9/20/2017: Around the O has the puff piece here, from PR flack Tobin Klinger. You’d think UO’s $475K budget for “Executive Communications” would buy a few more facts – maybe even a link to the letters from the Senate and Union, which McIntyre got by making a public records request to…
UO Matters
I thought ending the 160over90 branding contract was supposed to save money. Apparently not. And we’re now spending $475K on “Internal Executive Communications”? Hell of a job they’re doing.
As measured by the number of google searches:
The Pioneer, by Alexander Phimister Proctor, on the UO campus between Fenton and Friendly Halls: Call me a Yankee, but I’d thought General Ulysses S. Grant and President Abraham Lincoln had settled matters with Robert E. Lee and his ilk at Appomattox in April 1865, far beyond our poor power…
The “Art of the Athlete” course was one of the more hilarious scams set up by the Duck Athletic department, presumably with the help of their academic liaison Lorraine Davis, although it’s often hard to get the administration to reveal exactly what it is that Ms Davis does: The Art…
Just kidding, they seem to be happy new international students, celebrating their start at UO:
Thanks to Phil and Penny Knight’s $500M Knight Campus pledge. An anonymous post on UO’s official Around the O blog has the data: The UO’s funding campaign continues to be the most ambitious in the state’s history. The $1.7 billion to date doubles the total achieved during the UO’s last…
8/7/2017: UO is failing on economic diversity. Where’s the “Economic Diversity Action Plan”?
UO is ranked #328 out of 377 selective public colleges for promoting income mobility. 56% of our students come from families in the top 20% of the income distribution (4.3% from the top 1%) and only 4.7% come from the bottom 20%:
Our economic diversity has been getting worse over time (except perhaps for a small recent blip):
Despite this poor performance and the bad trends, UO’s long debates about diversity have generally ignored economic diversity. UO’s Institutional Research website has pages and pages of tables slicing and dicing UO’s students and faculty by every imaginable diversity metric – so long as those metrics are race and ethnicity or gender. The good news is that UO has improved markedly by all those measures over the past 10-15 years.
However, if you believe economic opportunity and diversity are important, you will have no luck finding that information on the IR website. If you go to UO’s Office of Equity and Inclusion’s “IDEAL Plan” you’ll find that the latest version now pays lip service to economic diversity, but you will not find a word about how UO compares on the relevant measures, or on the time trends. Similarly, the “Diversity Action Plans” that are now under preparation by every academic and administrative unit under the supervision of Equity and Inclusion have little if anything to say about economic diversity – it’s all race with a bit of gender.
Fortunately there is a new paper out with the data for UO and other colleges:
Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility
Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan
National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 23618, Revised Version, July 2017
Fact sheet: PDF
Non-technical summary: PDF
Paper: PDF
Slides: PDF | PPT
Data: Stata / Excel
NYT Interactive Tool to Explore Data: Web
Unfortunately that paper makes it very clear UO is failing when it comes to promoting economic diversity. The figures at the top of this post come from the NYT summary for UO:
A new study, based on millions of anonymous tax records, shows that some colleges are even more economically segregated than previously understood, while others are associated with income mobility.
Below, estimates of how University of Oregon compares with its peer schools in economic diversity and student outcomes.
The median family income of a student from University of Oregon is $126,400, and 56% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.4% of students at University of Oregon came from a poor family but became a rich adult.
When it comes to economic diversity UO is near the bottom whether you look at selective publics, the PAC-12, or other Oregon universities:
It would be nice to believe that these sad results will help drive UO’s diversity debate and spending priorities for promoting diversity.
update: And now it seems that the IAAF’s Lamine Diack, who gave the 2021 IAAF meet to Lananna’s TrackTown and UO, is implicated in a vote buying scheme over the award of the 2016 Olympics to Rio. I’m shocked: Rio 2016 President Carlos Nuzman was taken into custody last Tuesday…
Jeannie Suk Gerson in The New Yorker: Over the summer, anticipation over what the Education Department might do about campus sexual assault heightened as the Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, held high-profile meetings with groups advocating for the interests of universities, sexual-assault victims, and accused students—including one men’s-rights group accused of harassing women online. DeVos’s…
My understanding is that this will soon go to the membership for a vote. I vote yes. If you’re not a member yet, the info on joining is here. Bottom line is that faculty will get average 3% raises in Jan 2018 (old contract) and now 2% in Jan 2019,…
From the Industrial Designers Society of America website: \ University of Oregon’s Department of Product Design set SAIL in summer 2017 with a new addition to week-long programs designed to help high school students explore career paths. A product design undergraduate student in UO’s College of Design taught the next generation…
9/8/2017: Some light live-blog below on Friday’s Board meeting. Page down for Th committee meetings. Live video here. Some highlights from today: – President Schill gives his definition of excellence in his remarks below. – Biology Prof Karen Guillemin gives a fascinating talk on the importance of bacterial diversity. My…
More good news for UO’s efforts to increase retention, as our students won’t be thinking about leaving the couch, much less Eugene. The Street has the report here: Based on Baker’s data, the colleges ordering up the most ‘dro to their dorm rooms come from the University of Colorado, followed…
Thanks to an anonymous Harvard Man for the Crimson report. The news on Trump’s decision is not yet up, but I’m sure smart people like these professors must have done the backwards induction, and how else could he possibly react?