In the midst of a bleak funding outlook for higher education, Ball State professors are being asked to increase academic standards while producing as many four-year graduates as possible.
The goal is to prepare students for a competitive workforce and to save the college money by graduating students on time.
Ball State should be setting its own standards and methods of evaluating performance, said Provost Terry King during a University Senate meeting on Thursday night.
"We need to be ahead of the curve on this," he said. "If we don't fix some things, they will be fixed for us."
His comments led one faculty member to ask if it's really possible to raise educational standards while trying to graduate more students on time.
King answered with an analogy about the auto industry of 20 or 30 years ago.
"They were saying, 'You're telling us to do this better, quicker and faster. Which three of those do you want? These are all not possible,'" he said. "And you'll see what happened to the automobile industry.
"We'll have to figure this out. There's a lot of really smart people here at this university, and we'll figure it out."
Randy Howard, vice president of Business Affairs and treasurer, gave a presentation during the meeting that explained the reasons behind Ball State's $11.8 million cut in state funding last year and what we can expect from future funding.
"The story of our university, how we're trying to differentiate ourself, is selling with some people," he said. "It's selling with legislators. I think it's selling at the statehouse. It just hasn't translated to the commission's formula yet."
The formula he's talking about is largely performance-based, and the specific information that was evaluated by the Commission for Higher Education wasn't flattering for Ball State. For example, since Ball State had a dip in graduation during a time for which it was being evaluated, it lost performance points.
Across the board, schools are losing funding. In the 1980s, Howard said, about 9.8 percent of the average state's revenue was allocated to higher education. In 2013, that percentage could be down to 6.5 percent, and that's leaning on the side of optimism, he said.
All things considered, the Commission has Ball State's interest in mind, Howard said. Right now, what's important is finding ways to gain revenue and graduate more students on time.
"We just have to gain on the margins," Howard said. "So find some students that don't really have a great reason [to stay in college five or six years], and try to get some of those over the hump."
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