Annual Campus Report 2006-2007 | Office of the Provost | Leadership

2006-2007 Outcomes

The following is a summary of outcomes on key institutional metrics:

OSU graduated 4,050 students with a total of 4,221 degrees. The graduating class included 3,293 baccalaureate degrees, 621 master's degrees, 179 doctoral degrees, and 128 professional degrees in Pharmacy and Veterinary Medicine. Colleges awarding the largest number of degrees were Liberal Arts, Science, Engineering, and Health and Human Sciences. Additionally, 190 degrees were awarded by OSU-Cascades Campus, including 165 baccalaureate degrees and 25 master's degrees. Comparable figures for OSU and OSU-Cascades Campus for 2005-2006 were 4,144 students with 4,297 degrees and 189 degrees, respectively.
New grants and contracts awarded to OSU faculty totaled $185 million, and research expenditures were $191 million. These compare to $209 million in new grants and contracts, and $193 million in research expenditures for 2005-2006. The largest contributors to the research enterprise continued to be the Colleges of Agricultural Sciences, Science, Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, and Engineering. Licensing income from technology transfer efforts brought in nearly $2.5 million, an increase from last year's total of $2.13 million, and the University reported 54 invention disclosures, up from 48 the previous year.
Our Extension Service programs continued to reach an increasing number of Oregonians through faculty and volunteers. For each Extension faculty FTE, 124 volunteers participated in Extension Service programs, an increase from 99 in 2005. The 4-H Youth Development Program alone reached 126,333 youth during 2006. The academic programs offered through the Extended Campus continued to grow, both in headcount (6,193 unduplicated) and in student credit hours (45,484). This represents 4.74% and 9.86% increases in these two metrics over 2005-2006. The number of on-campus students taking Extended Campus courses also showed a significant increase, reflecting both the fiscal constraints of offering sufficient regular courses to meet demand, and the convenience of Extended Campus course offerings.
OSU continued to attract significant private support in the final year of the silent phase of our comprehensive fundraising campaign. During 2006-2007, the OSU Foundation received contributions totaling $58 million, an increase from $53 million in 2005-2006, as reported under the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) guidelines. The total raised for 2006-2007 was nearly $77 million, including pledges and grants. OSU's composite endowment now stands at $434 million, which includes $386 million managed by the OSU Foundation. The OSU Foundation's endowment portfolio returned an exceptional 17.2%, gross of fees, in fiscal year 2007.
Many of our programs and faculty were recognized for excellence by the academic community. The college and division annual reports detail these achievements. Listed below are examples of recognition at the program level reported during 2006-2007.
1. The November-December 2006 issue of Science Watch ranked the College of Agricultural Sciences as number one in the nation among the top 100 funded U.S. universities in agricultural sciences for citation impact of published research in the field. This follows an earlier global Thompson study that showed the College of Agricultural Sciences as ninth worldwide in citations impact in agricultural sciences.
2. A survey of 53 university forestry programs in the United States and Canada published in 2006 in the Journal of Forestry ranked the College of Forestry first in total number of professional publications, first in number of citations from those publications, and first in perceptions of academic colleagues as the top forestry program in North America.
3. U.S. News and World Report in 2007 ranked the Oregon Master's of Public Health Program in community health, a collaboration between OSU, Oregon Health and Science University, and Portland State University, second in the nation.
4. Conservation biology research at OSU is ranked in a new survey as the best of 315 such programs in the U.S. and Canada. The ranking done by the journal Conservation Biology, the leading professional journal in the field, points out that OSU had the second highest number of publications, the greatest number of citations reflecting the scientific significant of publications, and the number one ranking overall.
5. Oregon Sea Grant is the nation's top Sea Grant program among 30 university-based Sea Grant programs nationwide.
6. The Nuclear Engineering program is ranked 9th in the nation by U.S. News and World Report.

The university metrics and college metrics are posted at http://leadership.oregonstate.edu/strategic-plan/. We have included a new report at this Web address for academic units that provides five-year trends in enrollments and graduation, research, and private and state (Education and General Fund) support. Also posted at this Web site is the 2006-2007 Strategic Plan Implementation Update.

Though not an "outcome" in the same sense as the metrics described above, I would like to comment on our student enrollment, as it is an outcome in terms of our fiscal portfolio, securing State support, and for the mix and diversity of students who are enrolled at OSU. The University enrollment, based on the fall term enrollments reported by the Oregon University System, was 19,362, a 0.7% increase over the previous year. We have focused in the past couple of years on increasing our non-resident enrollment, while holding steady the resident enrollments (because there have been no state resources for enrollment growth the past few biennia.) For 2006-2007, the year-to-year change in enrollments was an increase of 6.4% in non-resident enrollment, and a 0.4% decrease in resident enrollment. A total of 935 international students enrolled at OSU, a 0.1% decrease over the previous year. While our strategy for resident enrollment will be shaped by the outcome of the legislative process, we will continue to focus on increasing non-resident and international enrollments. OSU-Cascades has experienced a 7.9% increase in FTE this fall. The headcount of traditional students, 20-24 years of age, increased by 10.8%.

Review of 2006-2007 Agenda

In my 2005-2006 campus report, I shared the following agenda for 2006-2007 with the campus community:

Budgets and Capital Campaign: Start redistribution of base budgets per budget rebasing; complete an incremental budget distribution plan; conduct program reviews for two support units; and revise development priorities in preparation for the open phase of the capital campaign.

Student Engagement and Success: Develop plans for first-year undergraduate education experience; initiate the University Council on Student Engagement and Experience to provide guidance and oversight regarding student engagement activities; and work on classroom renovation and process-related improvements connected with registration and classroom activities.

Research and Outreach: Complete work of the Centers, Institutes, and Programs (CIPs) Task Force; convene a President's Commission on Oceans, Coastal and Earth Systems Futures; and continue work initiated by the OSU Extension Service to address needs of an increasingly diverse urban and suburban population in the Portland metro area.

Community and Diversity: Complete the University Diversity Action Plan and provide training for individuals serving on faculty searches on best search practices.

Budget and Capital Campaign Activities

Balancing 2005-2007 Budget: As you may recall, the 2005-2007 biennium did not provide adequate resources to fund salary increases and to compensate for cost increases resulting from health care and retirement expenses. The outcome was a redirection of $10 million from existing University operations to fund benefit and salary increases. This was further complicated by the State Board mandate to hold the University's fund balances within a specified target and our own commitment to minimize the impact on students. While the process was not simple or without its challenges, we were able to redirect the $10 million from existing budgets and hold our University's fund balance at 9.8% for the fiscal year ending June, 2007. This is a remarkable accomplishment for the campus community, and for which the University administration is thankful to the college and unit administrators and faculty who made those changes possible. What is remarkable is that in some cases, such as in the Division of Student Affairs, this process served as an impetus to examine the units' priorities and led to key structural changes that will have a long-term positive impact on the operations of those units.
Incremental Budget Model: The University Budget Committee developed an Incremental Budget Allocation Model for use in conjunction with budget rebasing to distribute incremental revenue and costs. After discussion by and input from the campus community, the allocation model has been adopted and will be used starting in the 2008-2009 academic year. We will use the current year to run a "shadow system" to demonstrate how the distribution of funds will be impacted by key unit-based productivity measures. The Incremental Budget Allocation Model is posted at http://leadership.oregonstate.edu/provost/initiatives
Support Unit Program Reviews: We are in the process of conducting program reviews for the Graduate School and Facilities Services. We expect to complete these reviews by the end of Fall 2007. We will initiate program reviews for Information Services and for Academic Affairs/International Programs during the 2007-2008 academic year.
Capital Campaign: As I mentioned at the start of this report, we had an another successful year in fundraising ahead of the official launch of the University's comprehensive Capital Campaign, including completion of fundraising from private sources to qualify for state XI-G bonds to build a $62 million Linus Pauling Science Center. While the priorities for the campaign have been in place for the last two years, we reviewed and finalized those plans this summer. Case statements for colleges and support units are continuing to be refined and will be distributed in conjunction with the public phase of the Campaign. The University has developed and implemented an extensive marketing campaign to promote the University—the work of our faculty and students, and support the capital campaign.

Student Engagement and Success

Consistent with the budget rebasing plan, we started the process of redirecting $7.5 million of existing resources to the base budgets of four colleges (Liberal Arts, Science, Health and Human Sciences, and Business) that are under-funded relative to their mission of providing the core educational component of undergraduate education. The redistribution will be completed over a five-year period. During the last year, we allocated $800,000 to Liberal Arts, $1.0 million to Science, $200,000 to Health and Human Sciences, and $500,000 to Business. Resources for the rebasing came primarily from a reduction in the University subsidy to Athletics and from overhead charges to Auxiliaries and Statewide Public Services to reflect the services provided to those activities by the University.

We continued the renovation of classrooms and adjoining spaces. We completed the renovation of the first floor of Gilkey Hall, and we are in the process of remodeling the first two floors of Strand Agriculture Hall. One recent development is the completion of fundraising from private resources for a Linus Pauling Science Center. Once completed, the building will provide classroom and laboratory space needed for undergraduate and graduate student teaching in chemistry, in addition to providing much needed research capacity in nutritional health.

We now have degree partnership programs with 16 of 17 Oregon community colleges. We worked with other OUS institutions to implement the ATLAS system that will ease students' progress from one Oregon school to another. Students can use this statewide system to see how course credits transfer among community colleges and OUS universities, and to conduct degree audits online.

The University Council on Student Engagement and Experience (UCSEE) was created to guide the University in implementing its student engagement and student success agenda. The UCSEE started by reviewing reports and recommendations from past activities and surveys, including the Student Research Experience Task Force (2005-2006) and the results for OSU from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). The UCSSE made broad recommendations to promote a campus culture that values teaching, learning, and student success. During the first half of the 2007-2008 academic year, the UCSSE will develop and recommend an action plan for implementing targeted activities to enhance this critical area for the University.

The supplemental instructional program in mathematics has proven to be quite successful in retaining students in the math sequence, and we were able to attract funding through the Capital Campaign to offer and expand this program for the next three years. To date, 82 student-athletes have participated in the Bridge Encouraging Successful Transition (BEST) program which was first developed and offered to incoming student-athletes during the summer of 2006. The program is geared toward making the transition easier for incoming freshmen and transfers to OSU through a comprehensive array of programs and services for incoming student-athletes. The UCSSE will be evaluating the feasibility of expanding this program to a broader student population at OSU.

Following the recommendations of an external evaluation committee, as well as input from our faculty, we have decided to move the admission function for graduate students from the Office of Admissions to the Graduate School. The Graduate School has started the hiring process for an admissions director, and we will start the transition during this academic year.

We implemented a number of changes to improve the student registration process, including a two-tier registration system to better manage course demand, electronic wait listing, and a time zone based scheduling system to improve classroom utilization. The latter is particularly important as a number of classroom buildings are scheduled to come off-line for renovations in the next couple of years (e.g. Apperson Hall).

Engaging student experience and student success is critical to advancing OSU's vision and goals. While we have initiated several activities to improve student experience, we still need to make sustained progress in this area. Our first-year retention rate has been relatively constant at approximately 81%, and our 6-year graduation rate at approximately 61%, both below the goals we set in our Strategic Plan. Results from the past few cycles of the NSSE survey have also remained unchanged with regard to student engagement. Over the next couple of years, we will focus on a targeted action plan developed by the University Council on Student Experience and Engagement through campus input, focusing on programs that increase first-year students' successful transition to OSU and enhancing experiences that promote engagement through participation in research, international exchange programs, and other experiential activities. This will also require continued investment through budget rebasing in developing faculty capacity to address issues of quality and course availability in critical areas.

Research and Outreach

The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Centers, Institutes, and Programs (CIPs) completed its work that focused on fostering OSU's capacity for innovation by providing needed institutional support and direction for interdisciplinary research. Recommendations from the Task Force will be implemented in the next few years, starting with the improvement of the research infrastructure and a review of funding for the research enterprise.

We convened the President's Commission on Oceans, Coastal, and Earth Systems Futures. The Commission completed its work in Spring 2007, and its report is posted at http://leadership.oregonstate.edu/provost/university-committee. The work will help inform our plans for building academic excellence in thematic areas, as outlined in the Agenda for 2007-2008.

The OSU Extension Service conducted five strategic focus group conversations in the Portland metropolitan area to conceive of a model for future work in the metro area. Inaugural investments were made to reach providers of child health services to recognize nutritional issues, and a new partnership formed with the College of Engineering to reach diesel fleet operators with programming to reduce particulate emissions in high-risk environments.

Though not envisioned at the start of the year, our conversations during the search process for the dean of Extended Education led us to enhance the delivery of our outreach mission by realigning the University's two major extended education units, OSU Extension Service and Extended Campus, into the Division of University Outreach and Engagement, led by a Vice Provost.

We continue to monitor our investments in the six interdisciplinary strategic initiatives started in 2004-2005. The six initiatives are computational and genome biology; ecosystem informatics; healthy aging; subsurface biosphere; sustainable rural communities; and water and watersheds. Having completed three of the five years of the seed University investment, the initiatives have hired exceptional faculty members who in many cases are already producing excellent results in securing research grants and providing education and outreach programs. Implementation reports for 2006-2007 are posted at http://leadership.oregonstate.edu/strategic-plan/strategic-initiatives.

Partnering with other state and private institutions, we have been successful in advancing the Oregon innovation agenda. The 2007-2009 legislature has committed to provide continued funding for ONAMI, the nanoscience and microtechnologies initiative, new funding in two new signature research areas: sustainability and alternative energy, and infectious diseases and drug discovery, as well as funding in the emerging area of wave energy. First funded in the last legislative cycle, the ONAMI initiative demonstrated its growth by attracting more than $25 million in federal and private research grants and contracts, mostly involving collaborations among academic partners. OSU is very well positioned to benefit from the investments committed to in the 2007-2009 legislative cycle.

Sustaining and enhancing the phenomenal growth that we have experienced in our research enterprise over the past few years will require improvements in our research infrastructure, particularly in shared facilities and instrumentation. We also need to enhance faculty capacity in targeted areas, consistent with our aspirations in the five thematic areas. Additionally, to fully take advantage of the investment made by the legislature in signature research areas, we need to align our internal and external priorities and strategies to ensure that we maximally leverage the resources provided by the state.

Community and Diversity

The University Diversity Action Plan was completed and is available at http://oregonstate.edu/diversity/. We are in the process of defining baseline performance for metrics that have been identified in the plan. Companion diversity action plans for academic and support units are in various phases of development and implementation. Work will continue in order to finalize these plans during the 2006-2007 academic year.

We created the Office of Women's Advancement and Gender Equity (WAGE) and hired the Office's inaugural director. The WAGE Office will play an important role in assessing our performance with respect to gender equity and helping us to improve work/life balance needs and climate issues on campus.

We have implemented an all-University employee training/education program on harassment. The on-line version of the harassment prevention training program has been completed, and is currently being taken by faculty and staff in the Division of Outreach and Engagement. An affirmative action training program for faculty search committees has also been developed and piloted.

Other Activities

There are two ongoing activities that I would like to bring to your attention: assessment of student learning outcomes for academic programs, and promoting mental and physical health of students. Faculty and staff have invested in both these areas and although support in terms of financial resources has been constrained, outcomes are quite impressive.

Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes for Program Improvement: Academic units have been engaged in assessment of student learning for the past few of years. This year 100% of all departments and colleges reported on assessment activities and met the goals they set for the academic year. While some units are still in early stages of developing meaningful processes, significant groundwork and persistent effort has created the momentum needed to sustain full-cycle assessment. Each academic unit is looking at the culture and interests of its faculty along with the needs of its students. Units have focused on areas that they are truly committed to, articulated what is most important for their students to learn, and designed activities and methods to assure that desired learning outcomes are shifting from individual faculty efforts in a given course to the collaborative summation of full faculty participation in the students' experience of an academic program. The expertise and creative energy of our faculty will create far more meaningful improvement than can be achieved by one-size-fits-all standardized plans.

OSU Healthy Campus Initiative: The OSU Healthy Campus Initiative has been established to address the management of mental health, sexual assault, alcohol, and a variety of other issues. The Healthy Campus Initiative encompasses a number of work groups and response teams, including Critical Incident Response Team, Alcohol Work Group, Sexual Violence Prevention Work Group, Sexual Assault Response Network, Bias Response Team, Suicide Awareness Task Force, and Infectious Disease Response Team. In particular, the purpose of the Critical Incident Response Team, consisting of members of OSU community and public safety, is to assess and coordinate the response to significant campus situations and events, which require intervention in order to assist the community and its members to return to a more normal state of functioning. These events may include: student death or significant trauma, problematic student situations involving medical or psychological concerns, and campus emergency situations that directly affect the well being of students. Information on various facets of the OSU Healthy Campus Initiative is available at http://oregonstate.edu/deanofstudents/hcilc.html.

The Agenda for 2007-2008

In describing our progress on the 2006-2007 agenda in the previous sections, I have outlined continued or additional work that needs to be accomplished in some of the areas. This includes: continuing redirection of base budget funds to Liberal Arts, Science, Health and Human Sciences, and Business; renovating university classrooms and research space; transitioning the graduate students admission process to the Graduate School; aligning activities to support OSU's growth in the signature research areas; developing a vision and strategic priorities for recently created Division of Outreach and Engagement; developing metrics for diversity action plans; and developing an action plan for the Office of Women's Advancement and Gender Equity.

In addition, I would like to highlight the following specific activities that will require focused efforts in 2007-2008:

We will develop a more deliberative plan to advance our strategic priorities in the five thematic areas of excellence: advancing the arts and sciences; the study of the earth and its dynamics; the support of entrepreneurship, innovation and economic development; the promotion of health and healthy populations; and the effective management and stewardship of our natural resources. While we have implemented numerous actions over the past three years to improve our teaching and learning environment and to develop program excellence, we have made no deliberate effort to align our activities with our aspirations in these five thematic areas. Through a focused, consultative process, we will establish priorities for investment to increase the impact of our programs in the five thematic areas. The discussions will also include leadership structure, resource allocation, and organizational strategies that should be considered for future success.
We will examine how we manage the business activities of the University with the goal of better enabling a "service ethic" in the organization, ensuring higher levels of responsiveness and information accuracy, freeing administrators from managing business services so that they can focus on the essential responsibilities of building academic programs, and improving cost effectiveness of those operations, redirecting saved resources to the core academic enterprise (faculty, student services, and teaching and research infrastructure). We will implement a pilot project for re-engineering business services during 2007-2008.
The University Council on Student Engagement and Experience will lead our effort in defining an action agenda to enhance student engagement. The implementation plan will identify opportunities that OSU can guarantee to students, including student-faculty connections and experiential learning. We will begin implementation in Fall 2008.
To address key issues regarding budgets, space and information technology,
1. The University Budget Committee will review and provide recommendations regarding funding of interdisciplinary programs and for increasing recovery of indirect costs on grants and contracts.
2. The University Space Committee will finalize guidelines for space allocation/reallocation and will continue to help the University improve utilization of space in the campus core and enhance classrooms.
3. The University Information Technology Committee will complete the work that it started in 2006-2007 of developing an IT master plan for the University that will guide investments in information technology for teaching, research, and administrative functions, as well providing coordination of IT functions between the central IS division and the academic colleges.
The recently concluded legislative process resulted in an increase in our Education and General (E&G) Fund budget and deferred maintenance budget allocation. Our first priority in the 2007-2009 biennium will be restoring faculty compensation to competitive levels, and we will start that process with a 4% merit-based salary increase effective January, 2008. We will also increase our investments in renovating classrooms, improving buildings to ensure safety and accessibility standards, and enhancing the Laboratory Animal Research Center (LARC) to support research in the life sciences.
For the OSU-Cascades Campus, we will strengthen the enrollment management strategies to increase enrollments and develop a stronger presence in the Central Oregon community to build support for the campus and secure resources.