November 19, 2015

November 19, 2015 Tuition & Fee Student Forum Meeting Minutes Location: UC Denman Room Time: 1 p.m.

Panel Members: Dr. Ricardo Romo University President John Frederick, Vice President for Academic Affairs and University Provost Lisa Blazer, Senior Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Lenora Champan, Associate Vice President for Financial Affairs Sam Gonzales, Vice President for Student Affairs

The following questions were asked of the panel:

1. UTSA just raised over $188 million in our previous capital campaign. My question concerns scholarships for the school band. I know we are the only school currently in the state that does not provide scholarships for their band participants. I know Texas State, their President provides a scholarship of $336,000 per year for their band to be distributed amongst them. Are there any plans in the future, especially with these tuition increases, to provide a scholarship for the band?

Dr. Romo Response: Yes. There are 250 members in the band. Band members qualify for scholarship help. We don’t have sufficient money to provide everybody with scholarships. But, 70% of our students receive financial aid; 70% of the band probably receive financial aid; 50% of our students receive Pell grants. Maybe 50% of the band members have Pell grants. I want to clarify any myths here. There are a lot of people in the band who are on scholarship. We are a young university. Older schools receive endowments. What I am proud of is that one-third of the $188 million raised, goes to scholarships. One third, $63 million will be used by you and future students. And I will put that money up against Texas State. Did they raise $63 million for scholarships? What would you rather have? $60 million for everybody? Or $336,000 for the band? Think about it.

2. I am one of the people who are not on a Pell grant, but I do have some academic scholarships. If you do raise the tuition, what was that going to be going toward? Wouldn’t it be better to just keep the tuition lower rather than trying to add more scholarships and raise the tuition?

Dr Romo Response: If we raise the tuition, where is it going? Number one, faculty. We don’t have enough faculty. We have 26 students to each professor. UT Austin has a faculty to student ratio of 18 to one. In business courses, the ratio is 50:1. So if you are asking me, are you going to spend all this money on scholarships? The answer is no. We need to put 1 | P a g e some more faculty in the classroom. This is not to build up our scholarship fund. It will also be used for operations. In the state of Texas, there are twelve universities ahead of us with higher tuition. We’re not trying to beat them. But there are only four universities ahead of us in reputation. We are number 5 in the state. The resources of those four schools ahead of us: UT Austin, A&M, Rice, UT Dallas, if we are going to stay steady and keep our position so that your degree has worth, then we are going to have to use some more resources. If we don’t raise tuition over the next eight years, there will be a lot of people happy because they are saving $200, but their degree will not gain value.

3. When you talk about resources, we have a $240 athletic fee. When multiplied by 30,000 students, that’s over $7 million dollars. Can you talk about that?

Dr. Romo Response: That’s a good question: We have $7 million in fees; what are we doing with it? Some of the fees, you all approved: you wanted the Rec Center. And you wanted to be there 24/7. We can’t open 24/7, but we are open enough hours that we have to hire 200 people. If you hire 200 students to help in the Rec Center, it’s because you need them. You can say, that’s not fair, I don’t use the Rec Center much, but students in a democracy voted in consensus to have a Rec Center. And I’m glad they did. I think the Rec Center is a good portion of the student engagement. So, it may seem like a lot of money to you, $7 million in fees. But our budget is $500 million. That’s how much we spend to run this university. $7 million is not even 3 percent of what is needed to run this institution. We have $493 million from other resources to run this institution.

Sam Gonzales Response: Across the country, there are about 28 schools that actually make positive cash flow out of about 238. Why are schools putting up lots of dollars for athletics if only 28 of them have a positive cash flow? There are a number of reasons, for example athletics provides tremendous visibility to the institution. It’s very interesting to note that when we added football here, and we used to raise $8-$10 million/year, that is up to $30/million/ year. That is very symptomatic of what happens when you add major programs like that. Can I say that all of that is because of football? No. But we can say that we know that the visibility that was created from that did play and important role.

4. Are any of these fees going to be used to increase Advisor literacy?

Dr. Romo Response: If we need advisor literacy, we hope the funds will be used in the right way. And by raising that question, you are helping us. Because I don’t use an advisor. I don’t ride the bus. If you tell me that the bus runs late, I need to know that. I can’t come up with the solution if I don’t know about it. We do have some folks on the panel who are in the advising business who will answer more questions.

Dr. Frederick Response: The increase does include funding for DegreeWorks as well as some advising initiatives to assist with providing more accurate advising information to assist students to graduate on time and with a degree that is valuable in the workplace.

2 | P a g e 5. Is there a fee in this proposal for technologies that would reduce environmental impact, reduce carbon emissions, which will allow students/UTSA to showcase these technologies or have more impact on this type of infrastructure?

Dr. Frederick Response: We do currently have the Green fee, which has been entirely student generated and students have decided how it should be used. As of today, we just hired a new Sustainability Director for the campus. So I am hopeful we can continue to pursue those sorts of initiatives. Whether there will be another Green Fee, I can’t say. I believe there were some provisions for sunsetting the Green Fee, and whether it will be brought back or not I can’t say. However, the university continues to be very serious about sustainability and the technologies that will help us save energy and be more environmental.

6. Dr. Romo, the student activities here are awesome, and the veteran support is incredible. But we are here for an education. And I have noticed that with this increase and the push for Tier One there seems to have been disconnect in providing necessary training to the staff and faculty in regards to properly teaching. Is any money being set aside to help with the Teaching and Learning Center to make sure the resources are available to the staff?

Dr. Romo Response: This a listening forum, and I appreciate all the things you are bringing up. We benefit by you telling us. It is something that is a great concern for us, to have all of our teachers at the highest level. Some of them have had less experience than others, and as consequence, they absolutely can use some training education. We do have a “center” for helping faculty do better in the classroom.

Sandy Welch Response: We actually are going to be starting relatively cost-free ways to help faculty with ways to improve teaching. Sometimes whether they know they need to or not. We do have observations at the request of the faculty member or the department chair to see how the faculty member is teaching, what presentation and reaction styles with students are, and also if they are using the time wisely. We want students to leave the classroom having learned something. We are also seeking ways to have faculty engage more with students. Right now they are either very engaged, sort of engaged, to not as engaged. Student evaluations of faculty reside in my office, and for the most part, our faculty average a 4 out of 5 on that scale, which is a B. And the ones who don’t score as well, we are working with. We are also encouraging mentoring, taking more time outside the classroom to invite students to come see them, visit with them and learn about careers.

Dr. Frederick Resonse: Right now we have a lot of different facilities for helping faculty with different aspects of teaching, including the ones you’ve heard about through the Teaching and Learning Center, but also through technologies like helping faculty put course materials on-line, Blackboard and other things. One thing we are looking at is how to consolidate all those services; we need more faculty involved in them. This year we have implemented a new program where every new faculty member should have access to a 3 | P a g e mentor to help with teaching and research programs, and faculty are reporting very good experiences with this program.

7. Dr. Blazer, how come students under 24 are classified as dependent and still have an EFC though they live on their own?

Lisa Blazer Response: This is a federal requirement on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. I’m not sure I can answer the “why”. What I can tell you is per federal aid regulations, anyone under the age of 24 is classified as a dependent student. Even if a student is living on their own and parents don’t have the resources to help them. However, if there are extenuating circumstances where perhaps you do not have any contact with your parents, you can come to the Financial Aid office (you will have to share some detail of what is going on in your family), and if you have no contact with your parents, we can do an override. But it does have to be pretty extreme circumstances, and not just because “they don’t want to”. Once you get to graduate school, you will be independent regardless if you are under age 24.

8. The three-peat charge should go back to the original amount of $1000. Why did the amount change?

Lenora Chapman Response: The three-peat changed about two years ago, and actually UTSA’s charge was the lowest. The reason the fee increased is because after you have taken a class two times, the state no longer reimburses for that cost. So for those students, we are no longer being reimbursed by the state and tuition is the only revenue generated. So we would be losing money. Also, as part of the GRIP initiative to graduate students in four years, it is an incentive to complete their coursework. If a student is repeating a course three times, it is a disincentive that we wanted to have.

9. It is somewhat difficult to form an informed decision on whether or not you are in favor of the proposed tuition increase when these proposals aren’t outlined in a line-item fashion. Some of the language is contradictory and somewhat vague in the planned spending of the tuition increase.

Dr. Romo Response: We would need some specifics.

Lenora Chapman Response: Have you gone to the website that has the detail from our Tuition & Fee Committee meetings? Every single fee that is proposed had a 20 minute presentation with more details; what exactly they were going to use the increase for. This was done over three meetings about 2.5 hours each where we discussed each initiative and each increase. That is available for everybody to view on the website.

Student Response: If you are referring to the website with the hyperlink that was included announcing this meeting, yes, I did visit that website and I did look at the PowerPoints. There are bullet points stating some of the items that more money would like to be spent

4 | P a g e on, but it doesn’t state the dollar amount. For example, “increase in retaining key staff” was one of the bullet points. What does that mean?

Dr. Frederick Response: That is an individual case-by-case thing when we talk about retaining key staff. So it is very difficult to put a specific dollar amount on what that would be. It’s a little bit easier when talking about something like buying equipment; we can put a specific dollar amount on that. We know, for example, the cost of upgrading the network. We do have a more direct number for that. But for some things, I don’t think it’s possible to provide you a down to the dollar description of what it would cost to retain that staff. But it is a concern that we have, because we are losing staff. A good example last year is that we lost about 20% of our advisory staff because Alamo Colleges was paying a lot more money. So we lost advisors to Alamo Colleges. We had to step in with about $600,000 more in salary money just to keep the advisors have and to refill those position.

10. Alluding to Dr. Romo’s comment about the need for more faculty, I was wondering if there are any colleges that have more of an intense need for faculty.

Dr. Romo Response: Some of our peers have close to 2000 faculty members. We are at about 1300. Houston and Tech have over 2000. Our goal is to maintain position with our peers. We do not want to lose ground. So our commitment to our students is to increase the number of classes and the availability of those classes our students need to graduate. If we had more personnel, we could offer more classes. We are very fortunate that we have a very committed faculty, and many of them teach very large classes, way beyond what you normally find across the state. Our students are very patient. The way we improve is to understand that to run an institution with 30,000 students, you can’t have a campus built for 21,000, as we do. And you can’t have a campus that is staffed for 15,000. We are committed to address the priority needs, and a pressing need are faculty members.

11. Dr. Romo, I don’t want to take a shot at you, but I know you make $370,000, and we are talking about resources and cutting back, and increasing tuition affects me. What about cutting salaries?

Dr. Romo Response: Sure, we can do it. We can cut my salary and others’. But what you’re going to have after a while is people who will leave. And then when you try to hire somebody, you won’t be able to hire qualified personnel at those lower salaries. So the bottom line, is you can have people make the sacrifice, but it will only be a drop in the bucket. When you look at solutions, they have to be sustainable. I can give up my salary completely, but the next person who comes in will not work for free. My sense is, if you are going to pile on responsibility on people, and when you go out into the workforce, when they pile on responsibility on you, then they should pay you.

12. Dr. Romo, I have a concern about part-time students being excluded from scholarships and other opportunities.

5 | P a g e Dr. Romo Response: Thank you. You bring up issues that we may not be aware of. I think the best answer is going to come from those who do this on a daily basis.

Lisa Blazer Response: You are right that a lot of scholarships require full-time attendance, and that comes from the donors. But one of the things I think we could do is look at seeking out some resources for part-time students. I will write that down on my list. But one of the things that needs to be understood about how financial aid works, is for grants that we do award, part-time students still get those, but they are at a prorated amount. Unfortunately, every other grant but Pell, if you are enrolled below six hours, we cannot give you that due to regulations. We do try to take that into account and make adjustments when a student is part-time. I will explore to see if there are part-time scholarships available and if so, try and make those known to students.

Dr. Frederick Response: One of the things we are trying to do is to help part-time students be closer to full-time so that they can finish their degree sooner. And I know that there are sometimes financial reasons why a student can’t go to school more than six hours a semester. But to the extent that we can help them with other financial aid programs to help them accelerate their studies, we believe that in the long run that is best for the student because once they have their degree they will qualify for higher salaries and greater economic prosperity. And the longer it takes to earn their degree, the more it costs them.

Sam Gonzales Response: The vast majority of student service areas: counseling, health, disability services, all of those service operations provide the same services for a student who is enrolled in 3 hours as they would for a full-time student. So there is no distinction in terms of service.

NOTE: The following proposed fees, even if approved on our campus and approved by UT System, will have to come back for student vote next fall, for implementation in Fall 2018:

1. Athletics 2. Campus Rec 3. University Center 4. International education Fee

6 | P a g e