Tulane University
Staff Advisory Council October 2012
ATTENDEES
OFFICERS
Loshbaugh, Alysia,Chair
Smith , Lawrence, Vice Chair
Bouyelas, Sheri, Election
Coordinator
Bourgeois, Kathy, Recording
Secretary
Conners, Linzi, Corresponding
Secretary
Chavez, Gwen, Member At Large
PRESENT
PRESENT
ABSENT
ATTENDEES
DOWNTOWN CAMPUS
Davis, Patrick
Haase, Tanya
Heisser, Michael
PRESENT
Huber, Jennifer
PRESENT
PRESENT
Kivell, Anita
EXCUSED
ABSENT
Leger, Kay
Longlois, Christi
Miller, Michael, Senator at Large
Pick, Amy
Vasquez-Lockhart, Yesenia
EXCUSED
PRESENT
PRESENT
PRESENT
PRESENT
PROXY
Charles, Anna (Proxy)
Feiling, Greg (Proxy)
Guilbeau, Elizabeth (Proxy)
Hankins, Julia (Proxy)
Hayden, Nadrine (Proxy)
Hills, Tynette (Proxy)
Hyde-Augillard, Sharon (Proxy)
Kivell, Lyndsie (Proxy)
Ligget, Mark (Proxy)
Lossi, Suzanne (Proxy)
Nolan, Andrea (Proxy)
Parzynski, Stacey (Proxy)
Relayson, Barbara (Proxy)
Schafer, Liz (Proxy)
Schor, Meredith (Proxy)
ABSENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
PRESENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
PRESENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
Starck, Tamar (Proxy)
Strong, Sewann (Proxy)
Tedesco, Ken (Proxy)
Wilde, Elizabeth (Proxy)
Wilson, Marilyn (Proxy)
Young, Peter (Proxy)
PRESENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
ABSENT
NORTHSHORE
Guichard, Kenny
Viana, Rick
Waguespack, Desiree
PRESENT
PRESENT
PRESENT
WFMO Representative
Wallace, Christina
PRESENT
UPTOWN CAMPUS
Bocage, Jered
Branley, Kathy
Cheramie, Christopher
Espinosa, Miriam
Houck, Katie
Keck, Jeanny
Lane, Christopher, Immediate Past
Chair
Leonard, Angelica
Lowe, Brian
Mitchell, Scott
Murphy, Louise
O’Dwyer, Lisa
Platner, Robert
Richards, Whitney
Robinson, LaShanda
PRESENT
PRESENT
PRESENT
PRESENT
PRESENT
EXCUSED
ABSENT
ABSENT
EXCUSED
EXCUSED
PRESENT
EXCUSED
PRESENT
EXCUSED
ABSENT
PRESENT
EXCUSED
INVITED GUESTS AND VISITORS
Douglas Harris with Economics
* Via teleconference
All Officers are serving the Staff Advisory Council term 2012 – 2013
Call to Order: The meeting was called to order at 3:32 by the chair, Alysia Loshbaugh.
used video conferencing for the first time this month.
We
TU Staff Advisory Council Meeting
I.
October 11, 2012
Page 2
Review and Approval of the Minutes
The September 2012 minutes were approved.
II.
Guest Speakers
Douglas Harris with Economics spoke to us about the cost of higher education and why it
continues to increase. He has researched cost effectiveness and how schools and colleges can
get more with less for a number of years. The number of degrees divided by the expenditures
in the two and four year college sectors from 1970 – 2006 is the formula that was used.
Productivity is down by this measure by almost 50%, but it is hard to increase productivity. In
other sectors such as telecommunications and manufacturing and so on, productivity is
increasing, because their capital investments easily increase productivity. In higher education
we define a degree in terms of the number of credit hours, so sometimes it is impossible to
increase productivity because you have a certain number of hours that you have to spend in a
classroom. The most direct way to increase productivity is to have larger classes, but then you
have quality concerns. In some of the industries that are increasing productivity and the wages
go up, but then in education we have to keep up with that. We can’t let the wages go up in
other sectors and not compete for workers. Costs inherently go up in education and other
sectors. It is also hard to measure quality. There is a disconnect between price, quality and
cost. It is hard to know when a program is working. People tend to judge schools that are more
expensive as being more effective. Price ends up being a proxy for quality, which provides an
incentive to raise prices rather than to reduce them. There ends up not being a lot of incentive
to contain costs when being a higher priced institution is going to make you more attractive to
students. In almost every other sector it would be the opposite. Raising prices is usually a bad
thing, but in education, it can actually be a good thing. That is one of the reasons that Tulane
continues to see more and more applications despite tuition increases. Adding more students
to each class can diminish the benefit for each student, and increasing the number of courses a
professor teaches, would reduce research. It is not easy to figure out whether certain programs
are working. We see students in college access programs that seem to graduate at higher
rates. That may not be because they are in the program, but it might be because they are
students who are more motivated to do well in college and get into college access programs.
They were going to graduate at a higher rate anyway.
From a research standpoint, Economists have not been very helpful, because they don’t do a lot
of analysis where they try to take on that difficult task of identifying the effects and comparing
the costs. He went out and identified programs where we do have rigorous evidence of impact,
then estimate the costs and then calculate a cost effectiveness ratio by dividing the effect by the
cost to get a sense of how much you are paying for the dollar. There are programs like Upward
Bound that cost $5,000 per student, and there are other programs that cost about $5 per
student, so by cost effectiveness logic, Upward Bound would have to generate one thousand
times more benefits than the cheaper program to justify the additional costs.
He looked at key elements that are in US News as well as ones that are key elements to
determining costs. Tulane tends to have smaller classes than most colleges do, so he looked at
the cost of that. He had estimates of the cost of reducing the student faculty to student ratio
from fifteen to thirteen at $73,000 per one hundred students. He also looked at shifting from
current practice with a mixture of full time faculty and part time faculty to all full time faculty. The
increase in cost would be about $70,000 in a four year sector per group of one hundred
students. They think that having full time faculty would be more effective than having several
adjunct professors. Some studies suggest that the adjuncts are just as good as the full time
TU Staff Advisory Council Meeting
October 11, 2012
Page 3
faculty, but there is debate about that. Part of the problem is that they don’t have enough
evidence of the effects let alone the costs.
You could also look at how cost effective the institution is as a whole. They looked at the
graduation rate less the predicted graduation rate considering the demographics and the
academic background of the students. The effectiveness piece is the numerator and the
denominator in the ratio is the cost to the families (tuition). The problem with the usual ranking
system is that spending more money actually increases your ranking. The more you spend, the
higher your ranking is and part of that is automatic. From an economic standpoint, it is
backwards. Spending more for a given level of output is bad, but in a college ranking, you
actually get rewarded for spending more. It is another one of the reasons for the disconnect
between price and quality. College ranking reinforce that disconnect. In fact, they flip it around
and continue to reward higher spending.
He talked about an article that is based on the Washington monthly rankings. The Washington
Monthly used his metric in their new rankings. Research expenditures is a plus, so the more
you spend on research (no matter what that does and no matter how well that money is spent)
results in spending being a good thing. He feels that Washington Monthly is better than US
News in a lot of ways. Tulane University does well on service types of activities, but Tulane
doesn’t do as well by this metric. The graduation rate is lower than it is for similar levels of
academic prep of the students coming in. Ever since Hurricane Katrina, our rankings have been
lower, because of that Katrina year. He thought it was important to do this paper to show
almost the absurdity of how the rankings are set up. Just because there is a low graduation
rate, it doesn’t say anything about the quality, but quality is hard to judge. There are a lot of
institutional variations.
Alysia asked if they have done studies on MOOC (massively open online courses). One of the
programs that they talk about from a cost standpoint in the paper is course re-design. Basically
the idea was to redesign courses to make better use of technology and reduce costs. The
question was if you have a program that reduces cost, does the quality go down. The argument
for this program is that it didn’t go down and the MOOCS would be in this category. There are a
lot of problems with this system, because it is not for credit and it is free, yet people are
cheating. He thinks it has a future, but he doesn’t think it is a threat to Tulane. It is going to
open up new opportunities for people who are in areas that want to learn something that is
specialized. People will still be sending their children to colleges and using more technology,
but they probably will not be entirely online. Tulane would have to decide if it is an opportunity
for us.
III.
Report of
Loshbaugh
the
Chair,
Alysia
An email was sent out to all staff members that detailed who we are and what our strategic
goals are. Alysia received a lot of positive feedback. People are excited about the strategic
goals, and she received some suggestions for the professional development workshops that we
want to do.
IV.
WFMO Liaison
WFMO sent out a call for nominations for the President’s Staff excellence and the Yvette Jones
awards. The deadline is November 2nd to submit nominations. Christina asked us to put the
TU Staff Advisory Council Meeting
October 11, 2012
Page 4
word out. They are wondering why we didn’t have very many nominations this year. One
member suggested that it may be the criteria. The Yvette Jones award is fairly new and the
criteria are kind of specialized. It seems like it is primarily focused on people that deal in
external affairs. A suggestion was made to revise the guidelines to focus less on development
and community relations and more on just leadership, it may make it easier. The Yvette Jones
award is five thousand dollars and the President’s award is one thousand dollars. An employee
can be nominated by anyone not just the person’s supervisor. The supervisor has to sign off on
the nomination, though. We all were in agreement that Hurricane Isaac has put everyone
behind in their work, so they haven’t had time to devote to nominating someone. They will send
another reminder out.
They sent an email out to let people know about open enrollment, which included the prices.
Open enrollment begins on October 22, 2012 and will run for three weeks instead of two.
WFMO and United Health Care will be on site the second week to help with enrollment. The
people that did not do biometric screenings last year and therefore didn’t get the incentive
ended up paying more than those that did the screening, so this move to United Health Care
represents a decrease for them. If anyone has questions, they should call x1700 for assistance.
The plans are pretty much the same. It looks like the increase will be about 10% for most
people. There used to be an incentive to buy mail order prescription drugs, but because there is
a state mandate now, there is not a financial incentive to buy them this way. You would pay the
same thing that you would pay to a pharmacy. If you don’t do anything, then you will be placed
in a plan that most closely resembles the one that you are in now. If you used flexible spending,
you have to sign up for it again. It is a good idea to do this anyway to review and update your
information. Dental insurance went up, but it is still with Delta Dental. There weren’t any
changes to rates with Eye Med. It seems like most people are happy that we are going back to
United Healthcare.
There was a question about the paperless paychecks. Some co-workers asked if it is
mandatory for all employees. The paper paystubs are going away, so you don’t have the option
to keep it. You do have a choice for the ADP piece, so if you sign up for electronic W-2’s you
will get it, but you won’t get paper. Those that didn’t sign up for the electronic W-2 will just get
the paper form. Alysia said that she signed up for the electronic W-2, but hadn’t received the
activation code as of yet. She suggested that it is not working properly, because she did
receive the text message.
Because of the boil water advisory on the east bank of Orleans parish, the Newcomb Children’s
Center as well as Kidopolis closed. Employees that didn’t have another child care option were
forced to take a day off of work to care for their children and they want to know if they have to
use a vacation day for that day. Christina said that you do have to use a vacation day for that
day. If your child was in another daycare not associated with Tulane and it had to close, you
would still have to use a vacation day to take off to care for your child.
V.
Officer Reports
A. University Senate
There was a short meeting. The senate by-laws that were up for a vote did not impact
staff.
B. Board of Administrators
TU Staff Advisory Council Meeting
October 11, 2012
Page 5
No Report
VI. University Senate Committee Reports
A. Benefits
No Report
B. Budget Review
No Report, but they will meet next week
C. Information Technology
No Report, but they will be meeting to discuss the new Tulane mobile app. They want to
have most if not all that is on Gibson online added to the mobile app.
D. Equal Opportunity
No Report
E. Physical Facilities
No Report
F. Social Issues
No Report
VII. SAC Sub-Committees
A. Election Committee
No Report
B. Electronic Technology and Information
No Report, but they will be meeting to go over the pay-pal for the raffle
C. Staff Appreciation
Gwen asked Yesenia to give a report for her in her absence. She wants to have the
Staff Appreciation Day on Saturday, March 9, 2013. Alysia will ask Anne Banos to see if
President Cowen could join us. We want it to be a family event. It could have it either
on the Alumni grounds, Rogers Chapel quad, Gibson Hall quad or Audubon Park. If
anyone knows of a band or a DJ that they can recommend, they should let Gwen know.
Gwen would like us to try to get businesses to donate door prizes. She is looking for
ideas for adult activities, also.
D. Staff Issues
TU Staff Advisory Council Meeting
October 11, 2012
Page 6
They got feedback from the all staff list serve as to what people are wanting and what
they are willing to provide us for a staff development series. They are having a meeting
to see where they will go from there.
E. Health and Wellness
Louise Murphy is the new chair of Health and Wellness. Lindsay Garcia is the new
Health and Wellness director. They would like to enlist more members to help with this
committee. They are going to start over with trying to create some intramural sports.
F. Community Service
We have our permit for the raffle. We were given 3,000 colored printed tickets and they
will be able to pay through pay pal. They plan to launch the raffle on November 3, 2012
at Tulane’s homecoming game. They told us that we can be at gate C. We will have a
photo of the Saint’s tickets and the basket and the art will be there for people to see.
She has a free radio spot with WYLK on the north shore. They will do an interview with
Desi on their morning show. We may be able to get an ad in the Times Picayune. They
plan to have an off-site location for toys due to the security issues at the Primate Center.
Desi will give us the locations as soon as she gets them. The artist agreed to give us
another piece of artwork next year. He estimated the value at $2,000. A similar piece
sold for $2,500.
Yesenia held a school supply drive, which was very successful. Nearly three hundred
children received school supplies. We also received $295 in checks and cash, which will
be handed over to the fun. SAC was presented with a plaque that says Presented to
Tulane University Staff Advisory Council in appreciation for your dedication and service
from the Dinerral Shavers Educational Fund on August 25, 2012. Alysia will decide
where it should be placed.
Desi will send an email out in the next couple of weeks to request drop off locations for
toys, which will also serve as locations to purchase tickets.
G. Ad Hoc Student Relations Committee
No Report
H. Ad Hoc Constitution Committee
Jared and Alysia had their first phone call/meeting. They talked about looking at it on
two levels. They want to look at the technical aspects that are inconsistent as well as
the mission of the organization to make sure we are doing the best that we can for the
staff. They will look at what they can expand or cut back on. They will meet again
before the next meeting and welcome anyone to join the group. Only two other
members signed up for the committee, but one of them is leaving Tulane. Alysia would
like to have at least five people on the committee. Interested staff members can also
join if they would like to.
TU Staff Advisory Council Meeting
VIII.
October 11, 2012
Page 7
Old Business
Alysia is working on the constituency map. She hopes to have a draft of the map by the
November meeting.
IX.
New Business
No new business
X.
Adjournment
The meeting was adjourned at 4:41 pm
Respectfully submitted,
Kathy Bourgeois
Recording Secretary