The UT Board of Trustees’ Education, Research and Service Committee convened Friday morning to discuss system progress, complete with new annual statistics and faculty survey data.
As a system, UT is seeing rising numbers across the board in terms of students, with a total enrollment of 65,000 students rising at an annual rate of 4.4%. The system goal is to reach 71,000 students by 2030. First-year retention rates are also up all over the state at 85.8% and rising at a rate of 0.3% per year.
Across the system, four-year graduation rates have increased by 10.2% in the last five years, reaching 57.7%. Six-year graduation rates, too, have increased by 1.8% in the last five years, hitting 65.6%.
UTK boasted rising numbers in student growth and retention. Enrollment has increased 27.5% in the last five years, with the university hosting 40,421 total students this year. UTK Chancellor Donde Plowman’s goal is to reach 55,000 students by 2030.
Just at the Knoxville campus, the graduation rate for four-year degrees is 66.8% with a goal of 70% by 2030, and the six-year graduation rate stands at 74.5% with a goal of 80%. Graduation rates for both types of degrees have increased in the past five years.
Besides the Knoxville campus, all in the UT system reported strong numbers across the board.
Peter Buckley, chancellor of the UT Health Science Center, came onboard in 2022. He spoke about the major transformations that have occurred at UTHSC in the past couple of years.
“I wasn’t here, but four years ago, you received unfortunately an institutional probation for our residency program,” Buckley said. “That is not a good thing to have.”
Buckley spoke about the highly regulatory nature of UTHSC’s programs and how they’ve come out of its probation. Buckley invited Cynthia Russell to speak more in-depth on the strides they’ve made, including a streamlined website to appeal to potential applicants.
“Think about the shift and the significance of it. You all have come across in your lives, people who say ‘I want to be a doctor,’ ‘I want to be a nurse,’” Buckley said. “You all also know that there are far more young people that would like to do something in the health sciences, but they’re not quite sure yet. And so this ability to market ourselves as a provider across all the specialties is much more strategic than the prior way.”
The board reviewed the results of the latest COACHE survey, which is administered to faculty across the system, analyzing their opinions on university strengths, areas for improvement and concerns. Of 25 categories, UTK had 20 strengths and five areas for improvement.
UTK highlighted collaboration and departmental engagement as areas of considerable strength. Collaboration has moved up to an area of strength since the survey was last administered in 2021, following the creation of the College of Emerging and Collaborative Studies.
Faculty on campus cited childcare and quality of facilities as areas for improvement. UTK expressed plans for the development of a childcare facility on campus as well as the appointment of a Director of Academic Infrastructure to meet faculty needs.
“This is an incredibly important tool for us, and for the campuses, to understand a critical constituency: our faculty,” Jamie Woodson, chair of the Education, Research and Service Committee, said.
Trustee Donnie Smith expressed the system’s need for a comprehensive, online system listing statistics and data points for the universities.
“So, great work, thank you, but I’m left a little bit unfulfilled,” Smith said. “What I didn’t hear, although I heard mentioned … what I didn’t see is an online strategy.”
The board acknowledged Smith’s concerns, recognizing the importance of easily accessible statistics for administrators to reference.
“There’s more work to do online,” UT President Randy Boyd said. “That’s a goal. That’s an objective.”
Regardless, Smith concluded the meeting by appreciating the board’s wide collection of accessible information.
“It feels so good for trustees to ask a question, and for us to say, ‘I don’t have it with me, but I got that, and I’ll get back to you,’” Smith said. “We have come light years in the whole database development and delivery for our consumption and, hats off, it feels great to, within a few minutes, not the next board meeting, have an answer.”
Donnie Smith at the Board of Trustees meeting on Friday, Oct. 24.
