Enrollment is 'top priority,' Triggle says

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

As he changes gears and establishes himself as UB's chief academic officer, Provost David Triggle points to enrollment, noth at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as being the issue that must become the top priority for every member of the UB community.

"Because, if we don't fix the enrollment issue, then basically nothing else matters," Triggle says.

But fixing the issue-and reversing the decline in enrollment, particularly at the graduate level-could mean making some hard decisions and shifting resources that some faculty members may not be happy with, he says.

Moreover, a failure by departments to meet their enrollment targets could prove to be the death knell for some programs, he says.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Reporter, Triggle outlined what he sees as his top priorities as he begins his tenure as provost. And enrollment tops the list.

"It's not too much to say that the future of the institution as we know it really depends on our attractiveness to the students; that's what we're here for," he says. "And if we fail to attract students, for whatever reason, then we won't be here."

UB has been focusing its efforts on strategies that increase student interest in the university at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels, as well as increase "students' potential"- retain them-once they are here, Triggle says.

He notes that he has scheduled two meetings this week-one with the deans and one with department chairs-with the agenda of both being devoted solely to enrollment strategies.

"It's everyone's problem; it's not Nick Goodman's problem, it's not Mick Thompson's problem, it's not my problem alone," Triggle asserts. "Everyone's issue is to deal with the enrollment strategies."

The good news, he says, is that the university is starting to meet its undergraduate targets, although a lot more needs to be done.

The bad news, though, is that graduate enrollment continues to decline. In fact, although graduate-student enrollment has been o
e downturn nationally-a decline of a couple of only monitor applications, but also will provide a longitudinal database of every graduate program so UB can compare its programs against those of other universities, he says.

Nevertheless, failure to meet enrollment targets will continue to bring a financial penalty, Triggle says, adding that with a Resource Allocation Methodology in place in Albany that links enrollment to resources, UB has little choice but to assign these penalties.

To turn the decline in enrollment around, he says, UB must look at the areas that are not attracting students and ask a series of questions: Is it due to a lack of interest? A lack of quality? Is something missing from the program, or is there no further need for the program? Should it be smaller, or should it vanish altogether?

A failure to meet enrollment targets, as well as the quality of a program, could be among the factors that determine which programs continue and which ones are phased out, Triggle notes.

But, that doesn't mean that priorities only will be determined by "the bottom line," he stresses, adding that programs that do not pay for themselves may continue if the university decides it is important to the institution to retain them. Those decisions, he says, must be made "in terms of the context of knowing what it costsŠwith full knowledge of all the variables and making sure those variables are known to everyone."

The university must be able to shift its resources to meet the demands of the student and the institution, he says. "Since we play basically a zero-sum game, much of that shift of resources has to come internally; there has to be an internal decision to move resources from one area to another," he says. "And that's something that's anathema to the academic; we don't like to make changes. Academics are a paradoxically conservative species. We advocate all sorts of changes for the outside world, but when it comes to change in our own environment, we're extraordinarily reluctant to make these changes," he notes.

Academics tend to believe that "if you only hang on long enough, this problem will go away and I can go back to doing what I've always done. But it isn't going to go away," stresses Triggle. "We are going to have to make substantial changes."

The changes that he talks about are linked to the university's mission-review process, which the provost identified as another top priority. UB is in the final phase of refining its statement for submission to SUNY central administration.

"The mission statement ought to be your guiding principle," he says. "The trick is to draw it in broad enough terms that it provides you with the ability to still respond to the microenvironmental changes that are bound to occur in the next 25 years." If UB fails to chart its direction and simply responds to whatever happens, it "will flounder around over the next 25 years. One has to make basic, strategic decisions about what the university is going to look like in the next century."

Triggle praises former Provost Thomas Headrick's academic planning document, calling it "key in providing, perhaps for the first time in the university, a university-wide planning mechanism that enables us to think about our future."

With ever-tightening resources, UB must set its priorities and make critical decisions in terms of programs and research direction, he says. Headrick's document has "provided the basis for progressively sharpening our focus on where we want to go."

Some of those decisions will be easy to make. "We have to learn that when we invest in something, we have to maintain that investment and not simply move on to the next toy in the sandbox, which we have a bad habit of doing," he says.

For example, since UB has made a major investment in the Center for Computational Research, that has to be a major focus of the university for the immediate future, he says. "We have to see the computer sciences and supercomputing center as integral to our future in education at the undergraduate and graduate level, in service to the community and in research. It has to be one of the things we now focus on," he emphasizes. "We've made it a priority by investing all our money, and now it's insane not to continue to invest in that and make sure we absolutely maximize the benefits."

In addition to the information sciences, Triggle identifies three other areas in the sciences where UB should concentrate its resources:

- Molecular biology. The 20th century was dominated by the great discoveries of physics, and the 21st century will be dominated by molecular biology, he says.

- Material science. This science will derive new materials that are superior and have better properties than anything we've seen before, he says.

- The environment and infrastructure. UB already has significant strengths in this area, including the Environment and Society Institute and the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, he says.

Triggle notes that in the resource-allocation game, the liberal arts "clearly need a lesser scale of investment." In fact, UB already has invested significantly in the liberal arts, he says, citing as an example the Center for the Arts. But the sciences "demand a scale of investment which is really so large that one must be careful in making an investment," he says, adding that a more modest investment in the liberal arts brings a bigger payoff for the university.