomes than this conversation has tended to trend towards.
Anyway, but you know,
SPEAKER_03
and actually, to that point, John, I mean, you know, we're about to talk to President Dempest, and I just know what a remarkable institution that is, that's so committed to, you know, to student success, to sort of serving the region in which they live in central sort of Texas, and, you know, there are a lot of sort of headwinds for higher education, but there are just so many incredible institutions out there that are just working in ways big and small to serve the students, their states, their regions, and, you know, happy to get to talk to President Dempest
SPEAKER_01
about his turn. I think that is the perfect note to go to the break on, and when we return, we will be having that conversation. So, thanks a lot, Mishuk, and all of you, hold on for just a second.
And we are back with our special guest, Kelly Dampas, the President of Texas State University.
SPEAKER_02
Kelly, welcome to .edu. Thanks, John, and Mishuk, it's great to be here. It is really great to
SPEAKER_01
have you, and I will say this is one of those things that doing this podcast has been, you know, such a special joy for me because we get to meet people, members like you, who have, I think, really fascinating stories about how they got into academia, how they got into higher education, higher education leadership, and I have to say yours is particularly unique. I think you are the only college president I've ever seen whose bio starts off with a failed NHL hockey audition.
SPEAKER_02
Everybody brings it up. It's like the first thing people bring up is the major failure of my life, and so thanks, John, for keeping up the record, for batting a thousand.
SPEAKER_01
Not how I intended it, I promise you.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so I grew up in a little fishing village in Northern Canada, and, you know, I had no dreams of going to college at all. It wasn't in the plans, and I really wanted to be a goalie in the NHL. That was my big dream, but, you know, it's like many people, I think you have a dream that's a dream, but it's not a reality.
Like, I thought the chances of getting an NHL are almost impossible, and so really my goal was to work in a gas station, one of my buddies worked in this gas station, and I thought if he ever, you know, someday he's going to leave there and I'll take his job, and so he would pump the gas, I'd wash the windshield, and I was always thinking like, when's Randy ever going to quit this job? And so that was my goal. Kind of a miracle of my life is my dad in February, my senior year, moved us to Southern Alberta, and in that new high school, like everybody was going to college, and I just didn't, I mean, it just hadn't even crossed my mind before, and they were all going, everyone's saying, well, where are you going? I thought, well, I'm not going to college, and then I found out that local community college just down the street about 30 miles away had a law enforcement degree program, and I thought, well, I'm probably never going to make it. I'd already tried out for the NHL and hadn't made it.
I got cut, like, in the third day, and so I said, well, maybe I could go become a police officer. It's my next goal and long story about why that is, but I ended up going to community college and have completely lost. Like, my mom had grade nine in education, my dad had grade 12.
I had no idea what I was doing there. I don't know why I was there. I was a terrible student.
Failed my English class my first semester, which was my best class. I just was, I just kind of, I didn't know I had to go to class because I was, I thought I was pretty good at English, and then, you know, ended up, you know, long story short, I graduated, got a job as a prison guard, and then got talked into going back to school and by one of my former
SPEAKER_01
instructors, and then that brought me to a mirror. Yeah, and I will say, I like you described making it through three days of the NHL trial does a failure, which is, I think, we can comfortably say two and a half days longer than we lasted, and that's only if we'd hit in the locker room
SPEAKER_03
for the first few hours. John, can you imagine me as an NHL goalie? I mean, how many goals would I
SPEAKER_01
give up per minute? I mean, seven? I assume your reaction would be much like mine, which is after the first one to just throw your head on the ground and cower in place until they stop shooting at you.
SPEAKER_02
It's funny, when I first started playing, we didn't wear masks, and so you had to be very courageous to be a goalie. And so, and I have the, I have the mug to prove it too. So things have changed a lot.
But yeah, I, yeah, I remember the coach calling me to, hey, you need to come meet with me after practice, said, hey, that's it. I'm good shape. And then he said, yeah, you don't need to come back
SPEAKER_01
tomorrow. Yeah, that was it. So, well, and you spent three years in my practice, a correctional
SPEAKER_02
officer? Yeah, so when I graduated from college, I was only 19 and I couldn't get a job as a police officer. And I'm so grateful now that no police department trusted me with a fast car and a weapon. So I was doing, I got a job as a prison guard and I, I remember telling people like I was doing, after a while, I said, I'm never going to get out of prison.
You know, it's hard to get out of prison even if you're a guard. And, and I just thought I was kind of typecast. And I said, I'm doing a life sentence eight hours at a time.
And I was three years in, I said, I got 17 more years to go till I'm 20, and then I can retire and then figure out the next part of my life. And then I had this former instructor from CUNY college who saw me one day and said, I thought you want to be a police officer. I said, I did.
And he said, do you still want to? I said, I'll do anything to become a police officer. And he said, anything. I said, well, then I said, yeah, I'm all in, I'll do anything.
And he said, you should go back to school and get a four year degree. And that will help you and I'll help you get there. And he said, I've got this, these colleagues I've made some friends up and down in the school called Sam Houston State down in Texas, and they'll accept your two year diploma and come over there and get your four year degree and then come back and I'll help you become a Mountie.
So that was the ultimate goal. I met her, I ended up meeting a Texan who, she didn't want to marry a cop or a Canadian. So she made me stay in the States.
And that's the story. My life really is divided between Sam Houston State before and after, like, because I went there, I met her and made a decision to stay in the States. And that's really changed the trajectory of my life.
And getting that degree changed the trajectory of my life. And I think about that a lot when we talked about what we're doing in higher education in America and how we're changing people's lives. I'm in the living embodiment of that of a, of someone who came here with nothing I literally had packed everything I owned in the world in a hockey bag on the back of my motorcycle and drove to Texas from Canada, and then never left and didn't have to leave because this country afforded me so much.
And really, it was the degree that gave me that opportunity. Well, and I love, you know,
SPEAKER_01
the former professor reaching out to you, right? Because, and Moshchak will back this up, we have done a number of episodes where we've talked to people about their journeys through higher ed. And I mean, the overwhelming majority, right? Moshchak, I started with somebody who said, you know, you need to get your degree, or you would make a great X, Y or Z. And, and essentially, you know, always sort of shocking here, people said, I never would have considered this until somebody showed faith in me or reached out and saw, you know, knew what I wanted to do and gave me that encouragement.
So, you know, in some ways, we're talking about what a unique story you have, but in some ways, it's also a very consistent story that we see people who have really risen through the higher ed ranks. Yeah, when I get a chance to talk to people about my
SPEAKER_02
career, and people often ask, like, how do you become a college president? I said, well, don't do what I did because I wasn't planned at all. But I talk about the five people that changed my life, and they're all either advisors or teachers or professors. And one of them, I actually was a, my master's thesis advisor, who really babied me through the first couple years of graduate school, because I had no clue what was going on.
I had no idea what I was doing. I was basically just body my time, trying to figure out what to do with my life after I got married and trying to figure out a way to convince my wife that Canada was a beautiful place to live. And, and the next thing I knew I had a PhD and I had to stay here.
But I remember talking to him one day, and he said, I said, I don't know why you're, why you're doing all these things for me, why you're investing yourself in me. And I said, how, how could I ever pay you back for what you've done for me? And he said, Kelly, you don't have anything I want, so you can't pay me back. But someday you'll be sitting behind, we happen to be sitting in his car.
He said, someday you'll be sitting behind the steering wheel, and there'll be somebody sitting in the passenger seat, and they're going to need your help. And that's how you pay me back, because you, you do for them what I did for you. And don't forget that you didn't get here by yourself that you got here because other people invested in you.
I'm not kidding. I think about that moment every single day of my life. It was, that was one of those moments in my life.
I said, okay, you know, they say the second best day of your life was the day you were born and the best day of your life is to figure out the day you figure out why you were born. It was like that. I'm here to serve other people, help them get from here to there.
That moment changed my life. I don't, I don't know if that was a signature moment for him. We talked about that quite a bit.
I still love the guy. He's still a great, he's a great guy, great mentor. But for me, it was like one of those turning points.
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah. I mean, and for our audience who can't see, Mishak and I basically just spent the last two minutes sort of nodding and smiling. Yeah, you've seen this, right? Oh yeah.
And, but it, you know, every time it's, it's something that really reaches down touches you. And really the importance of higher education, how can impact people's lives and, and related to that, especially given your experiences we have been talking about, and Mishak going back to your time at the Department of Education with Second Chance Pell, we seem to be at what we see as a very positive turning point in the way we approach how we deal with incarcerated individuals and particularly giving them access to education. Very recently, we had a change in law that allows prisoners to access Pell grants after 20 plus years of denying any support, federal support for prisoners to pursue their educations, given your background, both in terms of correctional work and now as a head of institution.
Just curious to get your thoughts on where you see this moment in time and where you see those opportunities, what this looks like to you from your perspective. Yeah, it's, it's great.
SPEAKER_02
And I hadn't thought about my personal connection to being in prison guard, but I do remember when I was in prison and I was a brand new prison guard and one of the, one of the guards who was training me said, Hey, Kelly, don't, don't, don't think you're any better than these guys. He said, there's an off chance that you might have been just as likely to be in here as you were in the end. You, by the grace of God, you're not, but these people all come from different backgrounds and so on.
There's all kinds of reasons why they're here and they are valuable people. And he was telling me that trying to teach me, this is during the era of rehabilitation was kind of coming into vogue in the 1980s and in prison systems. That's how far back it was in 1982, right? And he said, prisons are not warehouses and they're not places just to keep people until they die.
Eventually they will here and, and, and this is like an older guard that was telling me this wasn't like a social worker telling me this. He said, our job is to help make sure that when they leave here, they can lead a good life and contribute back to society and not come back. That the truth is the recidivism rate, recidivism rate is somewhere around 70 or 80% depending on what jurisdiction you're looking at, which means 70 or 80% of people who get out of prison come back to prison.
And so when you have opportunities from whatever mechanism, a job placement or a degree advancement, where you can help people reintegrate back into society that they left and then have a reasonable chance at a reasonable life that's, that's, that, that can impact this impact our society in a good way. That's, there's no greater calling than the correctional system to do that. Remember, it is correctional.
And the idea here is that we are correcting people and trying to get them more socialized and give them the chance to get back into,
SPEAKER_03
into mainstream society. So you are about just a little bit more than a year into the, this presidency of, of Texas state, I think, a fabulous institution, I think, something like 33,000
SPEAKER_02
undergrads. Yeah, so we're the 25th largest university and undergraduate population in the country. But our, but our graduate programs are relatively small.
So you're right to point out about 33,000 undergrads and about 4,000 or 5,000 grad students. And I know you serve a
SPEAKER_03
pretty high percentage of Pell students, I think 41% of your students are Pell, something like 50% or underrepresented minorities, an incredibly diverse institution in terms of, in terms of your students. And also in terms of what you're trying to do, you want to talk a little bit about sort of the, your priorities over the next couple of years as you've entered this job. Yeah, just for
SPEAKER_02
some context, I'd served as a professor and then ultimately associate dean and dean at the University of Oklahoma and the College of Arts and Sciences. So I was, I was actually part of an institution that had raised its research profile and its, its, its national profile. I remember hearing this quote at the University of Oklahoma where the president once said, we want to build a university that the football team can be proud of.
And that's kind of a funny line, but he was trying to say, we've got to build up, we've got a great football team and we won the national championships, the whole university has to rise. And so I remember thinking and adopting this idea, we have to be excellent in all things. And so I left there and was chancellor of the campus at Arkansas State University for five years and then came here.
And while I was there at Arkansas State, we became an R2 institution. And then it's about the same time that Texas State became R2. And when I was applying for this job, there was actually eight criteria and what they were looking for for the presidency.
And the very first one was we want to become an R1 institution and become a tier one research university. This actually aligned with the Texas, Texas legislature's efforts to increase the number of research universities in the state. Number two was to raise the university's national profile.
And that really was closely tied to the first one becoming known as a national university, national research university. Number eight, by the way, was fixing the football program. So I think some alumni were asked, what are your priorities? And that that made it to the priorities list.
And so we're working on that as well. But it's telling that the university has been spending some time before I got here, thinking about what it would mean to become an R1 institution, because I've spent most of my career convincing people that these are not rankings, they're just classifications, they describe different things. And even during my interview, I would repeat this idea that if you want to become R1, you're saying we want to become different.
And here's what different looks like. And if that's what you want, I've lived through that when we went through that at Oklahoma. And I see how this can happen here.
And so we're behind. But there's things we can do. And we're fortunate that the state is providing resources to allow us to do that.
And we can certainly talk about that some more as well, to be living in a state where the legislature is actually investing in higher education is a relatively rare luxury. But when we got here, I also noticed that there was, I think, some understandable reticence among some of the faculty about, you know, a worry about giving up the things we have always valued were 122 year old university. And we've been certainly doing research for a long time.
But our, our, you know, originally, we were a teacher school. And so our job was to teach teachers. And then we started adding other disciplines over time.
And certainly, we've got some other great programs, our fine arts programs are unbelievable. And there's understandable anxiety around that issue. Like, do we stop investing in the fine arts? Do we stop being a teaching school? Are we more, more interested in PhDs than undergrads and so on.
And so, as I met with people, and I was, I actually spent the first few months just going to people's offices and meeting them in their spaces and trying to get a temperature on where we work. Because I anticipated there would be some anxiety around it. And I, and I found it.
And so what I, what I decided to do is that we would try to chew bubblegum and walk at the same time. Let's keep doing the things we're, we're proud of. And we've loved doing for over 120 years, but add this other component over here.
And so we've been blessed with some, you know, pretty strong resources at the university. We've saved money over the years. We've got some reserves we can invest in.
So we stood up two commissions, one on something I call the run to R1. Like, we could certainly walk towards an R1 designation, but we've done so much work already. What would it do, what would it take to get us there by 2027? I think 2033 or 2030 would be relatively easy.
But what would it take to get us there by 2027? And then at the same time, we stood up commission on student success. And this is all about the academic programs we're offering. Are we offering the right ones? Should we offering different ones? What does our recruiting look like? We've, as you mentioned, we've got a very diverse student body.
We're a 61% minority at our university. Our demographics exactly mirror the state of Texas. And so, and we've got a lot of first generation students here.
So how can we, how can we continue to recruit those kinds of students and have them be successful here, and then ultimately to graduate them? We'll have another record freshman class this year, probably about 8,000, maybe 8,500 freshmen this year. But our goal has shifted from getting, from having the biggest freshman class every year to having the biggest graduating class every year. So those two commissions are meant purposefully, not in a way to kind of co-opt anybody, but it align ourselves with our values.
Our values are both teaching and education and changing people's lives and the research mission as well.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I love that. I love, I love that you can hold sort of two thoughts in your head at one time and have the organization sort of move and, and to improve at everything that you do. It actually aligns really nicely with the way that we're thinking about the Carnegie work because we'll certainly keep a, a classification that's around, you know, degree profiles and degrees and, and research, but we're also creating this new special and economic mobility classification, you know, which really is going to be much more student outcome centered and really sort of evaluate institutions by, by how they're doing on, you know, social and economic mobility measures.
And thank you for clarifying that these are groupings and not rankings. And maybe if the two of us say it enough times, John, maybe you can help too, then maybe somebody will believe it one of these days because I feel like it's the, it's the hardest part of this. Can I ask one more question?
SPEAKER_02
It does, I just, sorry to chime in, but it does feel like rankings though, when you say here are new peer institutions, which are aspirational peers and we're not quite yet there yet. So I get why people think better now because you're compared with other people, but you know, it really, we, every university has to figure out who we are. And then as I said earlier, be excellent in everything that you do.
And that means sometimes jettison some things that aren't working, like things you tried to do. And, and if, if becoming an R1, what, if we weren't capable of that, then we should jettison the plan and say, that's just not who we are. We're this, we're, we should be proud of that and make that the best, make us be the best R2 and whatever.
But we're so close, we're, our trajectory is so close, I feel like we just have to make a few changes to get there and invest a little bit in ways we haven't done before. So yeah, great point.
SPEAKER_03
One of the things that's sort of interesting about research, and I think it sometimes gets lost, is, you know, the, the investment in research can have a lot of positive impacts for, for students and for undergraduate students. Are there ways in which you're sort of thinking about your investments in both the research expenditure side, potentially on the research degree side, and aligning that with
SPEAKER_02
some of the student success measures? Well, yeah, whenever I talk about this run to R1, I often talk about the first thing that I do is talk about why are we running into R1. And so, actually put together a video for our Board of Regents, so we're going to release next week. And you might, I'll send you a link to it so you can see it.
But if we talk about that, like, why are we doing this? How does this improve the kinds of faculty we're attracting? It says, it means we'll attract, continue to attract high quality faculty to come to our university. And those high quality faculty interact with our students. And by the way, because we haven't had a large graduate student population, a large number of undergraduates are actually engaged in the research process.
So how do we continue to engage our undergraduates when we grow our graduate student body? How do we continue to engage our undergraduates in the research enterprise? And how can we recruit more of our very diverse undergraduate student body into master's programs than ultimately the PhD programs? And what is the pathway for that as well? We think that becoming an R1 institution makes, also increases the value of the degree for our alumni, who then, again, see ourselves, see themselves aligned with other peer institutions that they think are, have high prestige as well. So there's all kinds of benefits out there. But you're right, you have to be careful.
This is the thing that I worry about the most, is chasing metrics with investments. And, you know, people do that with other, you know, magazine rankings and so on. And say, well, we've, we've reversed engineered the rankings, and we know that if we invest in these three things, that'll increase our score or such and such a thing.
And I've, I've resisted that greatly here, because I said, well, let's just do what we know we must do. And what, and let's, where are we short and where should we invest? And part of that is there's, you know, as good as we've been in student success, our retention numbers, we hit a record this past year of 80.2%. But that means almost 20% of our freshman class didn't come back. So what, where can we invest there? And, and so that's why the investment is in research, but also in the student success area as well has to be asked, have to be able to do both.
Yeah. And Kelly, I wanted to ask you about
SPEAKER_01
something that I think actually ties in kind of nicely with this, what we've just been talking about, the, the, how you embrace the research role, but keep it consistent with the identity institution and your, the other things you do very well. But you also mentioned earlier, it's nice to be in a state where they're investing in higher education. And one of the things that's sort of come up recently, this idea of the Texas University Fund, and which is a, well, frankly, I'll let you explain it a little bit, because I have a feeling you'll explain it better than I will.
But can you tell our listeners a little bit about what the Texas University Fund is and how that ties into these
SPEAKER_02
efforts you're undertaking? Yeah, some good context here is that, you know, at the, at the founding of the state, they created the state founders created something called a permanent university fund, which funneled money from West Texas counties that back then were basically cattle ranches and, and created push money into something called a permanent university fund. And those funds were originally going to University of Texas, but then ultimately the Texas A&M and then those two systems have benefited from the proceeds. Ultimately, they found oil in that land and turned out to be an incredible investment by the state to do this.
And those two universities and the systems have really benefited greatly from that. And so over the years, there's been efforts of trying to put other universities into the permanent university or let them get a cut of that fund because it generates enormous amount of money for those two systems. And then it's been politically unpalatable.
And so more recently, the effort has been to create a separate fund for other what, what the, what the state is called emerging research universities. And so they have taken part of this enormous surplus that Texas economic engine is running on all eight cylinders. And so $34 billion of surplus this year, they took somewhere, the numbers are still not certain yet somewhere between $3.
5 and $4.5 billion will be applied to something called the Texas University fund. One third of the revenue will go to University of Houston, one third of Texas Tech, and then University of North Texas and Texas State will split the remaining one third.
So we'll get one sixth each. And this will be the first time the state has made that kind of investment in those four schools just for the research enterprise. This isn't just our allocation.
These are monies that will go directly to the research enterprise. And, and the goal for the governor and for the legislature is for us to have increasing number of universities listed in the top 100 in the research classification or rankings, because we are, I mean, we're bursting at the seams and companies who are moving to Texas, many of them from states that are, that have universities that are ranked in the top 100. So we're generating knowledge in places like California and Florida and so on.
But we're not doing as well here. That's something the legislature says we can do a better job of. And so the kinds of resources that will now be split, I don't know where the number is going to actually fall for, for Texas State, but it could be an infusion of 25 or 30 or 40 million a year upwards.
I've seen upwards of $100 million a year over time, just for research. And that allows me to hire postdocs to, to invest in strategic hiring clusters, to provide stipends and tuition waivers for, for top notch graduate students now who are in an open market saying, well, here's what this university is offering. What are you offering? I'm going to go over there because we're offering more.
I can't compete very easily in that element right now. But now I can buying or paying for infrastructure, new buildings and new laboratories. Those kinds of things will come along to that because we now have some resources we never had before.
And that's remarkable in a, in a state to see a state investing like that. Now they had been doing this for a while. They had something called the N-RUF, which is a National Research University Fund, which meant once you became a, a, an R1 institution, you got part of the N-RUF money.
This actually gives you money to help you get and become an R1 institution. So it's a, it's a different kind of deal. So the effort before was fund yourself, use your resources to become R1.
Now shift it to, you know, here's some, here's some funding, make wise decisions and go off there and help us help the state of Texas
SPEAKER_01
get better. It really is, sounds like a remarkable, not just an act of support from the state, but a remarkable opportunity for Texas State and the other institution. So obviously something else that I know Mushdach and I will be keeping a close eye and keeping track of as, as you move forward and, and that run to R1.
But we're going to let you get back to doing just that and managing an actual campus that requires a bit more of your time of attention than probably this podcast does. But Kelly, thank you so much for joining us in, and sharing your story and your vision for the institution and the work that you're doing there. Thanks so much guys.
I really enjoyed it.
SPEAKER_02
And Mushdach, come back to visit John, you're welcome anytime come to San Marcos. Definitely do it.
SPEAKER_01
It's beautiful there. Yeah, I'll take you up on that. Absolutely.
One of the most beautiful
SPEAKER_02
campuses in the country. It's got a river running right through it's the headwaters of San Marcos River and Spring Lake is right there. It's just unbelievable.
You can see our original building in the background there by my slide there. So that's what our first building looked like. It looks a lot different from that now, but we're really proud of it.
We think we're doing great things. Thank you so much, John and Mushdach for inviting me. Thanks, Kelly.
Thanks so much for coming on.
SPEAKER_00
As always, you can check out earlier episodes and subscribe to edu on Apple, Google podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to your podcast. For show notes and links to the resources mentioned in the episode, you can go to our website at acenet.edu backslash podcast.
Well, there, please take a short survey to let us know how we're doing. You can also email us at podcast at acenet.edu to give us suggestions on upcoming shows and guests.
And finally, a very big thank you to the producers who helped pull this podcast together. Laurie Arnston, Audrey Hamilton, Malcolm Moore, Anthony Trueheart, Rebecca Morris, Jack Nicholson, and Fatma Gham. They do an incredible job making this happen and making John Mushdach and I sound as good as possible.
Finally, thank you so much to all of you for listening. Bye.