Funds redirected to maintain high quality of undergraduate education

With UCLA’s largest incoming freshman class projected to enroll this fall, senior leaders have taken steps to ensure that there will be enough seats for first-year students in critically needed lower-division courses, including General Education courses; skill courses such as composition, foreign languages and quantitative reasoning; and preparation classes for impacted majors.

 

Chancellor Gene Block and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Scott Waugh have decided to convert temporary resources, known as bridge funding, to a new pool of funds to meet key student enrollment needs in both core lower- and upper-division courses for all undergraduates to make sure they can graduate in a timely manner.

 

This new resource, called the Undergraduate Academic Incentive Funds, will also be used to provide seed funding for innovative projects that can potentially increase the efficiency of courses and curricula. Last year, roughly $7 million in bridge funding was distributed.

 

"Maintaining a high-quality undergraduate program is one of our highest priorities and these funds will support that goal," Waugh said.

 

That’s especially good news as UCLA gets ready to host the first-ever Bruin Day this Saturday, welcoming more than 3,000 students who have been admitted to the freshman class enrolling this fall. An estimated 8,000 parents and other guests are also expected to attend the event.

 

Undergraduate Academic Incentive Funds (UAIF) will be allocated annually after deans of the College of Letters and Science submit their requests each year for funding of courses they feel are critical to undergraduate education. Requests for funding for this year’s allocation are due by April 11.

 

"Our intention in providing this funding on an ongoing basis is twofold: First of all, we want to ensure that there is a sufficient number of courses to enable undergraduates to take the courses they need to move in a timely fashion toward completing their degrees," Waugh said. "At the same time, we want to stimulate faculty and departments to think about and implement innovative changes in courses and curricula that will improve their programs and will offer new educational opportunities for undergraduates."

 

The availability of these funds to add seats to core classes such as the General Education cluster courses underscores the administration’s continuing commitment to make certain that every UCLA student has access to an outstanding undergraduate education, said Dean and Vice Provost Judi Smith.

 

UCLA is projecting that an additional 600 students will be enrolled in next fall’s freshman class. Smith is requesting that her portion of the funds be used to hire nine more teaching assistants for the full academic year so that 280 more seats can be added to cluster courses. "That’s a substantial increase," and UAIF will help support more graduate students and lecturers, she said.

 

In the past, temporary bridge funds were being used by the Chancellor’s Office as a stopgap measure to cushion the blow of steep cuts in funding to preserve core academic programs. By also paying close attention to course enrollment patterns and getting improved data, administrators have successfully used this strategy to help students achieve the highest-ever four- and six-year graduation rates in UCLA history; currently, 70 percent of undergraduates get their degrees in four years while 90 percent achieve this in six years.

 

While other college campuses have had to drastically cut back on course offerings, that’s hasn’t been the case at UCLA, Smith said. "That doesn’t mean that every student got the class she or he wanted at the time they wanted it," Smith said. "But it does mean that we have worked very hard to keep the enrollment managed so that students’ needs are met."

 

The new fund also provides an incentive for deans to carefully craft a proposal that will guarantee that students will get the courses they need at a time when resources are becoming scarcer.

 

"We have to do a thorough job of looking at our academic programs carefully to determine what our departments need to meet students’ needs," Smith said.

 

For example, one area that could benefit from a new series of classes is business economics; currently, the faculty are in the process of revising its curriculum. To give majors a new skill they wouldn’t originally develop, Smith has proposed new funding to facilitate a new partnership between the writing program and economics to create new courses in business writing tailored to business economics majors.

 

"Without these new funds, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to apply for any seed money to get this off the ground and piloted," Smith said.