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- On his letter of March 17, 2006, Fr. Wildes informs us that in April, the Office of the Provost will post “all the data that will be used to guide decision-making.” These data are posted on April 7, 2006. They consist of six tables with summaries. A Senate subcommittee responding to SCAP analyzes these six tables in light of a proposed set of Program Review Criteria. This subcommittee counts thirty indicators of the eight criteria being discussed and finds that the data posted by the provost only provides information on TEN of these THIRTY indicators. These data are very obviously not “all the data that will be used to guide decision-making.”
- Table 2, posted by the Provost Office, counts majors and minors by class. This table has out-right mistakes and misleading information. For example, the number of Computer Science/Computer Information Systems majors in A&S is reported to be 26 when a more accurate count puts this number at 37. The terminated Communication sequences appear to have only 78 out of the 442 majors, but half of the Communications majors (221) are unaccounted for because they have not declared a sequence. Also, Education is listed as having 35 majors. However, the Education minor is more of an integral part of the Education program than other minor programs at the university and thus should be given more importance.
- Table 3, posted by the Provost Office, counts number of graduates in each program between the 94-95 and 04-05 academic years. While consistently doing so, this table negatively misrepresents the average number of majors in each of the Communication sequences over these 11 years because the Communication sequences did not exist in the 94-95 school year. Another example of this is Forensic Chemistry (FC). To say that FC graduated an average .8 students over the last 11 years is inaccurate, since FC is a relatively new and growing program.
- Table 3, posted by the Provost Office, makes A&S look very bad. Take for example the year 04-5. This table states that A&S has 60 programs of study and a total of 534 graduates, or 8.9 graduates per program of study. In contrast, Business looks much more efficient. On the same year they graduated 178 students on 6 programs, or 29.7 graduates per program of study. However, many of the A&S programs or sequences cost no additional monies and vary only slightly from other sequences (Chemistry Liberal Arts and Forensic Chemistry, for example).
- Table 5 makes a big deal about class sizes being less than 20. This could be spun both positively and negatively. The spin here is negative, even though many of the programs with “below 20” enrollments were untouched by Pathways.
- Table 6 attempts a comparison of instructional cost by discipline using the Delaware study. We have found several inconsistencies and flaws in this study and recommend that this table be completely re-done using Faculty input to ensure accuracy. Some examples of errors: course releases from grants are not accounted for (this would lower a department’s relative cost), CIP codes have been chosen without consultation with departments (this can result in departments being compared unfavorably with different and cheaper programs), Loyola’s numbers are for the 2004-2005 academic year while other universities numbers are from the 2003-2004 academic year.
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