(emphasis mine)
Less than a year ago, as a member of the Minnesota Daily Editorial Board, I and other board members reported extensively on the issue of tuition and administrative bloat at the University of Minnesota.
It is curious to think that a Washington Post commentary ("Let's shove back at higher ed," Jan. 3) was needed to start a conversation that has existed in the school newspaper for many years now.
University President Eric Kaler's response to criticism of the fiscal largess has been a mirror image of that of his predecessor, Bob Bruininks. From excessive administrative staffing to golden parachutes to pay freezes for the U's base employees, the administration at the U remains in disarray.
Kaler's response ("The state pulls back, but the U marches on," Jan. 6) represents the same old song and dance. His "run the U like a business" approach and his political dodging of tough questions demonstrates that both students and taxpayers alike are not receiving the proper return on investment.
With more than 70 percent of Minnesota students needing student loans to finish school and an average of more than $26,000 of debt upon graduation, Kaler and the Legislature need to cut the platitudes and find real answers.
CHRIS NERLIEN, ST. PAUL
Guilty Plea to Felony Count The Sainfort-Jacko Debacle at the University of Minnesota... What next?
Former Georgia Tech Professors Indicted for Defrauding the University
Some Preliminary Numbers on the Sainfort Jacko Double Dipping Proceeds
Old Story - Still No Answers:Is the U ever going to do anything about the double-dipping situation?
Georgia Tech Confirms Tenure Revocation
U Admin: Sainfort, Jacko Being Treated Unfairly?
Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave - From the Atlanta Constitution
Latest Word on Double-Dipping at the U
or, Business as Usual
Drip, Drip, Drip... The Ice Cream is Melting
People Continue to Ask What Should Be
Embarrassing Questions
In a quiet finale to a troubled tenure, the University of Minnesota is parting ways with Francois Sainfort and Julie Jacko, the star faculty couple investigated for double-dipping salaries in Minnesota and Georgia.
The pair's resignations were announced by e-mail inside the School of Public Health and confirmed Tuesday by university officials.
The professors faced pending disciplinary charges at the time of their departure, said General Counsel Mark Rotenberg. He said he couldn't give details about the university's charges because the two are no longer employees.
Sainfort and Jacko declined to comment on what precipitated their leaving and what they will do next.
The two professors were hotly recruited by the U more than five years ago for their potential to attract millions of dollars in research funding. Within three months of their arrival, however, they became suspects in a drama that evolved into grand jury indictments in Georgia, reprimands and demotions at the U, restitution payments and the conviction of Sainfort last year under a plea agreement.
In an e-mail to faculty colleagues Friday, Jacko's supervisor said that the professor had "decided to leave the University of Minnesota to pursue other professional endeavors." On Monday, Sainfort's co-workers learned that he, too, had "resigned from our faculty effective January 4, 2013, to pursue other professional endeavors.''
The e-mail announcing Sainfort's departure was unceremonious, but Jacko's supervisor lauded her work. "Julie has made stellar contributions ... during her time here, always demonstrating exceptional leadership across her many projects and endeavors," wrote Prof. William Toscano, head of the Division of Environmental Health Sciences.
The e-mails said Sainfort and Jacko will remain affiliated with the U as adjunct professors. But Rotenberg said that "to my knowledge, that temporary employment possibility has not been finalized.''
Rotenberg said he is under the belief that neither professor received or will receive severance pay. That could not be confirmed late Tuesday.
A Northrop reception
Sainfort and Jacko came to the U in 2007, after Minnesota outbid Georgia Tech for the two Ph.D.s by offering a package of high salaries, leadership positions, tenure and moving expenses. Sainfort was the prized recruit of School of Public Health Dean John Finnegan, who partnered with Nursing Dean Connie Delaney to also recruit Jacko.
Jacko was known for her work in "health informatics,'' a field that uses electronic medical records to improve and streamline patient care, and would later bring the U more than $5 million in federal research funds in the field. Sainfort was an expert on health care decision-making, and eventually served as principal investigator on more than $13 million in contracts and grants, according to his U biography.
The husband-and-wife team were officially welcomed to the U at a formal reception held Jan. 14, 2008, in the lobby of Northrop Auditorium.
But documents would later show that Sainfort also was committed to a contract worth $245,795 at Georgia Tech to work through June 30, 2008. His Minnesota contract, agreed to in August 2007, paid him $285,000 a year and made him head of the Division of Health Policy and Management.
Jacko's salary increase was even greater. She had accepted a $127,442 contract at Georgia Tech to work through May 15, 2008. When she arrived in Minneapolis in late January of that year -- still on the payroll at Georgia Tech -- she stepped into a $216,000-a-year job as director of the Institute of Health Informatics, with tenure as a full professor.
Within three months of the Northrop reception, newspapers were writing about a criminal investigation by Georgia authorities into possible double-dipping. Sainfort and Jacko both took leaves to address the conflict, and the U later reprimanded them and imposed $59,000 in fines for fringe benefits and travel expenses also reimbursed by Georgia Tech.
Sainfort was fined $44,024 of that, reflecting the fact that the U's investigation found Sainfort "largely responsible" for issues during Jacko's transition.
Still, the couple continued to work at the U even as Georgia began its criminal prosecution in March 2011. That's when a Georgia grand jury indicted Sainfort and Jacko on multiple felony counts. The indictment alleged that Sainfort and Jacko "conspired to be employed full time and receive salary from Georgia Tech while simultaneously being employed full time and collecting salary from the University of Minnesota.'' That indictment was later dismissed in favor of narrower charges.
Georgia case closed
Last spring, the Georgia case concluded with the dropping of all charges against Jacko in exchange for an Alford plea by Sainfort, in which he maintained his innocence but acknowledged that there was sufficient evidence to convict him. The last remaining count referred to an e-mail Sainfort sent to a Georgia Tech dean in February 2008 -- four months after he signed a contract with the U.
"As a matter of fact, Julie and I have not even signed an employment contract yet with Minnesota," his e-mail said. "We have only agreed to unofficially start this semester with full residence starting in May ...'' He was ordered to pay $43,578 in restitution and sentenced to five years' probation, after which his record could be cleared.
When the Georgia case closed, the U said its administration would "carefully consider the facts associated with the case and determine how best to proceed.''
Just after Christmas the Grinch paid a visit to University of Minnesota President Eric Kaler. On the last Friday of the year, the Wall Street Journal carried a front-page story singling out the university as the nation’s worst example of “administrative bloat.”
For Kaler, the timing couldn’t have been worse. The state Legislature is set to begin crafting the budget for the next biennium within days. The U of M is asking for an increase in state funding in exchange for a series of accountability commitments, including a tuition freeze.
The Journal story, however, could easily be read as justification for the state funding cuts the institution, viewed by some lawmakers as a fiscal sinkhole, has sustained in recent years.
Between 2001 and 2011, the piece reported, the U of M added 1,000 administrators. During the same time period, tuition and fees for in-state students more than doubled to $13,524 a year, some $5,000 more than the average at four-year public colleges.
The story acknowledged at the outset that Kaler vowed to ferret out waste and redundancy when he took office 18 months ago, but went on to lay out a case that the president and some other members of Minnesota’s higher-ed sector assert is miscast.
Adding insult to injury, the Washington Post followed up with a commentary — reprinted in the Star Tribune — that insinuated the U of M administration was complacently fattening itself with student and taxpayer dollars.
MinnPost asked Kaler to share his views on the ensuing controversy; an edited version of that conversation follows. But first, a little background is necessary to understand why he feels the Journal report missed the mark.
The U.S. Department of Education collects reams of statistics from colleges and universities, including data on hiring and spending. The paper’s analysis was based in large part on these statistics. But the agency’s reporting guidelines are so poor the numbers don’t compare apples to apples.
They do not, for example, spell out who is an administrator. That decision is left to the person completing the report. As a result, administrative head counts can fluctuate by hundreds of bodies from one report to another.
Ironically, Kaler attempted to explain this wrinkle in a presentation he delivered last fall to the Board of Regents illustrating how his administration is overhauling the way costs are tracked. The fifth page is a chart created using the relevant database.
MinnPost: Let’s talk about the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the ensuing chatter.
Eric Kaler:
I thought The Wall Street Journal piece was challenging. The reporter was here for a while, and I think got a fair view of the university but had a real hard time collapsing it into a 2,000-word article. So the bits and pieces that are some of the comparisons are challenging. Some start in different years than others, etc.
He also obviously wanted to make a story highlighting things that he thought would sell newspapers, and didn’t provide the context of the university around what was in the article.
So for example, you talk about increasing administrative hires. You’ve got to put that in the context of a 40 percent increase in our research grants and contracts over the last five years, 9,000 more students than in 2000, etc. etc. And you know he just didn’t seem to have space to provide that kind of balance. He needed to find the facts.
I think The Washington Post story was just — I’m trying to think of a polite word. It didn’t seem to be very well thought out, and I’ve written a letter to the Post and the Star Tribune. [His letter has since been published in both the Star Tribune and the Post.] I mean, characterizing UMore Park as a vast housing development, it’s just silly. He just didn’t do his homework.
MP: What do you think the Journal got right?
EK:
Boy, that’s a good question. He at least pointed out that we think comparisons between institutions is very difficult. He then attempted to do some analysis of our data, which we’re looking into, let me say.
The inner comparison of data really is terrible. The data we report to the feds, the categories that describe administrative personnel, are interpreted very differently by different institutions. So you will see institutions that have wild year-to-year variations in the number of employees in those categories, presumably based on who filled the form out. He did get that right.
But it is frustrating to focus on tuition without mentioning the just stunning decline of state support. [The story] says in the beginning that based on the flow of state dollars this hiring took place. Well, there was no flow at the University of Minnesota. I mean we’re receiving $140 million to $150 million less than three years ago. It’s a stunning disinvestment, and that’s what’s driven tuition. It’s frustrating when instead of addressing that, we talk about administrative costs, which certainly we’re working every day to reduce.
You know we’re focused on minimizing any tuition increase that we ask for from students and families, but good grief.
MP: I wonder if this must rankle particularly because you came in with a stated mission of ferreting out redundancy and inefficiencies.
EK:
It really does because we’ve made really good progress, but it’s only the start of a long journey. This change doesn’t come either easily or quickly, and we’re doing a lot.
The move to Google — we’re the first university to do that. This [saves] about $15 million in IT costs. Closing the system administration office, closing the bursar’s office — $2.2 million. We had the lowest tuition rate increase last year in 12 years of 3.5 percent. The centerpiece of our [budget] proposal for the state is a tuition freeze. So yes, I would’ve liked to have gotten a little more credit for that rather than reading about what happened before I got here.
MP: Can you return to the 40 percent increase in research and say why that might drive administrative hiring?
EK:
Because when you get a research grant, you hire people to do the work. If we get a $50 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for the Clinical and Translational Science Center, which we did, it requires us to hire people to manage that grant process. The regulations associated particularly with human and animal [research] subjects are just really almost unbelievable, and you need people to manage that, to help so the scientists aren’t spending all their time managing that.
And you expect to see growth in those kind of positions as you grow your research. We do so much that’s beyond classroom teaching. We have the land-grant mission of extension and the research and outreach centers across the state. We have clinical responsibilities. We have research responsibilities and so people who aren’t associated with the teaching mission are hired to do those kinds of missions.
I think also you’ve got to look at the student success. Our graduation rate has improved by two-thirds over the past 15 years or so, and that’s because not only of classroom instruction but having advisers and career counselors who can help students move expeditiously and appropriately through our curriculum. Those are people in student services who are classified as administrators and are very directly helping student outcomes.
Really, talking about the importance of the research mission of the university can’t be overestimated. The return on investment for the university is 13:1 for every state dollar that we get. As an economic engine for Minnesota, it’s an important institution. We’re dedicated to minimizing tuition increases, and we’re dedicated to moving the place to be as efficient and effective as it can be, and we’re making progress on those goals.
MP: The Wall Street Journal Piece noted that when you took office, you went looking for answers about spending and the system wasn’t set up to deliver them.
EK: We’ve been working on that steadily since I got here, and we reported to the Board of Regents at their last meeting, or the one before, how we can now track the cost of supporting the mission and administering effective leadership for the institution. That’s now very clear, and now we can keep an eye on it.
And again — I don’t mean to be critical about this — that’s because the way the system was set up 10 or 15 years ago; it wasn’t a priority for any institution to be able to answer questions like this. And we’re very decentralized. There wasn’t an institution-wide roll-up of that kind of data. And now there needs to be.
MP: If I were in your shoes with the Legislature poised to open, I’d be concerned about my budget proposal.
EK:
I think we’ll have to have more conversations. The Legislature has already signaled that they want to look at our budget in more detail, and I’m proud to show them. If you look at what we’ve taken out of our operations already and with fund cuts that President [Bob] Bruininks made, too, there’s a good story to be seen there.
I think it’s very important for us to tell the story and have people listen and not read a 2,000-word article that’s hither and yon or the snipey piece out of the Washington Post.
Charles Lane's "Let's shove back at higher ed" (Jan. 3), about costs at public universities, summarized parts of a recent Wall Street Journal article about the University of Minnesota. The articles did not report that despite stunning state disinvestment, the university is more productive than at any time in recent history. The U serves nearly 9,000 more students today than it did in 2000, an increase of nearly 16 percent, and has reduced the per capita cost of educating students by 13 percent.
We have increased research grants and contracts by 40 percent. Private philanthropy, which directly benefits students, has grown to record levels. Students at the Twin Cities campus are graduating at rates nearly 43 percent higher than they did 16 years ago, and the rate at which the U retained first-year students into a second year on campus reached an all-time high of 91 percent in 2011.
Lane also took at face value the Journal's analysis of administrative hiring at the university without providing the proper context. Growth of research (and attending to the myriad regulations associated with it), improving the student experience and managing complex technology all require staff who are classified as "administrative." And many of those activities do benefit students directly. Our analysis shows that 9 percent of our budget is spent on administrative oversight, a level in line with many nonprofit organizations.
Finally, Lane criticizes a "vast new housing development" without mentioning that this 5,000-acre parcel owned by the university will be mined for gravel for decades and redeveloped, yielding millions dollars of revenue over time for the university.
I agree that reducing costs -- including the cost of tuition -- on U.S. campuses must be a priority as the historic shift away from state support of public higher education continues. In addition, enormous change is underway in all institutions, driven by technology, shifting politics and a different economy.
Solving these problems isn't easy or fast, particularly at large, decentralized research universities. Institutions must standardize operations to a much greater degree and apply lessons learned from business. Higher education also must be more accountable to policymakers, business partners and, most importantly, students and their families.
Since I became president 18 months ago, reducing our administrative costs has been a top priority, and we've taken action. In my inaugural speech, I pledged to hold the line on administrative expenses, and we've made significant progress.
We have eliminated two major administrative offices, saving more than $2.2 million annually. We have saved $5.6 million in energy costs during the past three years. We were the first public higher-education institution nationwide to move faculty, staff and students to Google applications -- increasing efficiency and avoiding $15 million a year in technology costs.
Finally, we kept tuition increases at a 12-year low of 3.5 percent last year and have made freezing undergraduate tuition at current rates for the next two years our highest priority.
Simultaneously, we have allocated $20 million for hiring additional faculty.
We know there is much more work to do. Tough choices lie ahead for all colleges and universities, public and private, but the conversation about tuition should be framed by facts in perspective -- in Minnesota's case, in the context of the loss of nearly $140 million in state aid since 2008.
I'm certain that Mr. Lane -- a Yale Law School and Harvard College graduate with impressive professional credentials -- understands the value that is at stake.
* * *
Eric W. Kaler is president of the University of Minnesota.
In fiscal year 2012 the total cost of administration included $208,545,279 for administrative oversight compensation, $441,912,901 for administrative staff compensation, $131,590,95 for administrative supplies and services, $35,175,423 for equipment for administration, and an astounding $34,815,696 for consulting and professional services.
So the total cost of administration consumed 28% of the $3 billion in total expenditures for the year. Even with a reduction in state appropriations, the U of M administration increased spending from $2 billion in fiscal year 2002 to $3 billion in fiscal year 2012.
The fuel for this billion dollar explosion was skyrocketing tuition that soared from $293 million in fiscal year 2002 to $634 million in fiscal year 2011.
For more details see On The Cost of Administration Part III on The Periodic Table blog.
Last week, the front page of the Wall Street Journal carried a lengthy, thoroughly reported story chronicling the University of Minnesota’s ballooning spending on administrative salaries over the last decade. Between 2001 and last spring, the piece reported, the U of M added 1,000 administrators.
Thanks in part to that 37 percent increase, the university’s Twin Cities campus “had the largest share of employees classified as ‘executive/administrative and managerial’ among the 72 ‘very-high-research’ public universities in the 2011-12 academic year,” the paper reported.
During the same time period, tuition and fees for in-state students more than doubled to $13,524 a year, some $5,000 more than the average at four-year public colleges. Students must now work nearly full-time to pay the freight, a point the Journal illustrates nicely by quoting a sophomore who maintains a website listing campus events that feature free food.
Officials have disputed some of the statistics, noting that not all institutions report administrative spending the same way, and defended the value of some of the hiring. But university President Eric Kaler is quoted at the top of the story, describing his frustration with the administration’s shaky grasp on the details when it comes to the swollen payroll.
Whether damage will accrue to Kaler’s 18-month-old administration remains to be seen. At the time of his appointment, Kaler vowed to cut administrative costs and to ferret out waste; critics were initially thrilled but seem to have slipped into wait-and-see mode as the low-hanging fruit gives way to tougher decisions.
Also unknown: Whether the controversy, and the Star Tribune’s decision to reprint a Washington Post commentary that utterly failed to mention Kaler’s efforts to curb past excesses, will affect the university president’s chances of convincing lawmakers to buy into his plan to freeze tuition in exchange for the restoration of some state funding.
MinnPost will have more coverage of the fallout soon; for now, readers might want to spend some time perusing a local blog that’s tracked and archived information on growth in university spending for years, The Periodic Table.
It’s maintained by Bill Gleason, an associate professor in the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology, with contributions from local attorney Michael W. McNabb, who has both a B.A. and a J.D. from the institution. (Alert readers will recognize Gleason’s name from MinnPost’s comments thread, where he is a frequent participant.)
You can spend hours backtracking through their gleanings -- the Journal certainly checked in with them and mentions some of the little-known controversies they follow. Indeed, they’ve chronicled the ink the topic has earned in the last few days, including an annotated selection of reader comments from other websites.
In the interest of winnowing the field, we offer links to a few posts that are particularly relevant to the current controversy. Gleason’s annotated recaps since Dec. 29 are a good starting point and include plenty of trackbacks.
McNabb’s most relevant contributions include
The Strib has re-printed the Washington Post piece by Charles Lane entitled: The U's failing grade for fiscal management - Exhibit A on administrative bloat: The U.
Regular readers will note that this piece has already appeared on the Periodic Table.
The reader's comments are interesting although some of them suffer from a lack of information. This is not always the fault of the commenter.
At the University of Minnesota, the number of employees with “human resources” or “personnel” in their job titles has grown from 180 to 272 since the 2004-05 academic year. Since 2006, the university has spent $10 million on consultants for a vast new housing development that is decades from completion. It employs 139 people for marketing, promotions and communications. Some 81 administrators make $200,000 per year or more.
In the past decade, Minnesota’s administrative payroll has gone up three times as fast as the teaching payroll, and twice as fast as student enrollment.
Oh, and tuition more than doubled in that same period, to more than $13,000 per year.
These facts and figures, gleaned from a fascinating article in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, are depressingly typical of American higher education, where administrative payrolls and other non-teaching costs have been growing rapidly — without any obvious commensurate benefit for students.
To the contrary, the bloat on many U.S. campuses is now a significant cause, along with cutbacks in state spending, of the surge in tuition, which, in turn, is an obstacle to upward mobility for an entire generation of young Americans.
There should be a lot more outrage about this than exists — though we can hope that outrage will grow as more and more such facts come to light.
Solving the problem, however, won’t be easy. Americans and their elected leaders have grown used to discussing college “affordability” as a matter of distributing ever more government aid — in the form of tax breaks, direct assistance or subsidized loans.
Actually, this is self-defeating: by making it possible for students to pay higher tuition, federal and state aid reduces institutions’ incentive to make the hard budgetary choices that might hold tuition down in the first place.
Management got so loosey-goosey at Minnesota, the Journal reports, that the school had no idea of such basic facts as how many employees report to each supervisor.
In other words, the ultimate beneficiaries of all those government tuition subsidies are the highly paid administrators and faculty members whose hiring, and retention, it enables.
Of course, I wouldn’t deny that the growth of administrative payroll served educational purposes. In fact, I readily concede that the schools could identify all sorts of benefits: Minnesota’s president told the Journal his school’s doubling of “directors” at the Office of Equity and Diversity helped make the campus “more inclusive and more welcoming to people of different backgrounds.”
What I would deny is that Minnesota or any other institution can readily quantify such benefits. In higher education, the tuition dollars are hard, but the product is, by its nature, soft. When you plunk down $30,000 for a car, you know pretty much what you got, or at least what you were supposed to get. But a bachelor’s degree in psychology is a rather more intangible investment.
That is the nature of education, to be sure. In their purest form, market concepts of cost-effectiveness don’t neatly apply to what universities do, for reasons well explained by economist William Baumol of New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Like medical care or the performing arts, Baumol says, education is one of those “industries” whose “output” defies precise measurement and whose production processes are hard to automate and standardize. It’s a hands-on endeavor, with lots of human interaction, so there’s a limit to how much labor you can save.
Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t save a lot of money through the intelligent application of technology. Already universities are offering lectures online, and that is only the beginning.
The higher-ed establishment has no cause for complacency in an era when YouTube routinely teaches young people everything from dances moves to Spanish, for free.
Surely this generation will question, radically, the traditional calculus that tells them it’s a good career move to borrow and spend tens of thousands of dollars so that they can have their intelligence ratified by a bunch of PhDs who aren’t even on Instagram.
In the meantime, government should condition more of its support for higher-ed on actual cost-cutting by institutions. The days of pouring government money into the existing business model, no strings attached, need to end.
(Emphasis mine)
For students from states like Illinois, Iowa and Texas, the University of Minnesota is a deal.
Too good a deal, some now believe.
The university dropped its nonresident tuition four years ago to attract more undergraduates from elsewhere. It is now the cheapest school in the Big Ten for those students.
New leaders at the U, surprised by the slim gap between in-state and out-of-state sticker prices, are wondering whether that's fair to Minnesota residents, who have seen their tuition double over the past decade -- or smart for a university hunting for new revenue as state funding has fallen.
Reducing the out-of-state price "has put us in a place where we have a good, robust population of out-of-state students," university President Eric Kaler said. "It's probably -- certainly -- time to look carefully at where we are in that out-of-state price point and whether we should grow that."
The share of affected students on the Twin Cities campus -- those from other countries or states without tuition reciprocity agreements -- has swelled since 2007 from 7.7 percent to 17.2 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of resident students dipped slightly, while the number and share of students from reciprocity states such as Wisconsin shrank.
The university charges tuition and fees of $18,774 for out-of-state and international undergraduates, and $13,524 for in-state. In contrast, the University of Wisconsin charges $26,628 for nonresidents and $10,379 for residents. In the Big Ten, nonresident tuition and fees averages $29,328. Minnesota is the cheapest of those dozen schools. But when it comes to residents, Minnesota is the group's fourth-most-expensive.
For years, Bill Gleason, an associate professor at the U, has been arguing that the strategy causes the university to miss out on tens of millions in revenue each year -- "and that's not chump change."
"I think it's fair to say the University of Minnesota should be charging at least the average delta in the Big Ten," Gleason said. "Why are we giving this away?"
Before making any big moves, Kaler said, the university needs to study how sensitive out-of-state students are to price.
"You don't want to make it so expensive that no out-of-state student chooses to come," Kaler said, "nor do you want to make it so remarkably inexpensive that Minnesota students feel like they're subsidizing out-of-state students."
Moreover, one can't assume that any tuition increase would result in pure profit, said Robert McMaster, vice provost and dean of undergraduate education. "To get those students to the university, at least initially, you're going to have to put new financial aid on the table through scholarships and waivers."
The U is an outlier
Across the country, public universities have been recruiting more aggressively across their borders, hungry for the bigger tuition payments from those students. But the University of Minnesota was "something of an outlier," in lowering its tuition, said Patrick Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute.
From 2007 to 2012, the U had the biggest drop in published price for out-of-state students of any flagship university in the country, according to an October report by the College Board.
Callan said it makes sense that the university would consider raising out-of-state tuition to what the market will bear, but he added that doing so would be "just one more thing that stacks the higher education deck in favor of high-income students.
"Even though you might still get a certain kind of diversity in terms of people from other places," he said, "you might be losing a certain amount of economic diversity."
The university decreased nonresident tuition in 2008, so that out-of-state and international students would pay only $4,000 more than residents, a gap that has grown slightly since. Former U President Robert Bruininks said then that the plan would keep university enrollment up despite an expected drop in the number of high school graduates in the Midwest.
Since then, the number of students from states without reciprocity agreements with Minnesota has more than doubled.
"This has been a huge plus for our office of admissions," McMaster said.
Regents weigh in
Despite the growth in out-of-state students, the number of in-state undergraduates at the U has stayed steady, partly because the total undergraduate population has grown.
Kaler said his goal is to keep the share of Minnesotans around 70 percent, about where it is now, while further growing the slice of out-of-state students.
"I would expect to see that mix change again over time," he said, "bringing more U.S. out-of-state students, probably, perhaps at the expense of reciprocity students."
The university focuses its scholarships and grants on Minnesota residents, McMaster said at a Board of Regents meeting this month. The net price that in-state students pay after subtracting aid has grown at a much slower pace than the sticker price, university numbers show.
Several regents, who approve tuition rates, said they're ready to discuss widening the difference between resident and nonresident rates.
"I would love for us to take that on," Regent Patricia Simmons said during a meeting this month. First, she said, the board should know if out-of-state students stay in Minnesota after they graduate. "If they come to the University of Minnesota from Iowa or Illinois or Massachusetts, do they stay here and contribute to the workforce?"
The incoming chairman of the state House higher education committee, Rep. Gene Pelowski, said he has heard complaints from a few parents about the good deal nonresidents are getting at the U.
"The intent may have been a good one," said Pelowski, DFL-Winona. "But the downside is that the resident who pays the taxes, who expects to get their best education for the best dollar, they don't see it that way."
