A.G. Gancarski
It’s appropriate that former Jacksonville Mayor John Delaney is President of the University of North Florida. His time in public service in Jacksonville coincides nicely with the University of North Florida’s transition from a commuter school for working adults in the 1970s and ’80s to the thriving regional university it is today.
The campus has been transformed, from a bucolic outpost on the then-underdeveloped Southside of Jacksonville to a thriving, full-service university with 16,000 students who have an average high school GPA of 4.02. Serious accomplishments at UNF. And the campus has evolved from the identikit brown brick buildings familiar to more regional schools, to dazzling, 21st century structures, such as the new biology building.
This campus showplace, built using LEED environmental construction principles, looks like a neo-modernist behemoth of glass and steel. Yet it has features all its own, including a necropsy lab to research what happened to stranded whales and sharks, and infrastructure to match, such as 6,500 gallons of seawater coursing through the pipes of the building at all times.
A researcher or student assistant can turn on one of three faucet settings: hot, cold, and salt, in the building’s 46 labs.
The building is called one of the crown jewels of the UNF campus, and it’s a reason, according to Senate President-Designate Joe Negron, whose four-day listening tour across the state’s university campuses brought him to Jacksonville Tuesday, that the school is a “destination.”
Indeed, said Delaney, more than half of today’s UNF freshmen are not from North Florida. They are drawn by the school’s “vibrant feel,” its thriving programs, and, inevitably, the school’s proximity to the beach.
PECO funding has been good to UNF. $40 million went to the biology building in 2012. In 2016, $11 million more was allotted to refurbishing Skinner-Jones Hall, one of the campus’ original classroom buildings, built in 1972.
Yet there are challenges.
One – what Negron correctly called “financial insecurity” – is common to students throughout the state university system: having to work, sometimes full-time jobs, and balance that with rigorous 15- to 18-hour course loads, including such demanding disciplines as engineering.
“I don’t know how it’s possible to work full time and be an engineering student,” Negron said.
There is help on the academic side unimaginable decades ago, such as routing students who may be struggling into advisory tracks, to ensure they get the help they need.
Other challenges were revealed during a roundtable discussion involving Delaney, Negron, and fellow Senators Aaron Bean, Rob Bradley, and Audrey Gibson from the Jacksonville area, as well as Senators Lizbeth Benacquisto and Anitere Flores.
Despite the costs, as Delaney said, “kids don’t want to take on debt.”
Eight percent of UNF students are still going to school after six years as a result.
UNF, which has a third of its students below the poverty line, also has the third-highest admission standards in the state. It’s still a fallback school for some students who couldn’t get into Gainesville or Tallahassee. Perhaps as a result, there are still a lot of transfers out after one or two years … a metric Delaney said artificially depresses UNF’s graduation rate, down to 55 percent.
Delaney estimated that 25 percent of that statistical attrition is comprised of students who go elsewhere and graduate. Thus, they graduate in the system, but their graduation doesn’t count to a given school’s stats … which ends up counting negatively against the University of North Florida and other such schools in performance funding formulas.
UNF was dead last of Florida’s 11 public universities in the most recent performance funding rankings, released in March.
“The bottom three is one hell of a stigma,” said Delaney, who noted that designation has parents asking what is going on.
Another adverse impact (a classic unintended consequence) is driven by UNF’s commitment to having full-time instructors handle the bulk of its courses.
The performance funding formula, Negron said, inadvertently creates a “perverse incentive to round up 500 students in an auditorium.”
Senator Bean echoed this concern, noting that his son at the University of Florida “didn’t see a real teacher until his junior year.”
In closing, Negron noted that “this is the first time we’ve been able to dive in” to these details, and pledged to work with the State University System Board of Governors to make meaningful reforms.
Undoubtedly, Delaney will hold him to that commitment.
Negron and other State Senators are touring schools throughout Florida through Thursday.
