The title of my speech today was going to be "Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven, But Nobody Wants To Do What It Takes To Get There." What would it take for ISU to become a "Public Ivy" university? I haven't heard anybody say anything that would move us very near in that direction. I'm going to talk today about two things that would really help.
First, we have to recruit better students. Alvin Goldbarb said we had to identify a student profile. No, we have to recruit better students. How do we do it? How did our basketball team and our football team and our volleyball team that Dr. Strand spoke so highly of become Division I. They offered the students scholarships. They went out and spent money to recruit students. ISU spends almost nothing on academic scholarships. There are 30 or 40 Presidential Scholars, but there are hundreds of honor students who are not offered scholarships to come here. The percentage of our honor students who get scholarships pales in comparison to the percentage of our football team that gets scholarships. Guess which is Division 4 and which is Division I? It's pretty simple. There's plenty of money around. Susan Kern spoke about the importance of getting more money for Institutional Advancement. The critical thing is how you spend the money. The money is not any good at all if you don't spend it. The money ISU departments do spend on scholarships typically goes to juniors and seniors. That doesn't bring better students to the University. There are hundreds of students getting tuition waivers for athletics. The athletic program has a Redbird Education and Scholarship Fund with a million dollars in reserve and can afford to remodel it's facilities all the time. It can afford to pay for its own tuition waivers and they can be converted over to academic scholarships. You want better students, you got to do something. Departments have money in their foundation accounts. They could match those scholarships. You'll get better students if you're serious about it. I don't think people are serious about it.
The student/faculty ratio is the most significant problem at ISU. We have the worst in the state. 20-1 was the last one I saw which was a couple years ago. Whereas the second worst, Eastern or Northern, I forget which, was 18-1. The data I have showed you from the U.S. News and World Report showed what effect that has on the students. Among Tier 4 universities, which is the lowest category of national universities, we rank at the bottom or near the bottom in terms of the percentage of students in small classes and the percentage of students in large classes. We have one of the worst student/faculty ratios in the country. It takes a lot more faculty. There's nothing in the Fisher Report, there's nothing that anyone has said--spending money on faculty salaries isn't going to fix that. In fact, it's probably going to interfere with it. I think if you want to become a "Public Ivy" you really want to have to want it and start thinking about what would really get you there. Thank you.
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