It is my great pleasure to welcome our community friends and supporters to the University of Maine at Fort Kent. This is a wonderful way to start the day and I thank every one of you for joining us this morning.

This is a special year for UMFK.

• We opened the year with another ten percent increase in enrollment. Our head count this fall included 1339 students and we continue to be the fastest growing campus on a percentage basis within the University of Maine System. Our total this year includes 52 students from area high schools who are taking courses at UMFK through a variety of early college programs.
• We were, for the second year in a row, identified as One of the Best Northeast Colleges by the Princeton Review.
• We learned last week that we will be highlighted in College and University Business Magazine this month, due to release early next week. This national publication for our higher education will include an article spotlighting UMFK as one of a handful of universities that embrace the outdoors as part of their identity.
• In a related note, our Ski Teams have embarked on a very active season. Heather Hickey remains undefeated in Nordic within our conference. Let me highlight Heather for a moment as one of our amazing students. Heather is not only a skier, she has been a coach of our ski team and is currently assistant coach, she is pursuing a Bachelor of Science Degree in Biology and has an amazing GPA. She currently serves as our student representative to the University of Maine System Board of Trustees where she represents us wonderfully, and when I attended the student art show a couple of weeks ago, I learned she is an excellent painter as well.
• The UMFK Foundation has really hit its stride. The kickoff of the Annual Spring Dinner/Theater last spring was a marvelous success raising additional funds for the University, a portion of which was allocated to bringing performing arts and cultural events to this community. We are looking to follow up that first event with an even more spectacular event March 24th with another one of a kind dinner, and entertainment by the Portland String Quartet. The annual fund is on target to exceed $80,000 this year with an alumni participation rate now up to 6.5%. Our endowment, including spendable funds stands just under $2.4 million.
• In sum, this institution is increasingly recognized as a regional university that delivers a high quality education at an affordable price in a unique setting. Our setting plays out in two dimensions; first in terms of our Franco history and culture, and second, our geographic proximity to Maine’s wonderful wilderness truly defines this institution. We are very lucky!
• And the future looks even brighter!

1. A graduate Program towards a Masters in Education oriented to classroom teachers will begin offering courses on this campus as well as at UMPI and Machias this coming fall. It will be a 36 credit Masters including 15 elective credits. Half of the courses on this campus will be taught by our own faculty and half via distance education from UMS or Orono. Vice President Albert is in Orono today to move the planning ahead on this important degree.
2. The Center for Rural Sustainable Regional Development as a research platform here at UMFK has been approved for planning by the U Maine System Chief Academic Officers. This green light from the CAOs means we can move ahead with a proposal. Vice president Albert is creating a committee structure and possible outside consulting support to move this plan quickly. One of the downsides of running lean and mean is that every one on this campus is stretched to the maximum. I am indebted to our faculty for their enthusiastic support and as importantly their time, when they have none to spare, to move this project forward.
3. The preliminary Bond Issue that the System Trustees approved on Monday of this week includes funding for a modern classroom building on this campus. We will certainly be looking for broad regional support for that Bond Issue when we come to that stage. Finally, we are currently in the process of interviewing three excellent candidates for the position of Chancellor of the University of Maine System. Our leadership team from this campus, including the Cabinet, Dr. Peter Toussaint, President of our Board of Visitors, and a representative of the Faculty Assembly traveled to Presque Isle to meet each candidate in person. In addition, three polycom sessions occurred on other campuses for our participation.

Each of the candidates has strongly endorsed the important role of the smaller regional institutions within a total system. One candidate indicated that he had read the history and it was clear to him that the status of the regional campuses had been settled in the affirmative. Another talked about the vital role that these institutions play in providing access to Maine residents and the equally important role they fulfill in support of their communities.

Thank you to all of you for the wonderful support you provide to this university.

Now, believe it or not, these are not the things we invited you here today to tell you about. The fact is you have all seen, read about, and shared in our successes, and the goals we aspire to achieve target regional needs about which you are well aware.

What prompted me to ask for this opportunity to speak was a desire to tell you about some areas in which we have taken the lead that may not be so obvious. These involve growing trends to measure and quantify the ways in which we measure success in higher education.

Nationally, there is a growing trend for the people who fund higher education to say to us "how do we know that we are getting our money’s worth out of the services you provide?"

We all know the statistics concerning how much more college graduates make during their lifetime, but with close to 4,000 colleges and universities nationally, all with vastly different missions, student populations and service areas, how can we assess in even the broadest sense , how well any one institution is doing?

The answer is that there is a great deal going on nationally to address these questions and my goal in the next few minutes will be to tell you that this university is not sitting back and waiting to see what others will expect, we are already actively taking a lead in working with new assessment measures and techniques.

One of the most concise, useful outlines for accountability and assessment comes from a draft paper by Peter McPherson and David Shulenburger, President and Vice President respectively of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. They start off by noting that "Every public university is engaged in a serious and ongoing accountability appraisal with significant time and resources dedicated to the task." They begin by proposing a set of five "first principles" about accountability.

I believe the most important principle is number three: "All of our accountability measures should be transparent. By that we mean that both the methods by which they are derived and the results of those measures should be publicly disclosed." The measures we develop have to be clear to all if they are to be effective.

One of the most useful things these authors contribute to the dialogue is an excellent framework for pulling many disparate pieces together. They propose that we are accountable to three groups:

1. Prospective students, current students and their parents,
2. Faculty and campus support staff, and
3. Public policy-makers and funders of higher education.

Significantly, the questions, the kinds of information, the purpose for the information, and therefore the measures of success are very different for each group.

For example, students and families want to know things like, what does it cost to go to your institution? How successful are your graduates? What percentage of your students complete the program? In how many years? What are they doing today? These are important questions and increasingly, we need to collect this information and provide it to prospective students. More and more, families looking at significant family sacrifices in order to enable students to attend college want to see such data – and they have every right to do so. [I have just been named to a national task force to look at voluntary assessment information for students and their families, so this area will be of special concern to me over the coming months.]

Faculty and campus support staff need to be aware of the prior information of course, but the growing focus on measures for this population (and this really is where the greatest emphasis is today) relates far more directly to, how well are we doing in providing the educational services that we do, and, most importantly, how can we measure our effectiveness in ways that will enable us to explore and experiment and in so doing get even better at providing those services? So this is not simply feedback in order to make yes/no decisions but meaningful assessment of how well we are achieving our own goals in ways that will encourage and enable us to get even better at doing so.

The final category includes the policy-makers and funders of higher education. Whether legislators or philanthropists, they have every right to ask to see how well we are doing with the resources we have when we ask them for more.

These three categories translate for the authors into three components for Public University Accountability:

1. Consumer Information
2. Campus Learning Climate
3. Educational Outcomes

Step back for a minute, when we want to measure our performance, we do a number of very basic things; we usually start by comparisons to ourselves over time. Last week I ran around the block in 3 minutes and 30 seconds, this week I did it in 3:20. Before long, I look for a peer who wants to race, and then we can begin to calculate that I used to be fifth fastest in my group, and now I’ve worked my way up to second. Well, wait a minute, how do I define "my group?" Is my class at school, my height, weight or what? Fundamentally, we look at longitudinal data about ourselves, and then begin making comparisons with others.

In higher education the largest hurdles to providing comparative date has been the diversity of institutions and resulting lack of common definitions and methods of measurement. What I will talk about in the remaining time left to us this morning are some of the national instruments that exist, and have recently been developed to enable us to begin to make meaningful comparisons.

We have to start by identifying appropriate benchmark institutions – we want to compare like to like. We have done so at UMFK and for us they are:

Current Peers: Mayville State University in North Dakota, Valley City State University in North Dakota, Lyndon State in Vermont, Glenville State in Illinois and Castleton State in Vermont. Lyndon State was in our athletic conference until this year and our NEASC visiting team was chaired by the Dean of Castleton State.

Aspirational Peers: Dakota State in South Dakota, University of Arkansas Pine Bluff, Lewis-Clark State in Idaho, Plymouth State in New Hampshire and Ohio State Marion Campus. These are the ten institutions that we have agreed to utilize as benchmarks. Different sets of ten have been selected by all seven institutions in the University of Maine System.

So, let’s return to the McPherson-Shulenburger format and review what we have been doing.

I. CONSUMER INFORMATION

I think most of us in education have gotten the message here. We need to, and most institutions do provide clear information about the cost of attendance, courses offered. Issues like time to graduation are emerging as a concern for both families and funders, and data in these areas are going to begin appearing more regularly. This is an area in which one has to be careful in interpreting data, regional public institutions with a strong service commitment to regional populations will differ from selective prestige institutions. If you only admit the valedictorians, one can count on shorter times to graduation (again, the importance of comparing like to like).

One issue in this category in which this campus has an unusual record is the whole area of crime statistics. [show the overhead report]. These data are maintained by this university on our website as a matter of routine - it is that important today.

II. CAMPUS LEARNING CLIMATE

Here is where we are seeing the greatest amount of growth in recent years. Lacking national standards, definitions, test instruments and a body of data, information in this area emerged slowly over the past couple of decades, but is now part of the institutional buzz.

The National Survey of Student Engagement or NSSE has been around since 2000. It focuses on student involvement on campus and particularly in the educational process. How much homework do students do? How much writing and studying and so on? Over the years, 900,000 students from 1,000 colleges have taken the survey. In their own words, "results are invaluable for every campus and organization hoping to deepen and enrich student learning in and out of the classroom."

We first administered this survey here in 2004. There were 483 participating institutions that year. We plan to repeat the survey every two or three years thereby enabling us to make comparisons to national norms and peers and to measure changes over time within our own student population. Let’s take a quick look at what our initial survey data suggest.

As a matter of interest, these folks have now also created FSSE, or Faculty Survey of Student Engagement to give us a measure of how faculty perceive students to be involved. Cost to the campus for NSSE is about $3,000.

Another instrument is the Cooperative Institutional Research Project, the granddaddy of these studies. It was created in 1966 at the American Council on Education. I have used this elsewhere, but not here as yet. The two biggest advantages include 1) the high level of reliability resulting from its long use, and 2) the initial survey was for incoming students and over the years they have added seniors and alumni to assess their self-perceptions.

An ongoing and periodic assessment of success in meeting mission goals exists in the form of regional accreditation commonly reviewed every ten years. It begins with an extensive self-assessment that for us involved close to three quarters of the employees of the campus. The summary pages of the report of the visiting team that visited here in November 2005 are in your materials this morning on light green paper.

Professional accreditation is another place where we generate a self-study report and utilize outside visitors to comment and reflect on our success. Currently this applies to Nursing, Education and we are in the process of initiating accreditation for our business programs.

III. EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES

As its name implies, NSSE measures student involvement in the learning process – we know that is one important predictor of success. But wouldn’t it be nice if we had a tool to measure actual intellectual value-added through the collegiate experience? That is what the College Learning Assessment Project (CLA) attempts to accomplish. By conducting an assessment of freshmen students and then following up with a similar survey instrument for seniors, one can with an assumption that different classes are at least more or less similar, examine the differences noted between incoming students and those completing the collegiate experience.

What did students learn while they were with you as opposed to how smart were they when you admitted them? This is one of the newest instruments. We administered the first round of the CLA this fall, and we will administer the initial senior survey this spring. Cost for this campus is about $6300.

Note that Value Added is an especially important concept for small regional institutions like UMFK. We try hard to be as open as we can to the people within the region we serve. We avoid the concepts of "exclusivity" or "elitism" and look to serve students who demonstrate that they can benefit from the education we provide.

We cannot and do not want to compete with nationally prestigious institutions on the basis of who gets in and who is denied. Our greatest strength is the ability to say we took students from one level to the next. Ultimately, the ability to document the extent to which we do so will greatly enhance our ability to demonstrate the positive impact we have on our region and the state.

National Standardized exams, where they exist provide another indicator of success. Look at the brown sheet at the end of your packets. On the national Nursing Exam for first-time test takers, we see a table indicating pass rates by nursing institutions in Maine last year. Note that UMFK has the only perfect record for the most recent test year. Other instruments that might fit here include Student Evaluations of Teachers and Surveys of Alumni.

A couple of general comments; of course these categories are permeable. Information such as the 100 percent pass rate on the Nursing exam for example is of as much interest to the prospective student looking at a future nursing career, as it is to the agencies that fund an institution, and provides the institution with a good indication of its overall success.

And, what I have just touched on today is part of a national dialogue that is growing in intensity and importance. You will hear much more about it in the future. My purpose today has been to introduce the topic and to tell you what UMFK is already doing. And, doing so, I should add, on top of already crowded teaching schedules and committee assignments. UMFK people are amazing. The actual faculty forum for addressing and assessing these issues is the Council for Institutional Effectiveness and Assessment, reporting directly to the VPAA.

Nationally then, what is beginning to emerge is a significant body of knowledge about learning outcomes and outcomes assessment and therefore accountability. For those of us involved in this process, we need to embrace these issues as an important part of our future.

In closing, this concept of value added brings us around to the heart and soul of this university, and that means our people. Staff, administration and the faculty who deliver the educational services that we provide are without equal when it comes to professionalism and commitment to both their disciplines and to the students of this institution. There is far more to this business than pedigree alone, but I do want to share with you that over the past few years we have hired twelve new faculty members. Six came with PhD’s or Adds from top notch institutions including, University of Arkansas, Rutgers University, Louisiana State University, University of Guelph, Brown University, University of Denver, three brought other terminal degrees such as JD’s and MFA’s, one came with extensive experience running community health clinics, and two are enrolled in doctoral programs. They joined a strong cadre of experienced teachers who value education and the opportunity to work one-on-one with students. Clearly the people who make up this faculty could be teaching at universities anywhere in the US and we are very, very fortunate that they choose to work and to teach here at UMFK.

With that, I thank you for your patience, for your attendance today, and most of all for the strong community support you provide to this university. It’s Friday, and I hope you have a fantastic day!