Transcript of President Steven Leath's funding request for fiscal year 2016 to members of the joint Education Appropriations Subcommittee, Iowa Legislature, on Feb. 26:
Progress made on top priorities
1. Student experience
This is our sixth consecutive year of record enrollment, our eighth consecutive year of growth. We have nearly 35,000 students on campus. Sixty-eight percent of our enrollment growth is attributable to the colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Engineering. I want to point out that these are programs that students in Iowa cannot get at any other public or private institution in the state, and that's where our growth is coming from. They're also the areas that continue to be the primary drivers of the state's economy.
Despite the huge numbers on campus, we have the highest retention rate in the regents system -- 86.4 percent. My colleagues also have really high retention rates, but the point is, it's a great credit to our faculty and staff to have that high, high rate with such a large student body.
To deal with this, we had 105 new tenure-track hires last year; we're going to try to hire 130 more this year to keep the student-faculty ratio good. We've increased our capacity with this many students and faculty. With your help, we opened Elings and Sukup halls in the fall, which anchor our biorenewables complex and our agricultural and biosystems engineering department. We're about to start the biosciences facility, which was funded by the state. Again, that will help us because we've seen a 55 percent growth in this area over the last few years.
President Steven Leath presents Iowa State's FY16 state funding request to legislators on Feb. 26. Photo by Christopher Gannon.
As a leading land-grant institution, we're committed to keeping college affordable and attainable. Access is hugely important to us. In an effort to do both, we have joined with 10 other major public institutions to form the University Innovation Alliance to really move degree attainment forward.
We're also a strong supporter of the governor's Home Based Iowa initiative, we're proud to have been named a Champ Institution, we were recognized as a military-friendly school. You'll see that emphasis on pro-military continue.
2. Economic development
We're huge contributors to the economy of the state, we're proud of the fact that our students are being placed at 95 percent -- either in jobs or graduate school -- when they graduate. That's an unusually high number, especially for a school our size. Sixty-seven percent of our Iowa students stay in Iowa, as well as over 22 percent of our nonresident students.
They're not only getting jobs, but they're leaving school with less debt. I made a point to say I'm trying to drive down student debt. The number of students graduating with debt has dropped 3.7 percent since I've been here. The average debt load for graduates is dropping, too. In fact, it dropped another 5 percent just last year, so we'll continue to drive down student debt.
We're more organized and efficient when it comes to economic development. We've created a new unit for economic development, the office of economic development and industry relations. [That staff and other relevant units] all will be consolidated in our new economic development core facility, which is a building funded by the Legislature. This will continue to improve our ability to serve the economy of Iowa.
It's also part of a major expansion at the research park. We're doubling the size of the park, we're creating jobs, and having a huge impact on the economy.
3. Research
We're continuing to drive innovation in the state through our research efforts. We had $368 million in new awards last year, a 22 percent increase. We secured a tier one partnership in a large digital manufacturing lab that's expected to create 75,000 jobs. Our Critical Materials Institute already has disclosed 18 new inventions, and my new initiative on multidisciplinary research has resulted in $200 million in new grant applications in the last couple of years. So we're having tremendous successes in research; these will translate into jobs through our economic development efforts.
4. Campus environment
Our fourth priority is to provide a welcoming, safe and inclusive campus. Our campus is extremely diverse, the most diverse it's ever been. Twenty-two percent of our student body considers themselves multicultural or international, so we'll be hiring our first-ever chief diversity officer to implement recommendations from a large diversity study and a second study from the University Committee on Women.
FY16 appropriations request
1. Operating funds
We're asking for a 1.75 percent appropriation increase [$3.17 million], and it's really aimed at continuing student success. To deal with this large increase in students, we've had to do things differently. Our enrollment has increased more than 30 percent, but our faculty hires have not kept pace despite our aggressive efforts. So we used additional money to hire more faculty, particularly in the university's signature high-growth areas like agriculture, engineering, IT, big data. We'll also use the money to enhance areas in academic advising and student support, including making additional investments in learning analytics and student support, more academic advisers, and upgrading our classroom and learning spaces and improving our IT infrastructure.
We'd like to take this money, combine it with savings realized by the board's TIER (Transparent Inclusive Efficiency Review) study so we also can freeze tuition for resident undergraduates for a third straight year.
2. Directed appropriations
The second appropriations request is for the Ag Experiment Station. There currently are more than 750 projects tied to the Ag Experiment Station. This is a $1.04 million request for the most important industry in the state of Iowa. Ag Experiment Station/ag research funds were cut disproportionately when the budgets were cut, so our ability to serve the ag community in Iowa was really crippled and we're asking for help to move that forward and put it back to what it was prior to the 2011 funding cuts.
The next three are very, very modest requests: The first is for extension and outreach for $319,668. I want to remind the committee that we have offices in all 99 Iowa counties. Extension is a huge program and this is a very modest request for a program that large. Last year, extension directly touched 1 million people. If you think about that, that's one in every three Iowans. We really ask for your help in letting extension move forward.
There are two smaller requests, one for sustainable agriculture [$6,955 increase] and one for livestock disease research [$3,025 increase]. For example, support in livestock disease research would allow us to work on odor management and things like this that affect all Iowans.
3. Student Innovation Center
This is the only capital project coming from the regents this year. With 35,000 students -- and we expect more this fall -- we need to provide facilities for them. The reason 95 percent of Iowa State kids get jobs is because they have experiential learning, they've done things with their hands. We keep hearing that from employer after employer. But the space they're in now is the very, very old Armory. It's too small, it's not even safe anymore for the type of things we do, so we want to have an innovation center where students could do these types of projects: fabrication, large-scale, hands-on discoveries.
We were reluctant to bring it to you initially because it's an $80 million request. But through a number of efforts, we've come forward with half the money -- $40 million – and that's dependent on a $20 million gift from two alums who are willing to put $20 million cash up to make this go if the Legislature and the governor will provide half the money. It's a tremendous opportunity to leverage money. We've never brought a request like this to you where we put up half the money. This would be, if we can get this approved, the largest private gift we've ever had in Iowa State's history for an academic building. We really request your help because this is what's getting the kids jobs and making them great assets to the Iowa economy.
Performance-based funding model
If you look at the state map, you could call it a Cyclone state. Seventy-four of the 99 counties -- that's three-fourths of the counties -- are sending most of their kids to Iowa State. We're happy about that; we're glad to serve. They're sending them there in agriculture and engineering, which is something they can't get anywhere else in Iowa. But we need some help; we can't take 20,000 Iowa kids and 35,000 students without any help from the Legislature.
When I got here, I promised to provide access and affordability. But I also reminded everybody that access and affordability without quality is not a good value. So we do need some help, and the question is, how do we get there?
The regents spent a lot of time and formed a Blue Ribbon task force to look at how we can do this. We do have legitimate concerns. We received a little over $9,000 for every resident student, which is below the cost of instruction. In fairness, UNI receives $8,700 per student, a similar amount. The University of Iowa receives over $14,000 per resident student. We're not saying necessarily that this needs to be equal, but it needs to be equitable. You can't send 20,000 students to one institution, in high-cost programs like ag and engineering, and not provide any resources. This is a state without enrollment growth funding, so we ask that you think seriously about how we're going to find an equitable way to provide resources to these students. We want them to continue to come in ag and engineering, we want them to graduate, we want them to get good jobs, but this is getting to be increasingly difficult for us.
The regents have thought about this a long time. If we use performance-based funding, that additional funding will allow us to increase personalized learning, invest more in our learning communities which leads to higher retention rates, provide more opportunities for online learning and improve efficiencies on our campus.
I think the new funding model is really good. It follows Iowa students and there's certainly nothing wrong with Iowa tax money following Iowa kids. But it also puts emphasis on degree attainment, progress toward graduation, economic development -- things that we all should value. In my opinion, I have not seen a better model to fix this.
Please remember we have 20,000 Iowa kids on this campus and we could use your help in moving forward.
Conclusion
I know you've had an unwavering commitment to higher education in this state, but I think we're in a new era. If you think about the economy of Iowa, we're in a position to really help drive that forward with your help.
Thank you.
