Faculty Profile:
Tom Reck

Expanded Bookshelf

Faculty Reflection

Opportunities for Giving

Campus Collage

Helping To Make CSU, Chico Better

Last fall we learned that CSU, Chico ranked fifth among top regional public schools in the West in U.S. News and World Report's 1999 America's Best Colleges guidebook, two spots up from the preceding seventh-place ranking. When I heard about our fifth-place ranking, I promised the students at the freshman convocation that by the time they graduated, we would be ranked either first or second. This is a daunting goal, but one we will work hard to reach.U.S. News and World Report groups the nation's 1,400-plus four-year accredited colleges and universities by mission and region. It gathers data from each school based on up to sixteen indicators of excellence. Each factor is assigned a weight that reflects the magazine's judgments about which measures of quality matter most. The colleges are ranked against their peer group based on their composite weighted score.The indicators fall into seven broad categories:

• Academic reputation is determined by surveying the presidents, provosts, and deans of admission at other institutions in the same category.
• A school's graduation rate (i.e., retention rate) is determined by the average proportion of a class that earns a degree in six years or fewer.
• Student selectivity includes scores on the SAT or ACT of accepted students.
• Faculty resources are determined by the commitment a school has made to superb instruction, which is judged by examining class size, faculty salary, the proportion of professors with the highest degree in their field, student-faculty ratio, and proportion of full-time faculty.
• Financial resources are measured by the average spending per student on instruction, research, student services, and related educational expenditures.
• Graduation rate performance is measured by the difference between a school's six-year graduation rate for the class that entered in 1991 and the predicted rate for the class.
• Alumni giving rate is a proxy for alumni satisfaction.

As with all surveys, it is important to keep the results in perspective. Even the best-rated schools are often not pleased with the rankings because the choice of criteria and weight assigned is subjective. However, research shows that the better the prospective students, the more attention they pay to third-party evaluations of colleges, including rankings. We are happy to be recognized for our accomplishments.

I am honored to announce we have embarked on a three-year campaign to raise scholarship funds for CSU, Chico. Our campaign will be an ambitious one, and I am pleased to say that at this writing $2.2 million in cash has already been raised this year for scholarships. As scholarship money is raised, the entire campus community will benefit. Opportunity and access for students who want to come to Chico will increase, those students who do come will strengthen our academic programs and expectations for performance, and the inevitable ups and downs in enrollment will be managed more easily. Please look at the article about the scholarship campaign starting on page 8 of this issue of Statements.

In my convocation speech to our faculty and staff in August 1998, I mentioned "service learning." This is an exciting new way of teaching by professors who identify community outreach projects that can be directly linked to their course objectives. The projects are structured so that academic theory is reinforced by real-world experience. We are fortunate on our campus to have an award-winning group called SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise). In the past five years, our SIFE team has targeted at-risk students in local public schools with its community outreach projects. Last year, for example, SIFE taught a group of eighteen teenage mothers how to use their skills to start their own class business. SIFE members became business and computer consultants to incarcerated youth at the Butte County Juvenile Hall as well.

Service learning is truly a win-win situation for students and faculty, who gain valuable opportunities to improve their leadership, teamwork, and interpersonal skills. The community also greatly benefits from the knowledge and skills of university students and professors.

Another source of pride is CAVE (Community Action Volunteers in Education), the oldest student-run community service organization in the system. More than 2,000 CAVE volunteers provide over 190,000 hours of community service each year. With such program successes as SIFE and CAVE and the commitment, hard work, and selflessness of the students involved, I have great faith in our future as these graduates take their place in the world.