I enjoyed reading the article on “Panther Fridays” because it identifies the three areas UNI must improve, if it is to increase enrollment of good, quality students.

For far too long UNI has been mired in a marketing mentality focused on comfortable residence halls, fine dining, athletics and the need to show purple most days of the week.  Students and parents are looking for schools offering high-quality education, at an affordable price, with a placement office that allows students to get jobs in their chosen field.

Since 1990 there have been many changes challenging these desires. First, in 1990 we had a career planning and placement office where staff focused on good placement after graduation. Now we have a career planning office that gives students information on how a major might fit a particular job description. 

In 1876 our university was founded on the grounds of a school that offered a K-12 education to Civil War orphans. 

Our historical brand has been teaching, not athletics or purple shirts worn every Friday, and the symbol of our commitment to education was Price Lab School.   

However, that brand [Price Lab] was torn down and despite the previous administration saying there was a plan to replace it with something better, we are still waiting for substantive details.

For the past 16 years the athletic department has been hemorrhaging money, anywhere from $4.5 to $5.5 million a year requiring a transfer of money from academic programming to pay these deficits.

The total amount taken away from academics amounts to a little more than $60 million.   We now have a university where the president, responsible for academics, is paid substantially less than a couple of our athletic coaches and the president has a one-year contract as opposed to our basketball coach, who has a 10-year contract with termination penalties.

These long-term decisions may call into question just what the priorities are of the university. In the meantime, the state of Iowa ranks in the top 10 of all states having the highest levels of student loan debt at time of graduation.

As the cost of college at UNI has gone up, students and parents will seek to reduce expenses if it means graduation without a lot of debt. 

One major threat to UNI recruiting in this regard is community college.

Presently, it is less expensive to go to an Iowa community college, in some instances the classes are smaller [because UNI reduced faculty positions under the Allen administration] and courses can be transferred to any of our three regents institutions.

UNI needs to look at reducing the cost of tuition, which means setting realistic budgets and not generating undue deficits; substantially increasing academic quality by transferring much needed financial resources from athletics and administration into hiring new faculty and rebuilding our educational brand; revamping placement in a way that emphasizes internships, co-ops and improving statistics on employment of our students at time of graduation.

These challenges are significant, in many ways more so than at any time in the history of our university. However, with good leadership they are not insurmountable. 

-Dr. A. Frank Thompson 

professor of finance