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Boise State University
Presentation to the Joint Finance & Appropriations Committee
Idaho Legislature
Jan. 28, 2015
Slide 1 – Title slide
Thank you Madame. Chairman, senators and representatives. And thank you, as always, for the time
and the consideration you give Boise State University each year.
Slide 2 – More than 22,000 students; More than 3,800 degrees last year; more than 77,000 living
graduates – 68% living in Idaho
Good news is abundant on our campus these days:
Sophomore Start: We recently announced a new program with the goal of helping future high school
graduates enter college with a full year of classes already completed. Our “Sophomore Start” program
begins in West Ada, Nampa and Parma school districts this spring with plans to expand to additional
high schools in fall of 2015. The program will enable high school students to earn 30 credits at the
concurrent enrollment fee of $65 per credit — a 75 percent discount over Boise State’s per-credit
tuition.
While Boise State’s Concurrent Enrollment Program already provides opportunities for
students to take college-level courses while still in high school. (3,000 students took advantage of this
program in 2014), this new program will have students working with a Boise State adviser to identify
30 college credits that will apply specifically toward a college major of their choice and allow them to
earn these credits through a variety of experiences while still in high school.
College of Engineering – Our STEM efforts have paid off and we are flush with Mechanical
Engineering majors – in fact, we have more than doubled the number of students in this major in the
last five years. Oh, and last week the POTUS highlighted some of the work they are doing in our New
Product Development Lab, which gives students the opportunity to work with local business &
manufacturers to design, prototype and improve their products.
Arts & Sciences – The Talkin' Broncos, our stories Speech & Debate Team have won 3 national
championships, two of them in the last two years, and remain undefeated in the 2014-15 season. But
what I love most about this program is that the majority of students who participate on the team and
receive top honors at tournaments hail from right here in Idaho. The roster reads like the Legislative
Address book – Meridian, Idaho Falls, Boise, Kuna, Nampa, Weiser, Mountain Home, St. Anthony,
and the list goes on. It is a great program and we are very proud of it.
Business & Economics - Our management program and marketing and finance program are the thirdand fourth-largest undergraduate programs on campus, and the business administration degrees have
the second-largest enrollment of all graduate programs. We have an excellent accounting program, an
acclaimed international business program and our Responsible Business Initiative is attracting
attention for its innovative approach to training tomorrow’s business leaders to understand the
responsibility that business has to the community.
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And as you can see on the screen, we have more than 22,000 students pursuing 84
undergraduate majors, 76 master’s degrees and 9 doctorates. Though 78 percent of our student body is
from Idaho, we have students from every state and from countries around the world.
We awarded more than 3,800 degrees last year — the most in Idaho, and well ahead of our
targets for leading the state to its goal of ensuring that 60 percent of all Idahoans between the ages of
25 and 34 have a degree or certificate by 2020. Our commencement ceremonies are bursting at the
seams at our 12,000-seat arena — a great problem to have.
More than 50,000 of our 77,000 living graduates have chosen to remain in Idaho to raise their
families and lead in the workforce. Interestingly, since Boise State has grown so quickly in the past
decade, we have a comparatively young alumni base — half of our alumni have graduated since the
mid-1990s. Many of these individuals are just beginning to rise into leadership positions that will
shape Idaho’s future in all industries.
Slide 3
- $10 million NIH grant for Center of Biomedical Research Excellence
- 2016 Carnegie Foundation Community Engaged Institution & Inaugural APLU Innovation &
Economic Prosperity University
- Online program ranked among top 100 in the country by US News
Our fast-growing research mission received an exciting bolt this year, when the National
Institute of Health gave Boise State a $10 million grant to fund five years of research in a Center of
Biomedical Research Excellence in Biology. Dr. Julia Oxford will lead the efforts, which bring in
faculty and students from a variety of disciplines. This type of center promotes collaborative,
interactive efforts among researchers with complementary backgrounds, skills and expertise.
Boise State’s grant will support research in heart disease, cancer and stroke; ligament injury
and repair; and liver fibrosis. Additional projects could be added over the course of the grant in
musculoskeletal and cancer research.
Our commitment to our surrounding community has been recognized at the national level. We
have been named a Community Engaged Institution by the Carnegie Foundation TWICE since the
designation was created in 2006, and were one of just 16 (out of 209) universities in the country
recognized by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities as inaugural Innovation &
Economic Prosperity universities. Our commitment can be seen in our partnerships with private
industry and with state and local agencies, our thousands of hours of volunteer and community work
through programs like service learning, which connects real-life experiences with what is being taught
in the classroom, and many more programs.
SLIDE: Camille Eddy in the lab — She is a sophomore in mechanical engineering from Boise who
introduced President Obama — who in turn said she was a "great example" of what needs to happen
around the country. She works in the Ceramic Microelectrical Mechanical Systems lab, which is
working to build prototypes of a micro-propulsion device being designed to keep nanosatellites in the
correct orbit with microscopic bursts of energy. Imagine a Coke-can-sized satellite, which would need
just the tiniest thrust to position itself to stay on track.
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And just recently, we learned that our online programs were named among the top 100 in the
United States by U.S. News and World Report, which ranked us among wealthy and long-established
universities like Indiana University, the universities of Illinois and Missouri, and many more. Our
eCampus is designed to bring our signature educational experience far beyond our campus boundaries,
making a college education affordable and accessible for rural Idahoans and many other underserved
populations. This dovetails perfectly with Governor Otter’s goals for the Idaho Education Network,
which he says “enables Idaho to overcome our geographic and socioeconomic barriers…and allows us
to realize the kind of opportunities for enlightenment and progress that not long ago were available
only in our largest and most connected communities.”
We have also found that our online course offerings are being utilized by our full-time inperson students. These students are using the convenient online classes to augment their schedules and
make sure they stay on their track to graduate on time and on budget.
Boise State now offers 20 degrees and certificates that are fully online. Our most recent
initiative is about increasing the number of these programs - especially at the undergraduate level - to
enhance access. Currently, about 2,000 students are studying in these fully online programs.
Last academic year, a total 10,620 Boise State students took at least one online course. This
represents 36% of all Boise State students. Obviously, even campus-based students appreciate the
flexibility that online courses provide.
Slide 4
- Donors up 131%
- Degrees up 52%
- Enrollment up 18%
- Research grants and contracts up 39%
- Foundation assets up 59%
Just looking at our successes today may not give you a full appreciation of what the faculty,
staff and students at Boise State University have been able to do in a relatively short amount of time.
You may have noticed we were back at one of the top bowl games this year — winning our
third Fiesta Bowl in less than a decade. It was most gratifying for me because of the way the season
was managed, on and off the field, by one of our own: Coach Bryan Harsin. I can tell you it is hard to
know who is more proud — the football program, where he played as a quarterback and later worked
as an assistant coach — or the College of Business and Economics, where he learned how to
successfully manage a large organization and earned his degree.
Athletics are just one small part of the Boise State experience, but since the university has
found itself succeeding on the national stage, we noted that this exposure has opened doors for us —
and we have acted quickly to take advantage of it, especially as it relates to new students, high-quality
faculty, and more far-reaching research partnerships, among other things.
In fact, if you look back at the Boise State that emerged with a victory over Oklahoma in that first
Fiesta Bowl in 2007 and compare it to the Boise State of today, the changes are dramatic. In just a few
short years, we have:
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Increased university donors by 131%
Boosted yearly bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees by 52%
Increased total enrollment by 18%
Advanced research grants and contracts by 39%
Grown foundation assets by 59%
It is worth noting that also occurring since 2007 was the Great Recession. As you are all aware,
it significantly impacted the state funding across the board, including to public higher education.
In 2007, Boise State was receiving $82,700,000 from the state general fund to support our
operations. In 2015, we are receiving just over $81 million.
I know we have new members so let me also provide a bit more background and history as to
Boise State’s financial position in Idaho’s system of higher education, much of which was impacted by
the Great Recession.
As your budget book points out, Boise State does not have the highest tuition of its three
universities and we are very competitive when compared to Western states and in even better shape
when compared to campuses across the nation.
What we do have is the lowest funded budget when calculated by full-time students of the three
universities.
1. UI--$8402
2. ISU--$6939
3. BSU--$5133, 39% less than the UI
And our enrollment has grown 4.4% in the last 4 years as shown in your budget book and 18%
in the last 8 years, more than any other public university in the state.
The State’s share of our budget is only 18% of the total while the University of Idaho enjoys
30% of its budget coming from the State. As you can see from your budget book, our 2015
appropriation is slightly greater than $1M more than the University of Idaho, even though we are
serving 10,705 more students. Or to put it another way, Boise State enrolled 67% more students than
the University of Idaho, but receives only 2% more funding from the State.
In years past, when we have pointed out these discrepancies in funding and advocated for
“equity funding”, one of the defenses has always been that we don’t have the graduate student
enrollment that the University of Idaho has and it’s more expensive to educate graduate students.
Well, that argument no longer holds now that Boise State has the largest graduate student
enrollment of all public universities in the State.
It just seems to me that we’re running out of reasons to explain away the greatest funding
injustice in the history of Idaho public higher education.
So Boise State will do this spring what it is forced to do every spring and that is propose a
tuition increase that covers the discrepancy in funding, but does so as to not harm educational
opportunity at Boise State.
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We will also, every day of the year, continue monitoring our costs and applying fiscal restraint
everywhere we can—as we did with our highly successful Program Prioritization – which I will get to
in a minute.
Again, as you can see from these statistics on the screen, we have truly tried our best to not let
the Great Recession or these funding issues slow us down.
WHAT’S NEXT
We are laying the groundwork for maintaining this incredible trajectory, by focusing our efforts
on student success — and by that I don’t mean simply mean accelerating their progression toward a
college degree in an affordable and timely way — though that remains one of our top priorities.
I am a firm believer that a university’s responsibility is to prepare every student for success far
beyond their diploma. To give them the skills, experiences and competencies they need to excel in
their first jobs, and the problem-solving, critical thinking and communications abilities that will serve
them throughout their chosen career paths.
We are tackling these goals across campus, and in many different ways.
Slide 5 – School of Public Service
First, of great interest to you as public servants, who I am sure have devoted much of your lives
to working for your communities and state, we are excited to be creating the SCHOOL OF PUBLIC
SERVICE, gathering our public administration, community and regional planning, political science,
criminal justice and policy departments together under one roof. It is to inspire students to become our
civil servants of tomorrow. The School will be launched in the fall and will bring together students,
faculty and researchers here in Idaho’s state capitol in partnership with federal, state and local agencies
in pursuit of enlightened public policy.
SLIDE: Tim Hibbard - Navy veteran who is now a member of the Boise State Honors College, regular
on the Deans List, an undergraduate researcher in political science and a math tudor for his fellow
students. He hopes to earn a degree in political science next year. His immediate goal: get his
research published.
Slide 6 – Bridge To Career
We are well aware that are recent graduates may be facing issues with college debt,
unemployment and underemployment among college graduates.
So we have launched effort called Bridge to Career, which will attempt, through
transdisciplinary training, to close certain skills gaps among students, e.g. business skills for the nonbusiness major; technical, computer-based skills for the non-STEM major; and professional skills for
all students. This sort of training is growing in private business and at other universities. For example,
companies such as Koru, Coursolve, Intern Sushi, Fullbridge program deliver this kind of
programming as their core business model, and the November Wall Street Journal piece, “College
Diplomas, With a Side of Specialized Study” further explores this burgeoning area.
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To be concrete, Bridge to Career would, for example, assist a student in the arts
gain business/financial skills to start a business or to better understand how to translate
their skill set into a business environment. A student in engineering could gain training in
communication and leadership. A student in the social sciences could gain training in
web design and basic coding. Any student could gain practice and training in professional “success”,
which includes key skills like leadership, team work and problem solving. To that end, the program is
piloting three areas of short courses and experiences that will provide students opportunity for
Business Literacy, Technical Literacy, and Professional Success.
SLIDE: Lindsey Lankford standing at the B after commencement — she had an on-campus job as an
undergraduate, as the assistant to our Director of Trademark Licensing and Enforcement. Just this
month she was offered a job to join the trademark licensing team at the University of Cincinnati.
Slide 7 – Professors of the Practice
Our PROFESSORS OF THE PRACTICE program invites leading scientists, business
executives, artists, engineers and others at the top of their industries and in the peak of their careers to
interact with students and faculty in ways that provide the kinds of experiences and insights that a
traditional classroom experience could never replicate. Along with people like Whole Foods Co-CEO
Walter Robb and Boise State Artist in Residence, Benjamin Victor — the only living sculptor to have
two works of art represented in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol — we were privileged
this year to work with NASA astronaut Steve Swanson, who interacted with Boise State students while
he was commanding the International Space Station, and then spoke to students in intimate settings and
a packed house of community members late last year.
Slide 8 – College of Innovation & Design
These last two programs mentioned are key programs in one of the most exciting changes we
have ever launched here at Boise State – the COLLEGE OF INNOVATION AND DESIGN.
The College of Innovation & Design is the most recent example of the entrepreneurial and
innovative spirit that pervades all we do. We are soon to announce that the college will be led by
Gordon Jones, the current director of the Harvard Innovation Lab — a very exciting opportunity for us
and one of the best signs I can think of that we are a university on the move. This college will act as a
hub that leverages the speed, collaboration and risk-taking of a start-up to re-imagine the way we
teach, learn and conduct research at Boise State. Teams of faculty will cross traditional disciplinary
boundaries to create new degrees and certificates, paving ways to learning that are more in sync with
employer requirements for the workforce of tomorrow.
Among the initial efforts of the new college will be a degree in “Gaming, Interactive Media and
Mobile Technology.” It will prepare students to create new applications through multiple technology
platforms. Students will develop expertise in computer programming, visual design and animation,
modeling, narrative arts, game theory and development. Graduates will be qualified for high-growth
professions, such as mobile app developer, video game designer and web developer.
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The new College will also incorporate previous campus efforts, like our Venture College, under
its umbrella, and set upon expanding on already successful efforts. The VENTURE COLLEGE has set
a national example of how to build entrepreneurship at the college level. Here, more than 300 local
business and community leaders volunteer their time to help students realize their visions of new startups or non-profits. As the directors say, Venture College isn’t about learning how to start a business —
it is about starting a business.
SLIDE: Sarah Rehn looking at a test tube — Boise State's fifth Goldwater Scholar, recognized
nationally for her undergraduate work in cancer research. She's a junior chemistry major from Boise.
Goldwater Scholarships are the top undergraduate research award in the nation. Sarah actually
started researching at Boise State while she was still in high school — an option that exists for
motivated, high-caliber local students.
Slide 9 – Ensuring Efficiency -- Every University program evaluated on: Relevance, Quality,
Productivity & Efficiency
Throughout all of these changes and growth and improvements, we continue to do all that we
can to ensure that we are spending our tax dollars and tuition as wisely and efficiently as possible.
Last year, in the higher education version of zero-based budgeting, we undertook one of the
most in-depth evaluations in university history. It was called “program prioritization.” We looked at
159 of our minors and related programs, 135 degree and graduate certificate programs, and all 242
administrative and support programs — and examined how they were performing in four ways:
efficiency, quality, productivity and relevance.
Some programs were immediately consolidated or eliminated, a great many others are on a plan
to be improved substantially. We expect this process to guide and improve our decisions for years to
come — and it is already informing our efforts to ensure that we are focusing on the kinds of programs
and courses of study that meet our university mission and serve the ever-evolving needs of our students
and Idaho’s economy.
We at Boise State realize the importance of efficient spending, eliminating programs that no
longer have enough student demand to justify the investment — and aiming limited resources in areas
of distinct need. We want all stakeholders to know that the institution is operating as cost-effectively as
possible. And many of the new exciting initiative that we have underway will be realized because we
have gone through this process.
Which leads me to our priorities for the coming year.
Slide 10 – Complete College Idaho
Our budget request for fiscal year 2016 focuses on two main priorities:
First, we are continuing our efforts to meet the state’s goal of ensuring that 60 percent of all
Idahoans have a degree or certificate by 2020.
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Our focus on the 60 percent goal has been tightly drawn for the past couple of years. We know
what barriers can slow our ability to graduate more students with the skills and experiences they need
to be successful in the workplace, and we are working each year to eliminate them.
We know that professional advisors are needed to keep students on track to finish on time and
on budget.
We know how many new tenure-track and clinical faculty we need to teach the kinds of small
and technical upper-division courses that can fill quickly and cause bottlenecks that delay graduation.
And we know hiring the right support staff can free department chairs to better work with
students and faculty to improve academic offerings and outcomes.
Slide 11 – Professional Advisors
The national benchmark for the number of undergraduate students for each professional advisor
is 300 to one. Boise State’s ratio last year was 578 to one.
Your budget allocation in FY15 allowed us to hire 7 advisors and lower that ratio to 403 to 1. It
will take 6 more new advisors to bring us to that national goal.
And it is arguable that these advisors are even more important at Boise State than around the
country. Studies show advising is even more important for first-generation college students, who don’t
always know what to expect and can’t rely on their parents’ experience to guide them. More than onethird of Boise State’s students are the first in their families to attend college.
Slide 12 – Tenure-Track & Clinical Faculty
Boise State similarly lags behind the national averages for the ratio of students for each fulltime faculty member.
You can see here that last year’s budget increase allowed us to add 14 faculty lines and lower
that ratio to 27.1 from 27.7.
It will take 63 full-time positions to reach the average of the kind of school Boise State used to
be — a “master’s large” university — and an additional 72 new lines to reach the average of the
“Doctoral Research” institutions that we are joining. That is 135 total faculty positions to put us in
good stead with the ratio. It sounds daunting I know, but if we continue to plug away at it each year,
we will get there.
We plan to tackle this deficit by both hiring top-notch tenure-track faculty who are engaged in
the kinds of research and teaching methods the university needs to move forward and by converting
part-time adjunct professors into full-time lecturers.
The need becomes even more acute as the university evolves. As upper-classmen and graduate
student numbers rise — as you can see they have been in this chart — the need for this depth of
expertise increases — in traditional class times, evenings and weekends and online.
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Again, this is a good problem to have — it shows how well we are doing to retain and progress
students through their first two years of college, and indicates the growing relationship between Boise
State and the College of Western Idaho, which provides a great many students an affordable and
accessible way to get halfway to a bachelor’s degree.
Slide 13 – Computer Science Workforce Initiative
Our second main priority this year is to expand the opportunities in Computer Science. We are
working with a number of partners in both private enterprise and public agencies to expand the
opportunities in Computer Science - one of the fastest-growing and highest potential industries in our
area.
Slide 14 - STEMblog
Three of the hottest jobs the Idaho Department of Labor projects for this state are tied directly
to this discipline — software developers, network administrators and computer systems analysts.
In fact, industry watchers predict that as many as half of every job in STEM — science,
technology, engineering and math — will be in computing by 2020.
Slide 15– Percentage Growth in Job Ads During the Economic Expansion (2009-2014)
Here in Idaho, you can already see the demand quickly outpacing other industries.
This chart shows that while all job openings have increased greatly since 2008 in the U.S. and
Idaho, software developer job ads increased in Idaho by 233 percent. This industry is desperate for
trained workers, and we are committed to finding ways to provide them.
We also know that attracting students into this major needs to begin early, so as our program
grows we are also growing outreach in the high schools.
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We recently received a grant from NSF to train high school teachers to teach Computer
Science and our faculty have been working with the State Department of Education on
standards for teachers so they can be endorsed to teach computer science
We held 2 summer camps this past summer for high school students and we also sponsored
a workshop for elementary teachers to help them integrate computer science into their math
and science curriculum.
Slide 16 – Computer Science Initiative (continued…)
Finally, this beautiful new building, going up right now in The Grove, is the symbol of one of
the best public-private partnerships we’ve ever undertaken. Eight local technology companies joined
their financial resources together last year to help Boise State secure a state workforce development
grant to jumpstart plans to double the number of our computer science graduates.
A few months later, Boise State became a partner in one of the most innovative new projects in
Downtown Boise — joining the Gardner Companies and many others in a project to expand
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convention center space, meet the needs of a downtown transit center, and, for the first time in Boise,
move an entire academic department into the heart of the industry where its students will intern and
work.
Our intention is to expand computer science from the 50-60 graduates per year currently to
about 200 graduates per year, establish a PhD in Computer Sciences, offer additional graduate course
work and experiences in the area of big data and data analytics to support the research needs of the
industry, and to eventually spin off 10 start-up companies every year — the kind of entrepreneurial
innovation that drives the modern economy.
We have already increased our computer science student body to 476 from 337 in just a couple
of years. And little wonder — these are high paying jobs, earning college graduates annual salaries
between $65,000 and $68,000, and master’s degree holders between $80,000 and $120,000. Almost all
of them stay in Idaho — in fact, most have job offers in hand before they even graduate.
Slide 17 – Small Business Development Center
Accelerating business growth through coaching & training
A proven 4:1 return on investment
Investing $298,600 for 4 FTE to join the 8 Idaho locations could lead to 16 new businesses, 100 new
jobs, a $2 million increase in sales and $2 million in capital raised.
Focus on: rural, export and technology companies
In partnership with Idaho’s universities and colleges
One of the programs housed in Boise State’s College of Business and Economics is the Idaho
Small Business Development Center. The organization, hosted by Boise State since 1985, works
statewide through partnerships with Idaho’s other institutions of higher education to accelerate
business growth through no-cost consulting and affordable training. The return on investment and good
work they are doing is incredible and provides a very valuable service for the Idaho business
community.
Katie Sewell is the current Director for the Center and she is here with us today. Katie has
done a masterful job summarizing the Center’s request and its impact on this slide such that it speaks
for itself, but Katie and I are both here and will now stand for questions.