The University of Wisconsin System released an accountability report Friday showing progress on 19 of 20 goals last year.
According to UW System spokesperson David Giroux, the UW System has released an accountability report annually for the last 15 years. Last year’s report, Achieving Excellence, highlights six different goals broken down into 20 smaller parts that the UW System aimed achieve throughout the year.
The accountability report shows achievement or partial achievement of each of the 20 goals except for one that aimed to increase the number of students served by multicultural and disadvantaged pre-college programs.
According to the report, “UW System multicultural and disadvantaged pre-college programs work to ensure that students of color and economically disadvantaged students graduate from high school and are admissible to UW institutions.”
The number of students participating in these programs decreased by almost 4,000 from 2005-06 to 2006-07. The report said this is mostly due to a lack of federal funding and fewer pre-college scholarships given from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
According to a UW System statement, the accountability report shows the average graduation rate at UW System campuses this year was 68.4 percent, which is 8 percent higher than the system’s average 10 years ago and 4 percent higher than the national average.
The system’s average retention rate of first-year students to the second year was 3 percent lower than its goal, but still 1.5 percent higher than the national average, the statement said.
The report shows that the UW System can do more to draw in and to retain students of color and those from low-income households.
“The recurring theme, the persistent challenge for us whether we’re talking about access, retention or graduation, all gets back to the same area,” Giroux said. “Our institution needs to focus more tightly on addressing these gaps between white students and nonwhite students.”
The UW System began issuing accountability reports on an annual basis so the public could track the overall performance of the UW System and the individual institutions over time.
The data in the report show where the university is succeeding in reaching its goals and where the university faces challenges, Giroux said.
In addition to the UW System releasing a report, each individual institution submits a four-page report outlining its success on four different goals, UW-Madison Director of Academic Planning and Development Jocelyn Milner said.
The goals each institution aims to achieve are providing access to higher education for the citizens of Wisconsin, providing academic support services that facilitate academic success, providing a campus environment that fosters learning and personal growth and utilizing resources in an efficient and effective manner.
Milner said the institutions use this as a measure of how well they are doing. She said if the university achieves its goals for that year, it strives to reach a higher goal for the next year.
The accountability report will be a topic of dialogue at the Board of Regents meetings to be held Thursday and Friday of this week. Giroux said UW System President Kevin Reilly will be holding a briefing and discussion on the report for legislators at the Capitol.
“We are very interested in whether the form of the report is serving its intended purpose and really serving the needs of our state legislators,” Giroux said. “(We are interested in) whether we are tracking the right data… and whether it is actually useful for them. (We want to know whether there are) more global, more macro-level benchmarks that we should be considering that relate to the state’s overall economic health and quality of life.”
