Negotiating Access and Tier One Aspirations

Striving Institutions

The idea of striving or upward mobility of the image and perceived prestige of an institution (Gardner, 2010; O’Meara, 2007) is discussed in literature that is informative on the types of challenges that affect students and faculty when institutions move, often in shifting their emphasis from teaching to research, to increase their prestige. For instance, Gonzales (2013) investigates the ways that faculty at a university in the Southwest with a similar context made sense of a push toward Tier One and finds that many of the faculty expressed concern that striving would disenfranchise the students the institution was originally intended to serve.

Previous research on striving suggests that a focus on research comes at the cost of other missions including teaching and service (O’Meara & Bloomgarden, 2011) as well as diverting funding away from instruction (Morphew & Baker, 2004). Striving institutions often suffer from high faculty turnover (Gardner, 2010; O’Meara, 2007), especially if they were drawn to their institution for its original emphasis on access and teaching. O’Meara (2007) addresses the forces that contributed to striving in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, but little work has been done on striving in Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs).

HSIs

Research on HSIs is growing, but Hurtado and Ruiz (2012) argue that more understanding is needed of how these institutions make meaning of and put into action their designation to serve their Hispanic students. Central to the founding of UTSA were the students in a predominantly Hispanic area it was created to serve (UTSA Graduate Catalog, 1973), though UTSA predates the establishment of HSIs. An institution becomes an HSI if Hispanic students make up at least 25% of the full-time equivalent students (Department of Education, 2011).

Unlike other minority-serving institutions, HSIs were not created with the specific mission of serving Hispanic students (Gasman, 2008). Yet HSIs do share some similar challenges. First, HSIs face the need to balance access with quality (Santiago, 2009). While HSIs are typically broad-access institutions, HSI presidents reported a need to ensure that students who choose to attend HSIs still receive a quality education (Santiago, 2009). Second, leaders at HSIs typically identify funding as a chronic concern at their institutions (De Los Santos & De Los Santos, 2003). As a consequence of financial shortfalls and increased competition among public institutions for state and federal funding, more institutions, including HSIs, may look to increase their funding through striving.

The Emergence of Tier One Aspirations

In the university’s first Graduate Catalog, its purpose and philosophy included the statement,

While striving to merit and to achieve ultimate recognition as a significant university from the national perspective, it will also strive in various ways to reflect and to serve the special characteristics of the Southwest, the State of Texas, and South and Southwest Texas as distinctive regions. (UTSA Graduate Catalog, 1973)

The mission indicated a need for the university to stand out among its peer institutions around the country as well as serve its local population, one who is predominantly Hispanic.

By 1999, the state legislature began to toy with the idea that Texas could have more than its traditional flagship institutions, UT-Austin and Texas A&M University in College Station, but UTSA would require more research and funding to compete with these institutions (Guerra, 1999). While still not a “university of the first class,” UTSA could have remained where it was as a growing, comprehensive university that reflected its community far more than it ever had in its short history. In his early years as president of UTSA, Ricardo Romo used the phrase, “We want to be a university of first choice” (Flores, 2003) as the slogan for his agenda.

That changed in 2009 with H.B. 51, a plan for Texas universities that strove for Tier One status and that provided details on how they planned on joining the ranks of elite institutions in the state. There were seven institutions across the state that intended to compete for these funds, including two other HSIs in Texas, the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Houston. The bill required the seven “emerging research universities” to submit their detailed plans to the THECB on how they would achieve their plans (H.B. 51, 2009), and as Hamilton (2010) reports, this bill created benchmarks for becoming a top-tier research university that the state of Texas would financially incentivize these universities to achieve. The benchmarks included, among other things, a minimum endowment of US$400 million and a minimum of 200 doctoral degrees conferred annually.

UTSA announced its plans to achieve for “Tier One,” a multifaceted plan that included, among other objectives, recognition from the American Association of Universities and annual research expenditures exceeding US$100 million (UTSA’s Tier One Path, 2013). The UTSA 2016 Strategic Plan indicates that if Tier One status is achieved by UTSA and if it finds the balance between excellence and access, UTSA could be the first HSI to become a premier research university (UTSA’s Tier One Path, 2013). The strategic plan offers potential benefits to the local community should UTSA reach Tier One status, but there are also lingering questions on the effect Tier One will have on the enrollment UTSA built over the last three decades. Perhaps the benchmarks listed in H.B. 51 that caused the most tension is the move toward accepting freshman classes with “high academic achievement” (Hamilton, 2010), meaning that UTSA, among other objectives, would have to consider rethinking its historical mission of broad access to underrepresented populations.

Student Enrollments

Despite its original charge to provide postsecondary education to the largely Hispanic area of South Texas, sizable Hispanic student enrollment at UTSA did not occur until the mid-1980s. During the tenure of President James Wagener, the university experienced some incremental enrollment growth, but its Hispanic student population increased 26.4% between fall 1984 and fall 1988 (UTSA Enrollment by Ethnic Origin, Fall 1984 to Fall 1988, n.d.). The opening of a downtown campus in 1994 held the promise to better serve students of color, or as then-mayor Nelson Wolff stated, “It is essential to the education of our Hispanic and black inner-city residents that we have a downtown campus for the University of Texas at San Antonio” (Phillips-Gonzalez, 1993, p. 2B).

Several years into Ricardo Romo’s presidency, enrollment numbers indicated that UTSA was quickly becoming a popular university in Texas (“UTSA Is Busting Out All Over,” 2002). Some of the growth in enrollment numbers were due to the Coordinated Admissions Program (CAP). This program offers provisional admission to the University of Texas at Austin to undergraduate students who agree to complete their first year of coursework at a participating UT System campus. After completing 30 hr, in addition to other minimum requirements, students are able to transfer to the UT flagship university. Between 2002 and 2013, CAP students constituted between 16% and 27% of UTSA’s incoming first time full-time undergraduate class annually (UTSA Fact Book, 2006, 2013). As part of UTSA’s Graduation Rate Improvement Plan, closely tied to its Tier One plans, UTSA announced its intentions to phase out its participation in the CAP program in 2011 (Four-Year Graduation Rate Improvement Plan, 2011). While the program boosted enrollment, the Plan pointed out that it artificially impacted UTSA’s enrollment and retention numbers as they were usually counted with the statistics of students who intended to complete their degrees at UTSA.

With specific regard to non-CAP admissions, changes in admissions standards have roughly come in two cycles, the first preceding H.B. 51. In fall 2008, admissions rates dropped from 99% in fall 2004 to 87% (Crisp, Horn, Dizinno, & Wang, 2010). However, the full force of the Tier One move came to bear in the 2013-2014 school year when new admissions standards went into effect and the admissions rate slipped to 60% (Chavez, 2013). Just a decade earlier, a local newspaper column summarizes UTSA’s careful balance of striving for excellence while still providing access as “UTSA wants to offer strong undergraduate and graduate programs without developing the selective reputation some other top-tier institutions have. Increasing its selectivity would require greater rigidity in the admissions process, at odds with the university’s commitment to access (Flores, 2003, p. 1A).” UTSA argues that it has maintained diversity in its new class of students, with nearly half the 2013 incoming class comprising of Hispanic students (Chavez, 2013). The implication then is that the proportion of Hispanic students being admitted remains high even if the overall number of accepted applicants falls across the board.

Persistent Funding Challenges

In its early years, UTSA enjoyed a steady flow of capital for construction and development from the state. However, all that changed in 1977. Considerable delays and changes in construction plans required more funding that Flawn struggled to obtain (Walker, 1979). Further and more significant cuts came down from the state during the legislative session that one San Antonio journalist called “the day the music died” for UTSA when, among other cuts, it was placed on formula funding at a time when UTSA’s enrollment began a downward turn (Walker, 1979). Problems with funding are a persistent theme of UTSA’s history and a possible cause of its turn toward Tier One.

The growth during Kirkpatrick’s term came from an influx of state money granted to border-area institutions as a result of legal challenges from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the League of United Latino American Citizens (Fuentes, 1992). The state legislature approved the South Texas/Border Initiative that greatly increased the fiscal appropriations for institutions in South Texas, including UTSA (Flack, 2003). Between 1990 and 2003, the Initiative brought more than US$93 million to UTSA, including more than US$16.5 million for academic program development (Flack, 2003). Despite the money that flowed into UTSA during the 1990s as a result of the South Texas/Border Initiative (Flack, 2003), UTSA was still referred to as a “limited doctoral university” (Guerra, 1999).

Since the arrival of Ricardo Romo in 1999, the university has added 22 doctoral programs and is making strides to award 200 doctoral degrees annually as stipulated by the policies born out of H.B. 51 (THECB, 2014). However, UTSA has continued to fall short of the US$100 million in annual research dollars specified by its Tier One aspirations (UTSA’s Tier One Path, 2013). During the 2012 fiscal year, UTSA’s research expenditures totaled US$78 million (Fish, 2013). Although the university made strides toward the US$100 million mark, including a 50% increase between 2007 and 2012 (Fish, 2013), it still has a sizable gap between current levels of research dollars and its goal.

Curriculum

The first degree programs included master’s degrees in Hispanic culture and bilingual–bicultural studies, which reflected an awareness of the community (UTSA Graduate Catalog, 1973). When approached by a local magazine about the possibility of an engineering program at UTSA, an unnamed THECB source replied, “The notion that an engineering school would attract industry in San Antonio is bullshit” (Walker, 1979, p. 63). The source told the journalist that “if your Mexican American [student] wants to be an engineer, let him enroll in one of the beginning programs at UTSA or Trinity or St. Mary’s and finish up at UT-Austin.” UTSA did not need an engineering school because, as this source explained with shocking bluntness and racism, “The Mexican American community is not where engineers come from anyway” (emphasis added; Walker, 1979, p. 63).

While the mission of the university aimed to provide access to an underserved area, this quote indicates that UTSA still faced prevalent racism and deficit-driven perceptions about Hispanic students within the state power structure. What the source failed to realize were two important realities for underrepresented students: their limited finances and mobility. UTSA is the only public institution in the San Antonio area, and private universities such as Trinity and St. Mary’s may have been out of reach for low-income students. What is more, transferring to a university in another city may not have been a realistic option for students who live at home while attending school. The university prevailed in getting an engineering program in 1983, but doctoral programs eluded UTSA until the 1990s. Although H.B. 42 allowed for the creation of doctoral programs at UTSA, it was not until 1992 that a doctoral program in biology was approved (Coburn, 1992) followed by a second program in computer science in 1995 (Martinez, 1995). From that point, it could be said that UTSA was offering more comprehensive education options to its historically underserved area, at least in terms of programs and graduate programs.