IHL looking to change funding formula?

[Maroon Eagle]

From the Hattiesburg American:

The current proposal calls for dividing $333.2 million by first putting aside 7 percent, or $24.2 million, to fund operating expenses.

The next 84 percent of the money, or $278 million, would be allocated based on how many course hours students complete. Each school would get a share of the overall course hours taught in the system, with hours weighted to reflect the higher expenses of teaching graduate courses or courses that require highly paid faculty and technical equipment. For example, a university would get 8.8 times more money to teach a credit hour of a doctoral-level math, science or engineering course than it gets for teaching an introductory English course.

Southern Miss currently has the highest ratio of weighted student credit hours to student credit hours at 2.35, ahead of Mississippi State with 2.34 and Ole Miss with 2.14 on a scale ranging down to 1.95 at Mississippi Valley State University.

 

[Dawghouse]

Seems reasonable but I'm no economist, politician, or college administrator so my opinion means squat. I'm sure there will be plenty of extremists on both sides claiming the IHL is discriminating against them.

 

[57stratdawg]

More people go to graduate school at USM? Seems strange.

 

[Maroon Eagle]

Breakdown among top five universities by student population...

University Underg Grad Total
Mississippi 16684 4844 21528
MissState 16390 3975 20365
SouthernM 13658 2810 16468
JacksonSt 6675 2144 8819
DeltaState 2756 2007 4763

Go to Page 20 of 61 in the pdf (page 14 in the document).

I'm a bit surprised Delta State's graduate student population is more than 40 percent of its enrollment. Ole Miss's enrollment includes UMC.

 

[57stratdawg]

So, again, how does USM have the highest weighted appropriations hours if 17% of their student body is in Grad school compared to 22.5% of MSU? I guess it could be because this is done by student and not by hours. Maybe USM has a bunch of students only taking 3 undergranduate hours per semester, so the enrollment numbers slant it?

 

[Maroon Eagle]

Some things that come to mind:

1. Page 31 (25) in that pdf is about FTE enrollment per level. USM has 13.2 percent of its students in grad school as opposed to MSU's 15.3 percent meaning that...

2. MSU has more PT grad students than does USM and...

3. USM could have more people working for Specialist degrees as well as Ph.Ds-- which *is* possible considering that their focus is education. Also there are a few dual-masters programs at USM, so there could be quite a few grad students going after two masters degrees boosting their graduate credit hour total.

4. I'm a bit surprised that Delta State isn't number #1 on the list considering that more than a third of their FTE credit hours are in graduate school.

 

[deltadawg63]

Please be aware that DSU hosts an annual Teach For America Institute each summer for those entering teachers. Those 600-700 will count as graduate hours in their number of grad school students but those are likely only 3 to 6 hours credit total.

 

[Maroon Eagle]

That's probably why Delta State's ratio is lower than I thought it should be...

The numbers I linked to in my 8:50 a.m. and 10:09 a.m. posts were for the Fall 2012 semester.