Farm Tables
Custom Built To Your Specifications
Oliver’s Antiques
501.982.0064 1101 Burman Dr. • Jacksonville Take Main St. Exit, East on Main, Right on S. Hospital & First Left to Burman NEw HouRS: MoNDay-SaTuRDay 10-5
CURRENT EXHIBITS
boost. Still, the school has been able to dramatically increase enrollment (from 990 in 2001 to 1,469 in 2010) while adding faculty (from 82 in 2001 to 109 in 2010) to retain a 12-to-one facultyto-student ratio. A just-completed $100 million capital campaign, begun near the beginning of the tuition hike, helped fund the expansion. Those kinds of financial acrobatics aren’t as easy to pull off at public universities, where despite underfunding, the goals continue to involve growth — in enrollment, in graduation rates — without sacrificing program quality. State schools are often stuck in a sort of Catch 22, according to UCA’s Meadors. “They do want us to enroll more students, but at the same time, they want our retention rates to be better. But unless you spend a whole lot more money, it’s hard to give the attention to those who need remedial courses.” Progress demands new ideas, according to future UA system chief Bobbitt. “We simply can’t continue to do what we’ve done in the past.” At the University of Texas at Arlington, where he currently serves as provost, the expansion of online classes has helped increase enrollment by more than 30 percent in three years, which has helped with the bottom line, he said. Meadors said UCA is looking for ways to save money by improving efficiency, applying for federal grants and ramping up its private fundraising efforts. Perhaps not surprisingly, Meadors doesn’t think higher ed is a bubble in danger of bursting. “I don’t think we’re going to wake up one day and find that no one wants to go to college. But we don’t want to keep making folks have to borrow more and more to go to school.” Cloyd doesn’t think you can commodify higher education. “It’s not, ‘Oh, I get this piece of paper. It’s fungible. I can go here and get a job and make X.’ Higher education, particularly a residential liberal arts experience like Hendrix, it’s about cultivation of the whole person, a 24/7 developmental experience.” The future is up to the marketplace, Cloyd said. “The cost of higher education is always going to be adjusted to the market. If suddenly the market stopped buying what you’re offering, you’re going to have to make an adjustment. [The current rate of cost increases] is sustainable for some institutions, but it may not be sustainable for others.”
Women’s Foundation of Arkansas gratefully acknowledges its Girls of Promise Campus Partners who help provide an educational foundation for Arkansas’s women and girls:
Arkansas State University Arkansas Tech University Harding University NorthWest Arkansas Community College Southern Arkansas University University of Arkansas at Little Rock University of Arkansas at Monticello
Support Women. Strengthen Arkansas. womensfoundationarkansas.org
June 4 - August 21, 2011 Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer, an exhibition developed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Govinda Gallery, and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, is sponsored nationally by HISTORY™.
©EPE Reg. US Pat. & Tm. Off
June 4 - September 11, 2011 In partnership with
1200 President Clinton Avenue • Little Rock, Arkansas 72201 • 501-374-4242 • clintonpresidentialcenter.org www.arktimes.com • AUGUST 17, 2011 15