Feature Stories - February 2006

Industry Focus: Higher Education

Reading, Writing, Recruiting and Remediation

by Kathleen Foley

As part of its monthly Industry Outlook Series, Nevada Business Journal recently brought college-level educators together to discuss the status of education in Nevada and the challenges it is facing. They confronted concerns such as managing growth in higher education, attracting new faculty members to the state, bridging the gap between primary and secondary schools and the universities, efforts to provide an educated workforce and the changing future of Nevada higher education. Connie Brennan, publisher of Nevada Business Journal, served as moderator for the roundtable discussion, which was held at The Stirling Club in Las Vegas. Following is a condensed version, beginning with introductions.

Charlotte Bentley:  National University, Nevada is a not-for-profit institution formed about 35 years ago, focusing on the adult learner, with accelerated classes. The school has expanded in the last few years, moving to Hawaii and Nevada, and soon Arizona. We have online and distance education, as well as instruction in the classroom. We’re hiring full-time faculty and staff now and will open in January. Our biggest challenge is finding a director of nursing. Currently, we offer pre-nursing classes, and we will eventually add several of the nursing programs we already have in California, but Nevada law requires we have a director of nursing before we can do that.

John McDonald: I’m the dean of the University of Nevada School of Medicine. We have our undergraduate two-year campus in Reno. After completing that, students divide their time between Reno and Las Vegas, where we have a major presence at University Medical Center. Our challenge is accommodating the need for healthcare providers, based on our rapid influx of population and aging of the population. We are partnering with UNLV to start an academic medical center complex that will incorporate physician training, nursing, public health and multidisciplinary medicine. We received a $17 million award to fund biomedical/technological research across the state with UNLV, Nevada Cancer Institute, DRI and the University of Nevada School of Medicine.

John Gardner: Desert Research Institute (DRI) is unique in the fact that our faculty members are not tenured; they must bring in their own salaries [in the form of grants and contracts]. Their work is recognized internationally across the research community. We benefit the university system because our faculty teaches at both campuses in environmental subjects. We have projects in Ghana and other parts of the world that not only improve the quality of life, but also the quality of science. We have two campuses, one in Las Vegas and one in Reno, and two campus outlets in Henderson and Steamboat Springs, Colo.

LaShung Willis: I’m the dean for DeVry University. We have over 75 campuses nationwide. We started as a technical school, but today we offer every kind of program, including business management, healthcare and technology. DeVry has rolled out all of its degree programs in Nevada, enabling students to start at the associate’s level and accelerate all the way into the master’s program. One of our associate programs, Electronic Computer Technology, is linked with the Cisco academies. DeVry offers students who graduate from the Cisco academies a $1,200 scholarship to continue their programs of study through DeVry. One of our challenges is getting students interested in higher education because there are many opportunities for employment here that don’t require a degree. But we are determined to help build the skills required for the future workforce of Nevada. 

Jim Rogers: I’m the chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education. We have eight institutions – two universities, four community colleges, Nevada State College and DRI – with more than 100,000 students. Twelve years ago we had 30,000 students, so we’re growing rapidly. In the next four or five months we should have a general plan out to the community on what we’re going to do about the Academic Medical Center. We have decided we are not going to be timid in what we want, so we’re going to make every attempt to educate legislators so they will know what we want and why we want it, what we expect from them and what we expect to give them during the next session. We are trying to develop relationships with the school districts throughout the state so we can lobby for things together. We’re in a very important discussion about raising admission standards. We’re bothered by grade inflation. We have very serious problems. Fortunately, we are in a city that, literally, is awash with money, and I think we're going to have access to that money in the next legislative session. So you may see requests for a medical center that exceeds a quarter of a billion dollars, and we think we have a good shot at getting that money.

Debra March: I’m the director of the Lied Institute of Real Estate Studies [at UNLV]. We offer a bachelor’s degree in real estate finance and provide research opportunities for the active adult in executive education. The research we’re involved with has to do with the workforce, planning and growth-related issues in our community. We are committed to building a creative community here in Southern Nevada, a tolerant community that supports business and creates opportunities for people to live and be part of this community. We have some challenges, but I’m proud to be a part of the solution as well.

Harry Rosenberg: I’m the founding president of the University of Southern Nevada. It was incorporated in the state of Nevada as a private, not-for-profit independent institution. The University of Southern Nevada started as the Nevada College of Pharmacy and is accredited through the Accreditation Counsel on Pharmacy Education. We have also started an MBA program targeted towards healthcare practitioners who wish to enhance their credentials. We have the faculty and administration facilities needed to start a nursing program next year. We have a very limited, focused mission: to prepare competent healthcare practitioners.

Steve Brooks: The Art Institute of Las Vegas is a creative arts college. The creative arts include interior design, graphic design, animation, game art and the field of culinary arts, offered at bachelor’s and associate’s degree levels. Our biggest challenge is being able to supply and find the teaching talent to bring into our market. Bringing people to Nevada is an issue unless they come from California. If they come from the Midwest, the cost of living becomes an issue and a factor in bringing talent to the table.

Keith Evans:  Regis University has two campuses, in Henderson and in Summerlin. Regis is a satellite operation of Regis University in Denver, a Jesuit school that, in the early ’70s, began offering adult accelerated education. We offer bachelor’s and master’s programs in liberal arts, business and family therapy. Our biggest challenge is to be known for what we are. We have a limited mission and we’re not for everybody, but we can provide solutions for a lot of people. We just have the ongoing challenge of getting the word out and working with businesses and organizations to create educational opportunities in which tuition reimbursement would help people get degrees. We foster the notion that people can continue their lives with work and family while getting an education in the accelerated evening programs we offer.

Dr. Fred Maryanski:  Nevada State College is entering its fourth year of operation. We are the public middle-tier institution offering bachelor’s degrees. Our largest programs are nursing, teaching, business psychology and law enforcement. Our biggest challenge is building out our campus to respond to the need for higher education in Southern Nevada.

Lisa Ackerman:  I’m with University of Phoenix. We have 300,000 students nationwide, 3,000 students in Las Vegas and 700 in Reno. The goal is to remove the barriers to higher education for working adults through a flexible schedule that offers classes in the evening. We focus on the competencies of oral and written communication, team building, critical thinking and problem solving that business leaders are looking for in successful employees. It is our goal to enrich and build the existing workforce instead of building the youth into the workforce. We offer degrees in management, accounting, information technology, criminal justice, human services, counseling and education. Our challenge is that education isn’t perceived as something that’s heavily needed in a lot of businesses. That’s now changing, and together we can help make a difference.

Mitchell Forman:  I’m the founding dean of Touro University in Nevada. It is a private not-for-profit organization with a College of Osteopathic Medicine and a master’s level physician assistant studies program. This year we began a college of Health and Human Services with an entry-level master’s program in nursing, a master’s occupational therapy program and three education programs, one of which is an autism program for teachers. Our interest is addressing the disparity in healthcare in this state through partnerships and collaborative efforts. Southern Nevada area is ideal if you look at its infrastructure from the standpoint of the hospitals. The private, for-profit hospitals run occupancy consistently above 100 percent. It’s a great place to educate students, residents and fellows and we hope to have a future partnership with the University of Nevada School of Medicine. The Challenge of Growth

Connie Brennan, Nevada Business Journal:  Chancellor Rogers, how does the university system manage growth? Rogers: We have a tremendous capacity problem. We don’t have room for the current students and we don’t have room to grow. I’m very concerned about the quality of our students. Our medical school, law school and graduate programs in the universities are very good, but our undergraduate programs leave a lot to be desired, because for all intents and purposes, we have an open admissions policy. If you can breathe, we will probably let you into school. Of the freshmen enrolling with a 2.5 grade point average, 40 percent never become sophomores and only 11 percent ever graduate. So it’s hard to explain to taxpayers who may feel they are feeding a dead horse. A lot of people think we should have open admission to the universities, but they ignore the fact that we have Nevada State College and the community colleges. So we have some real problems. Our universities need to be first-class institutions. In order to get there, we need more private support, but we can’t get the private support until we are first class. So which comes first, the chicken or the egg? It’s a real problem for us. We’re going to have to sell a lot of good faith to the private sector. The law school is a great example. It has the highest initial ranking of any law school in the history of the American Bar Association; various universities were shocked when the initial ranking came out as 82 out of 240 law schools. There are pockets of excellence in the system that we’re going to develop, but I’m not sure that growth in enrollment is the answer at this point at UNLV and UNR. They may shrink in numbers, while Nevada State College and the community colleges rapidly grow. March:  Do you think using financial resources to hire key faculty members who are leaders in their areas of study would attract more quality students from outside Nevada?

Rogers:  The law school has 40 percent of its faculty on supplemental pay from outside sources, and it would not surprise me if in the next five years, 100 percent of the faculty of the law school goes on supplemental pay. We’ve never had any problem with recruiting people to Las Vegas for the law school. The medical school is going to find that to be true as well, and there’s going to be supplemental pay from outside sources. We’ve asked the Legislature to continue to deliver an adequate amount of money, because you can’t go to a donor and say, "If you put it in the front door, the Legislature will take it out the back door." So we’ve told legislators if they stabilize our state funding, we’ll raise the private money. We have a first-class economy and a third-class culture. The first-class economy has decided that it wants to be part of a first-class culture, and we have the money here to do that. We have a lot of billionaires in this town. You can go to people like Brian Greenspun, and get him to write a check out of petty cash for $50 million – and believe me, Brian can do that. Or you go to Bill Boyd, and tell him he needs to raise his commitment to the law school from $7 million to $32 million to make it easier for me to sell the naming of the business school. And Bill did that at the end of last year. The Fertittas have been wonderful too. 

Brennan:  Is money the solution? 

Rogers:  Money’s the solution to everything.

Brennan:  There’s talk about raising admission standards within the university system.

Rogers:  If we raise the admission standards, the president of Princeton is not going to lose a lot of sleep because we’re coming up behind him. We rank in the bottom quarter of universities in this country, so we’ve got to go a long way to even become mediocre. In this state, we educate the bottom 60 percent of the population because the top 40 percent go elsewhere and we lose them forever. Are we building an elite school? No, this is just self-preservation. We should build a school that is at least good enough to keep the best students here. One way to do that is to buy the students, by saying that we’ll pay their tuition for all three years, pay their travel, and give them a signing bonus of $5,000. Scholarships are designed to recruit and keep the best students here. Secondarily, they help the student. Private donors are going to have to put up the money and they’re starting to understand that. We have tremendous support at the law school, and we’ll have tremendous support in all of the smaller colleges because they’re easier. This helps our student body to go forward and it helps our faculty.

March:  We have a tremendous international community; we’re attracting people from all over the world. We have a lot of potential and opportunity here to be so much more if we’re strategic in our approach to attracting students, providing scholarship support and paying faculty. We have to change the complexion of the faculty program and what the community or the university offers.

Rogers:  We have to change our marketing and go out and hustle bucks from the people in the community who have the money. Recruiting Faculty

Brennan:  The majority of you said that you have problems recruiting faculty. Is this a universal issue? 

Bentley:  It depends upon the area. A professor from UNLV recently said that one-third of the people moving into Southern Nevada are retirees. Retirees aren’t a good target audience for any of us seeking students, but they can be a good source for adjuncts and part-time instructors. A lot of people retiring to Nevada are the early baby boomer retirees wanting to be involved in the community. A lot of retirees want to be teachers, so recruiting has only been difficult for specific targeted areas.

Rosenberg:  Several issues are involved in recruiting. Jim [Rogers] is right – sometimes it's a matter of dollars. A lot of annual surveys of salaries are based on individuals with a certain number of years of experience, and you need to be competitive nationally. We typically hire at least at the 75th percentile and sometimes even higher. But it’s no good trying to hire a faculty member of a certain stature if the institution doesn’t have a reputation as an excellent establishment. If you can convince faculty candidates you’re committed to quality, they’ll come here.

Gardner: That’s one advantage DRI has. Because we have a reputation of being a quality institute, when we bring visitors here from around the country, they really want to be part of us. All of you benefit from that, because the science programs at the universities have our faculty teaching there. We receive only 1 percent of the Nevada system budget, but with our grants and contracts, we give directly to the whole system because of our faculty, our staff and our reputation. When you say you want a quality product, you have to have a quality faculty. When people come here, they want to be attached to something of quality. If it’s not quality, there’s no money in it.

Rogers:  There are other issues in addition to money. We have people classified as part-time faculty who are working 80 hours a week, and professors who are only covered by health insurance when school is in session. We’re going to have to look at these issues. As tough as the Legislature supposedly has been on us, we received almost everything we asked for last time because we went up there as one institution rather than eight. We didn’t fight and we educated them ahead of time with the truth – it’s just amazing how effective the truth is. We have a system that has spent too much time trying to grab territories – whether UNR got this, UNLV got this or if Community College got that. The first 10 months I was there, I never heard the words "student" or "professor."  I’m there to help the students, but the system has not understood that. The individual institutions are "territory grabbers" like I’ve never seen.

 Forman:  Contrary to some of the things voiced about becoming involved with established centers of excellence, one of the things I’ve noted is that there’s an attitude in Nevada of being a pioneer. I left an established program and many faculty members came with me because they felt they could have a significant impact on a new, potentially growing operation. The potential for growth and partnering with people who have been successful is what has attracted some of our faculty who had become stagnant at other institutions. They’re part of a large organization and the opportunities for them to grow at those places may be limited. The benefits of moving into a community such as ours are the opportunities and the pioneering spirit.

Brennan: How does the increasing cost of living affect faculty recruitment?

March:  As recently as a year ago, 75 percent of the contracts offered to possible faculty coming to UNLV were accepted. This past year, less than 50 percent of the contracts offered were accepted, the reason being because of the affordability of housing in the community. We have money issues, whether it’s the salary we’re offering or the ability to afford housing here. We need to be looking at those issues as important concerns for how we make people welcome in our community.

Maryanski:  It’s an issue if you’re hiring people who are new in their career and not from a place where they own a house with equity. There must be a way of supplementing money or providing them with affordable housing on a three- to five-year basis in order for them to become established.

McDonald:  The issues relevant to healthcare education are affordable housing and a labor market that’s below the college professor level. Communities can work to redevelop areas where the need is the greatest so people can afford to live. These are wonderful opportunities for some public/private partnerships.

March: The Clark County School District used to attract teachers to the community in the past by saying, "Come to Las Vegas; housing is affordable." Now they’re saying, "Come to Las Vegas; we’ll find you a roommate." If candidates have an option between Las Vegas and another community, they will choose the other community, where they can afford to buy a home. Bridging the Gap

Brennan: I want to touch on bridging the gap between K-12 and the university system. Dr. Carol Harter of UNLV has attended previous roundtable discussions and expressed her concern about the quantity of graduates coming out of Nevada’s high schools, with many of them having to take remedial classes when they get to college. Is that a problem that seems to be getting worse? 

Rogers: Grade inflation is a big problem for us, in part because kids want that 3.0 GPA to get the Millennium Scholarship. Another related problem is that students are taking easy classes instead of more challenging ones in order to keep their grades up. Then they get to the university level and have to be remediated. Because remediation works with almost 100 percent of students, we know they are capable of learning, which shows that we’re being conned. I told the school districts that it will come down to a hard lesson for them: not only will we refuse to remediate these students – we’re not going to let them in at all if they haven’t taken the challenging classes they should have. It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to figure these solutions out, but they haven’t been done before because Nevada’s university system has never had a relationship with the K-12 system. Now people from the university system meet at least twice a week with trustees from the Clark County and Washoe County school districts to try to develop some sort of relationship and stop this foolishness.

Rosenberg:  Education in the United States, including universities, has been grade-based, not competency-based. There’s no reason for a high school student to be promoted without knowing math and English. It’s all inflation. They don’t understand the fundamentals. The university should be given a transcript that shows, not a grade point average, but a definition of what that student can and cannot do.

Rogers: We all do a great disservice to the student. He’s got a 3.0 GPA, but put the kid in a college class and he blows out. We make the students believe they’re really "B" students, and the truth of the matter is they’re probably "D" students because they haven’t taken any difficult classes.

Bentley:  A lot of the Millennium Scholarship students don’t even score high enough on the SATs to go into regular classes. They have to take the pre-math and pre-English classes.

Rogers: We remediate 35 percent of the Millennium scholars.

Willis: When students take the CPT (College Placement Test), they bomb it, and then they look at us like, "What’s wrong with your school?"

McDonald: We need to take this argument out of the classroom and the schools and push it back onto the kids and the parents. I would send every parent in the state of Nevada an e-mail when the grades came out to tell them what this grade-point average would earn the students if they maintain it when they graduate and apply to UNR and UNLV. I think we have to be a little more inventive about the way we get people involved. Bentley: Yes, but you’d still have the problem of grade inflation.

Rogers:  Last year, if you had a 3.0 GPA graduating from high school in Las Vegas, you were in the bottom half of your class.

Kathleen Foley
Kathleen Foley is a freelance writer based in Southern Nevada.