The draft report, available at www.universityofcalifornia.edu/accountability, presents 102 measures of university performance, including measures of student success, access and affordability; research impact and funding; faculty diversity and quality; and university finance. The data are presented in ways to highlight trends over time and, wherever possible, to compare UC's performance with that of eight other U.S. research universities to provide context.
The report is being issued as a draft for discussion. Created quickly in the months since Yudof took office as president, the report now goes into a period of review and comment. For the next several months, members of the public and the UC community are invited to read the draft report and provide suggestions for improvement via an email mechanism on the Web site. A final report, reflecting modifications from the draft, is expected to be issued next spring.
Although UC campuses have long collected and publicly reported a broad range of performance data, the new accountability framework launched by Yudof gives the university its first comprehensive mechanism to make these data routinely and widely available to the public -- an expectation that has only grown with the increased national focus on accountability in higher education, business, government and many other sectors.
"We should be accountable to the Legislature, the parents, the taxpayers, the students," Yudof said. "People deserve an honest answer to the question of how you're doing, and it needs to be backed up by statistical data. Numbers do not measure everything, but the fact you can't measure everything doesn't mean you don't measure anything."
After this first report is issued, it will be updated and published annually. The measures contained in it will expand and improve over time, including the addition of qualitative as well as quantitative data. Periodic subreports will be presented to the Board of Regents throughout the year, focusing on specific areas of the university's service to California.
In addition to providing transparency about the university's performance, the report will be used to help guide strategic planning, budgeting and performance management, as well as helping university leaders focus on the most important policy issues facing the institution.
This first draft report includes measures of performance in such areas as:
• Student persistence and graduation
• Satisfaction with the student experience
• Affordability and student debt management
• Diversity of students and faculty
• Student-faculty ratios
• Graduate enrollments
• Faculty honors and compensation
• Research competitiveness
• Technology transfer to society
• Success in attracting private support
• Efficiency in use of facilities
• Progress in seismic retrofit of facilities
The draft report in many areas makes comparisons to the four public universities (Illinois, Michigan, SUNY Buffalo and Virginia) and four private universities (Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale) that UC has historically tracked to compare faculty salaries and budget data. This group provided a convenient starting point for this year's effort, but the comparison group is expected to evolve over time as the report develops in nuance and sophistication.
Vice Provost Daniel Greenstein, who led the development of the draft accountability report, cautioned readers that institutional assessment is an inexact science. Truly comparable data are not available in every instance, he noted, and every measurement should be viewed in context -- not as a definitive statement about the strengths or weaknesses of a campus.
"Wherever possible, bring as much context as you can to bear on the interpretation of any measure, and don't read too much about the university into any single measure," Greenstein said. "I would warn against trying to identify UC's successes and failures in the data that compare UC campuses with one another and with other research universities. An institution's progress can only truly be measured in light of its own goals."