Baylor sets sights on joining top 50 schools
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___WACO--Baylor University plans to enhance both its Christian identity and its academic program in a quest to become one of the top 50 universities in the United States.
___Both goals are spelled out in a 40-page vision document for the next 10 years adopted by the university's board of regents Sept. 21.
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OLD MAIN building on the Baylor campus.
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___While other universities have seen those two goals as contradictory, Baylor sees a perfect fit between striving for academic excellence and advancing Christian commitment, President Robert Sloan said in an interview after the regents' meeting.
___"We want Baylor to be a great university that is faithful to Christ," he said.
___The quest to become a Tier One university requires being ranked in U.S. News & World Report's annual survey of American colleges and universities as one the nation's 50 best. Contrary to what others may believe, achieving that ranking will not require sacrificing the Christian character of the institution, Sloan insisted.
___"We wouldn't aspire to that if it didn't meet our criteria. Our first priority is to be faithful to Christ."
___The 10-year vision calls for a number of changes to meet this goal. Among them:
___ Converting to a flat-rate tuition. (See story on page 3)
___ Decreasing the student-faculty ratio from 19:1 to 13:1.
___ Recruiting more "world-class" faculty who teach, research and publish.
___ Creating a "great texts" component to the core curriculum in which students will study and discuss western and Christian classics from writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Calvin and Luther.
___ Establishing an Honors College for the best and brightest students. The Honors College will incorporate the current honors program, university scholars program and Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. It also will add a "great texts" major within the Honors College.
___ Establishing a School of Communication that will encompass the current journalism, speech communication and telecommunication departments.
_ _ Adding 237 new faculty positions.
___ Building 1,800 new units of student housing so that 50 percent of undergraduates will live on campus.
___ Investing $262 million in new buildings and renovations.
___ Creating a greenbelt around the campus, with walking malls crossing the campus.
___ Erecting a $90 million, 450,000-square-foot science building.
___ Increasing the university endowment from its current $645 million to $2 billion.
___The Baylor regents adopted the vision document unanimously, according to university spokesman Larry Brumley. Baylor regents meetings are closed to the press.
___John Wilkerson, a Lubbock layman who is chairman of the board of regents, affirmed the new direction as well.
___"The regents feel we're providing a first-rate education today, but they feel that education will be significantly improved by this vision," he said. "The regents will be very concerned that we maintain our Baptist and Christian mission and that we continue to be able to attract the broad spectrum of students that we have attracted in the past."
___Sloan echoed those sentiments, saying the new vision statement "speaks unequivocally about the commitment of Baylor to academic excellence under the lordship of Jesus Christ."
___Sloan said the new vision was developed over the last year with input from faculty, staff, students, alumni and regents. In town hall meetings with these groups, he said, one of the "resounding messages" heard was, "We want Baylor to be a great Christian university."
___The challenge, according to Sloan and the language used in the vision report, is to be both a "great" university in the secular rankings and be a "Christian" university. Numerous schools that regularly rank in the U.S. News top 50 have roots in Christianity but have become highly secularized institutions.
___No school currently ranked in the top 50 would be generally characterized as pervasively evangelical in its worldview. The only Baptist school in the top 50 is Wake Forest University, which maintains only loose ties to its North Carolina Baptist heritage.
___Tier One schools include Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Duke. Texas schools among the top 50 are Rice University, Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin.
___To break into this elite group, Baylor would have to surpass Texas A&M and the University of Texas, which fall at the bottom of the top-50 list. The rankings are based on measures such as overall reputation, freshman retention rate, graduation rate, faculty resources, typical class sizes, student-faculty ratio, average SAT/ACT scores, the number of freshmen who were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes, student acceptance rate and alumni giving.
___Baylor already ranks competitively with some Tier One schools on certain categories. However, the annual survey weights results, so that certain categories contribute more to the overall score than others.
___For example, a school's academic reputation, as judged by other academic administrators nationwide, accounts for 25 percent of the final score. Faculty resources and the rate for graduation and retention of students each accounts for 20 percent. Student selectivity accounts for another 15 percent.
___These are all areas Baylor has targeted for improvement. For example, the vision document calls for reducing student-faculty ratio to 13:1, which would accomplish two tasks important to ranking on faculty resources--lowering the ratio itself and decreasing average class size.
___Recruiting more freshmen who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes also will boost Baylor's standing, as will the complimentary goal of being more selective in admissions.
___Sloan said this drive to more actively recruit the brightest and best students will not exclude Baylor's historical base of Baptist students.
___The academic standing required for admission to Baylor has been increasing every year for the last six years, Sloan explained. This is due to a larger pool of qualified students applying to Baylor, not due to a change in minimum acceptance standards.
___This trend will continue as Baylor enhances its academic reputation, he predicted. And as it does, he hopes Baylor will do a better job of attracting the best and brightest Baptist students. These are students who currently attend other Tier One schools, usually out of state.
___"A lot of fine Baptist students are not going to our Baptist schools," he said. "We want the outstanding Baptist students to come to Baylor."
___Baylor will seek to attract these students with appropriate financial aid, Sloan said, noting that the vision document calls for doubling all categories of merit scholarships.
___"It is very important that Baylor remain accessible to our historic constituency," he said.
___And the vision for Baylor's future relates to more than academics, Sloan emphasized. He noted a major component of the plan relates to enhancing student life.
___"It's not just the books," he said. "A place like Baylor has had its genius in relationships, in friendships that last a lifetime."
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