The Role of the Undergraduate Population in a Research-Intensive University

Link: http://UBdumb.com

In short, they pay the bills! The undergraduate student population provides a certain level of financial stability through payment of their tuition and fees and through state subsidies based on the head-count. University reputations are slow to build and slow to lose; thus, undergraduates will continue to be attracted to a school that has historically enjoyed a strong reputation even in times its undergraduate and other programs are suffering. This provides a type of economic inertia that helps stabilize university budgets and permits realistic projections of future expenditures. UB needs a larger undergraduate population to provide this type of stability in funding and 10,000 new students is not ultimately an unrealistic number.

Good graduate students in strong programs are not typically tuition payers -- they are in fact cheap labor (e.g., the proverbial “ghosts in the machine”). For their efforts we owe them tuition remission and a stipend, ever so inadequate compensation for their talents and long hours of dedicated work. They are not revenue-generating sources directly; they financially cost the university in many cases. The undergraduate population remains our main source of stable revenue and they need better “care and feeding.” Yes, our strong graduate programs and graduate students contribute immensely to our reputation and they help us to obtain better and better external funding, but they don't pay the bulk of the bills. And good graduate students in strong graduate programs obviously contribute importantly to our undergraduate educational mission, but they don't pay the bills.

Of course Albany politics can make the pay-off variable through unilateral changes in policy, but undergraduate tuition revenue is still more stable than funding from grant agencies and the professors that hold these grants and contracts. Research-intensive professors are known to abruptly pull-up stakes and leave, taking with them their funding and the all so important indirect costs associated with their large grants. (Remember Jeffrey Skolnick, founding director of the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, the “rock star" of bioinformatics? He one of a long list of people holding special titles such as "Distinguished Professor" that has abruptly left town.) Many high-profile professors are finicky, others just constantly shopping for a better deal; many have left UB abruptly and many more will continue to leave in the future. This is NOT a stable source of revenue, even in at times it is extremely lucrative. UB simply can't bank on this income. Even the University planners must realize this; otherwise why expand the undergraduate population so dramatically with UB2020? After all, you can pretty much count on at least some undergraduates competing with faculty for parking spaces.

Indirect costs generated from grants and contracts obviously contribute importantly to the University's operating budget and subsidize the cost of our graduate programs. In fact the indirect cost revenue appears to be the major reason the administration is interested in “research.” They’ve seemingly forgotten that the real purpose of research is to advance knowledge not generate revenue for university administrators to spend on their favorite projects, be it football, dormitories, or downtown campus buildings. Research money is the TOOL not the objective of any legitimate research program -- the pursuit of knowledge remains the objective which sometimes costs money and sometimes does not.

UB needs a better plan for building its undergraduate population and not simply the fantasy of build the physical space (and fill it will ‘instructors’), and they will come. Quality is of the utmost importance and UB’s current policies simply leave too many professors out of the classroom and fill the vacancies with poorly prepared graduate-student instructors. UB needs a real plan, with a workable approach to building its undergraduate student population based on attracting quality students to Buffalo for study at a premier institution. Students need to get their ‘money’s worth’ and more, and then they’ll be flocking to UB from across the region and perhaps even across the country.

UB has some strong graduate programs carried largely by the efforts of individual faculty and we have many outstanding faculty members who through their research and creative work contribute immensely to developing a better, stronger reputation for our University. Indeed UB is prominently on the ‘map’ in several areas. The administration needs to learn how to facilitate its faculty and not just dictate new directives based on the desired financial outcome of its faculty's work. Some scholarly activities bring in money, some do not, but they all contribute to building an outstanding university that undergraduate and graduate students alike seek to fulfill their educational objectives. Build that, and they will come!

Reallocating funding from the instructional core into ‘project UB2020’ has been to the detriment of undergraduate and graduate student instruction. In the hurry to build the buildings and to recruit a few ‘star-caliber’ new faculty members, UB has pillaged its very faculty and resources that make a university a university. The University needs to pay more attention to the “care and feedings” of its regular faculty—better salaries (not limiting pay raises just to administrative favorites), better working conditions (That's my office?!), and a better feeling of being appreciated and valued as a University at Buffalo professor, even for faculty members not bringing in the grant money (croak, croak) UB too highly prizes: then “they will come.”

The title UB often uses to describe its perception of itself gives away the administration's ulterior motives: "major research-intensive university" obviously ignores the contributions of the "arts" to the "College of Arts and Sciences" which comprises the single largest portion of our undergraduate population. Why not simply describe UB as a "premier university" or as a "leading university." The descriptor "research-intensive" defines its NEW mission which ultimately is linked with generating revenue from the indirect costs associated with external funding sources. (The passive acceptance of such "New-Speak" around UB has been phenomenal.) Hence, it has become the job of faculty to raise money for the administration (i.e., seek external sources of funding) which is not the job most of us signed on for when we were hired or is it the mission of any credible leading university.

Of course the undergraduate student population does much more than just contribute their tuition money to our endeavors at the University -- they enrich our academic environment by stimulating our thinking and energizing us with their contagious enthusiasm, demand that we explain our latest ideas in simple, logical terms that even a journal or grant reviewer might understand, keep us sharp at fielding questions which come from directions often impossible to anticipate, and enrich our lives in many more ways including helping us remember that knowledge needs to be effectively communicated to those whom would develop pragmatic applications of often very esoteric work and to those whom further build upon what we've 'learned' in our lifetimes' commitment to the pursuit of knowledge. In keeping with the administration's apparent objective of expanding the undergraduate population under "project UB2020," this commentary focused on the financial aspects of their contributions. And for that we faculty are also appreciative.