University of Tulsa

[TulsaGoldenHurriCAN]

Can you give us any examples?

Not offering 196 degrees at a university of 4,400 students. Rice University, for example, offers around 50 undergraduate programs and about as many post-graduate which lines up with TU's new total of 112. 196 is far more than other private institutions with the same number of students.

Also, consolidating departments is something quite a few have done to help standardize a lot of the admin stuff and save on costs. Rice has 6 main divisions vs the 25 department TU had previously (going down to 8 "divisions").

[SXSW]

Rice is a good university to use as a model.  I would like to see TU eventually get closer to their total enrollment which is around 7,000 with ~4,000 undergraduates and ~3,000 grad students.

[DTowner]

I haven’t reviewed TU’s plan sufficiently to comment on it substantively, but the reality is most universities are going to have to modify their operations to align their cost structure with their revenue streams.  Tenured faculty, department heads and administrators represent a lot of fixed costs.  The Tulsa World article mentioned this, but the number of graduating high school seniors is already dropping in some states and in a few years will be true in nearly every state.  It is simple demographic reality that colleges are and will be fighting over a shrinking pool of potential students.  That is why, as much as I would love to see TU grow, that will be an enormous challenge. In the next decade, for many colleges simply surviving will be an enormous challenge.