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S PORTS Antigua not main cause of USF’s struggles. BACK
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F S O U T H F LO R I DA
USF finds gender gap in graduation By Abby Rinaldi
LI F E STYLE
The Index
News.................................................................1 Lifestyle......................................................4 Opinion.......................................................6
E D I T O R
At USF and other universities across the nation, women are graduating at a higher rate than men. Vice Provost for Student Success Paul Dosal said he saw this problem two or three years ago and since then it has only grown. USF’s graduation rate in 2013 was 35.6 percent in four years and 63.2 percent in six years. Of this, 27.5 percent of men graduated in four years and 57.9 percent graduated in six years. Women graduated at 41.4 percent in four years and 67.1 percent in six years. In 2015, the graduation rate at USF for graduating on time was 63 percent of men and 72 percent for women. According to College Completion, F l o r i d a ’s graduation rate was 38.7 percent in four years and 64.4 percent in six years for all counted graduates in 2013. Isolated by gender, the graduation rate for men in
Florida was 30.6 percent in four years and 59.6 percent in six years, while women graduated at 45.1 percent in four years and 68.1 percent in six years. Dosal believes, along with USF’s administration, that this gap is a problem because of its effect on USF’s overall graduation rate, as well as those male students who aren’t performing at the same rates as their female peers. “It was certainly a big enough gap to be of concern to our President and our Provost, because while we have seen growth in the graduation rates of men and women, the undergraduate males have not been able to gain much ground at all,” Dosal said. “In pursuit of our strategic objectives, we want to continue to raise our graduation rate, so for the last cohort of students for which data is available — the 2009 cohort – our graduation rate hit 69 percent, roughly. So we’re thrilled about that.” There is a lot of pressure to meet these state benchmarks, Dosal said, from the state and
from within the university. The incentive is partially associated with the monetary rewards for meeting them, but also is about the university’s desire to do better. “I think we would have been doing it with or without that performance money,” Dosal said. The increase in women receiving bachelor’s degrees and graduating from college at greater rates is a national trend which has been in action for years. Women officially began to outnumber men as bachelor’s degrees recipients in 2015, according to the US Census Bureau. In the 2014-15 academic year, USF awarded 5,676 to women and 3,814 bachelor’s degrees to men. So far, for the 2015-16 academic year, women have received 1,084 bachelor’s degrees at USF, compared to 711 bachelor’s degrees for men. According to the USF, in the 2015-16 academic year, women make up 55.7 percent of the undergraduate
n See GRAD on PAGE 2
Property values in university area on the rise By Morgan Blauth C O R R E S P O N D E N T
Tampa has seen a boom in real estate growth in recent years, due in part to the growth of both USF and the University of Tampa (UT). Online real estate database Zillow predicts home values in Tampa will increase overall in 2016. The highest growth is in the Terrace Park neighborhood, with an estimated 6.7 percent increase. Terrace Park is located directly across Fowler Ave. and stretches down to Busch Blvd. between Bruce B. Downs Blvd. and Temple Terrace.
The neighborhood may seem like an unlikely location for increased home values, but the reasoning is. Andrew Duncan of Tampa’s Duncan Duo & Associates attributes the growth of the Terrace Park area to the increased availability of restaurants and shopping centers. “People wanted to live in areas like South Tampa because of the proximity to restaurants and businesses. Once they realized they could have the same experiences 15 minutes up I-275, they made the economic decision to move to Temple Terrace,” Duncan said. Dr. Joseph DeSalvo, an urban economics professor at USF,
offered another perspective. “Economics always falls back on supply and demand … If demand is increasing, you’d expect that rents would be going up, as well as the market v a l u e s of the housing,” DeSalvo said. Both seemed optimistic for the future of real estate in the Bay Area. “There’s a lot of positive buzz around Tampa right now,” Duncan said.