Waiver of SAP standards raises questions

UTB-TSC administrators and faculty are divided over whether the decision to waive academic standards for its dual enrollment program is in the best interest of students.

The dual enrollment task force, formed last year to improve academic oversight for the program, was not consulted before the decision was made.

"What we're seeing here is a classic example of why the (Academic) Senate called for oversight," said English Department Chairman William Harris, a member of the Satisfactory Academic Progress, or SAP, task force.

The decision to waive academic standards comes on the heels of a significant drop in regular enrollment, and is marked by a compensatory increase in the dual enrollment program. The numbers leave some faculty members skeptical about whether waiving requirements could have more to do with enrollment numbers than with academic standards.

The rapidly growing dual enrollment program allows high school students to take college-level classes for college credit at their high school campuses. The program has grown from fewer than 700 students to more than 6,000 over the past five years, and accounts for more than a third of the UTB-TSC population.

 OVERSIGHT AND STANDARDS

The advantages of the program are obvious: Students can earn college credits for free, putting them on the track to a degree at a young age in a highly competitive marketplace.

But task force members say that with no dean for the program and little oversight apart from an administrative director, it is impossible to ensure that classes are truly of college-level quality and content and that the teachers are properly certified. Waiving academic requirements, they say, is a distressing move.

Linda Fossen, the vice president of enrollment management who announced the waiver decision to the task force, says the change does not leave students unaccountable in the long run and will do little harm.

"It does matter that students who take dual enrollment classes take them seriously and work very hard to get good grades," Fossen said. "We are just waiting to start the clock with academic performance of those students until they get to campus."

Task force members say they didn't become aware of the decision until after it had been made. First, an e-mail was circulated among high school academic counselors in early October, informing them that SAP requirements, which specify grade point average (GPA) and completion rate, would not be applied to students enrolled in the program.

"I think there seems to have been a lapse in communicating that (policy change), both to this task force and to the Academic Senate. So that seems to be true," UTB-TSC President Juliet V. Garcia told The Brownsville Herald. "The provost and vice president of academic affairs looked at the issue and made the decision and they did not consult with the Academic Senate."

Vice President for Academic Affairs Charles Dameron says waiving SAP requirements prevents dual-enrollment students from being put on probation for dropping classes; high school students often drop dual enrollment classes when they realize the material is too difficult, he said.

Task force members say that differentiating between dual enrollment students and regular students sends the wrong message. In the long run, they warn, it could even be detrimental to students' academic health.

"Low academic standing will affect students' eligibility for scholarships and loans and to be admitted to other colleges," said Betsy Price, liaison to part time faculty and a member of the SAP task force.

Unlike Advance Placement (AP) classes, the grades from dual enrollment follow students into college. Without the SAP to pressure students to achieve high grades, students may risk beginning school with a low GPA, setting them up for academic probation.

"We have to be fair to the student," Price said. "A good grade will give them a boost to a satisfying and productive career. A bad grade can dramatically reverse the benefits."

Harris, the English department chairman, says his concern is the original mission of the task force: to ensure that dual enrollment classes are truly college classes.

"We ought not to be making distinctions between classes taught in high school and those taught in college," he said.

SHIFT IN STANDARDS, LOSS IN ENROLLMENT

The dual enrollment SAP decision came after a significant increase in standards for regularly enrolled students. The change meant an immediate drop in enrollment, and President Garcia describes the change as a difficult business decision, but an important one for the school's academic health.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, all colleges are mandated to enforce a SAP policy for students receiving financial aid from federal Title IV funding (including the Pell Grants and Stafford Loans many UTB-TSC students use to pay for college), but schools can create the policy themselves.

Dual enrollment students do not receive such funding, so the university is not required to enforce the policy.

By enforcing a SAP policy, schools ensure that students with little hope of graduation don't dig a hole of debt by continuing to fruitlessly borrow student loans.

In Brownsville, the troubling graduation rate - less than 20 percent of students at UTB-TSC graduate in six years, according to the University of Texas System's numbers - combined with the high level of poverty in the region makes this issue economically dangerous. It means that, without a degree in hand, a student who has borrowed money for school is left with few options.

To fight this trend and raise the graduation rate, UTB-TSC increased the rigor of its own SAP policy last year from a 1.6 to a 2.0 GPA and 70 percent completion rate.

If regularly enrolled students have less than a 2.0 GPA, which is equivalent to a C-average, they cannot graduate. Theoretically, by ensuring that these minimal grades are maintained each semester, all students will stay on the track to a degree.

Garcia said the new SAP policy will help UTB-TSC work toward the ambitious goal of a 53 percent, six-year graduation rate by 2015.

But, she added, an additional effect of the change in policy was that more than 900 students who did not meet the new SAP were automatically were placed on academic probation. These students were forced not only to take a semester off, but when they returned to school they could not receive aid for their first semester and had to take a reduced courseload - measures that could deter some from returning at all.

"It was not easy to go to the UT system and tell them we were going to run a deficit budget to the tune of $3 million," Garcia said.

Administrators who have since left the school say that after the drop in enrollment, pressure to enroll students was intense.

According to Rene Coronado, the former director of human resources at UTB-TSC, enrollment became a priority in every department.

"Enrollment is way down at the university," he said. "They're trying to raise enrollment - that's really the only thing they're worried about."

(Coronado said he was fired in September because he became a whistleblower on several ethical issues and then told his supervisor that he suffered from insomnia and carpal tunnel syndrome. However, he said he is not speaking out against the SAP policy change out of retaliation for his firing.)

Garcia said the school is trying to increase enrollment, but the effort stems from a desire to bridge the historic gap in minority achievement; it is not simply enrollment for enrollment's sake.

"There is an urgency for us to catch up, not as a university, but as a region," she said. "Is there an urgent need in this community to get more kids going to college and succeeding? Absolutely. Do we feel responsible to fill that need for this community? Absolutely."

Dual enrollment students generate substantially less income for the university than regular students, but a report by the dual enrollment task force estimates that about $1 million will be generated by the program this year.

The task force requested that $453,000 of that money be used to provide increased academic oversight for the program, including the salary of a new dean and support staff.

WHAT THE NUMBERS SAY

Garcia said that while she has worked well with academic committees in the past, the dual enrollment task force, comprised of faculty and administrators, was self-appointed and the university is not required to accept its recommendations or consult with its members when making policy decisions.

At UTB-TSC, more than 6,000 of the approximately 17,000 students are in the dual enrollment program.

Faculty opinions have been divided as the program has grown. Students in the historically impoverished region benefit from college credit at no cost and begin learning complex material at a younger age.

But more than a third of the students are freshman and sophomores, so some students can spend four years in the program with no academic oversight from the university.

The task force also found that there was no universal method to ensure that faculty have the proper credentials to teach college-level courses.

"There's many opinions about whether UTB should offer dual enrollment and there is a clear disagreement amongst many folks on our campus," said Edward Camarillo, a Brownsville city commissioner and the director of the dual enrollment program.

Harris, of the English department chairman, says the Academic Senate created the task force to address just such criticisms.

"There are an awful lot of faculty that are unhappy with dual enrollment," he said. "We need a systematic approach.

"There's no reason why this couldn't be a model program in the state/">state and the country."

UNEASY RELATIONSHIP

Tanya Ceja, one of the school's student advisors during the SAP change, said she suspected there might be a relationship between the push to enroll additional students in dual enrollment and the loss of regularly enrolled students once the SAP was changed.

Ceja, a former academic advisor in the school of education/">education at the university who left last year, said she repeatedly heard from other advisors that they felt uneasy about the relationship between enrollment pressure and academic standards.

Ceja says she left her job at the school because she felt that her efforts to improve standards had fallen on deaf ears.

"I'm a woman with opinions, I spoke up," Ceja said. "I knew that I couldn't rise up the ranks in a place like that."

She described one occasion last summer when advisors were asked to come in on a weekend to enroll hundreds of students into summer dual enrollment classes that would begin that Monday.

"We were being asked to override the system to enroll students into these classes," Ceja said. "Anytime you are being logged in by someone with a supervisory password, it makes you wary, because you know that if you were to override the system ordinarily you could get in big trouble."

Camarillo, the program's director, says advisors sometimes were called in from other departments to enroll students, but only because the dual enrollment program doesn't have sufficient staff to handle the task. All students enrolled are qualified, he said.

"One thing I could see happening is that a student was pending and had the test scores, but they hadn't gotten to us yet," Camarillo said. "That happens, but only rarely."

Ceja says that on the occasion she was called in, it was more than a rare occurrence.

"We kept being told to override the computer system," she said. "Someone in authority is saying ‘do it.' You do it because it's your job. You don't know if that person is qualified (for dual enrollment) or not."

When asked, three current administrators at the school said they had heard stories about such an incident, but would not discuss it on the record.

President Garcia said she had not heard about the enrollment session, but that the possibility of such a situation "concerns me an awful lot and I'm going to find out what could possibly be there."

Garcia was in Mexico at the time this article went to print and was not available to respond to several requests for information on her findings.

Ceja wonders if enrolling students who ultimately would drop the classes would allow the school to get the enrollment numbers and funding. By waiving the SAP, she said, such students hypothetically would not be punished for a low completion rate.

She maintains Camarillo is not to blame. According to Ceja, he was merely following directions in a chain of command that discouraged challenging authority to maintain standards.

"I think he really believed it would all be sorted out," Ceja said, "but to me, the real story is that there's so much opportunity to operate in a gray area. There shouldn't be. When you get down to enrollment and qualifications, it should be black and white."

Ultimately, Harris says, the policy change contradicts the purpose of the task force.

"Most faculty who become aware of this are distressed," he said. "We see it as a quality issue and we're not clear on the motivations."

According to the UTB-TSC Web site, an enrollment of 20,000 has been set for the university by 2015 to contribute to Closing the Gaps, a statewide initiative aimed at enrolling students in historically underserved areas to educate more minority students:

l Current enrollment at UTB-TSC is 17,301.

l Of those students, 11,031 are taught on campus by UTB-TSC professors.

l The remaining 6,270 are dual enrollment students.

l Enrollment at the university has grown almost precisely by the number of students that the dual enrollment program has grown over the past five years, from 683 students to 6,270.

l The UTB-TSC overall enrollment has grown from 11,560 to 17,301.

l Without dual enrollment, the overall enrollment would have dropped by 529 students between 2004 and 2008.