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Could San Antonio Support an A&M Campus?

Posted on: Monday, 23 January 2006, 18:00 CST

By Melissa Ludwig, San Antonio Express-News

Jan. 22--When State Sen. Frank Madla talks about building a Texas A&M University campus on San Antonio's South Side, there is no if. Only when.

With its low college-going rates and depressed economy, the South Side needs a four-year public university and Texas needs more Hispanics with college degrees, Madla says. End of story.

"I will get A&M. It will come," Madla said during a recent interview at his office on the South Side. "The South Side will be proud, and the community will be proud. It will be a beautiful institution."

Despite Madla's ironclad will and considerable political clout, questions remain about the rationale for building an A&M campus here.

Madla and other supporters argue a campus will boost the South Side's economy and attract more students, especially Hispanics who are underrepresented in higher education. They quote statistics and cite equality for the South Side in the ongoing nine-year quest to make San Antonio the only city in Texas with both a University of Texas and an A&M campus.

"UTSA (University of Texas at San Antonio) will not be able to handle the future demands of our community," said Lionel Sosa, a San Antonio media consultant and former regent for the Texas A&M System. "Texas A&M must be here to make it happen. It is not easy, and it will never be easy, but it must be done."

Critics say the campus will serve local politics more than educational goals, and fear it would take students and state dollars from UTSA.

They point out that Texas legislators have yet to approve tuition revenue bonds that would help pay for badly needed improvements at UTSA, including an engineering building, and at campuses around the state. With limited funds, they say, a new campus simply will be another mouth to feed.

"Those students that Madla wants to take care of would be helped a lot more if tuition were reduced and they could get scholarships to go to one of the other campuses," said Kenneth Ashworth, who served as Texas higher education commissioner for 21 years. "But that doesn't raise real estate values and prime the local economy."

City officials plan to meet with representatives from A&M on Monday to negotiate a possible land deal for a new campus. Mayor Phil Hardberger estimates the cost to the city at about $30 million for land and infrastructure.

The grand university proponents envision is now housed in eight portable buildings that make up the Texas A&M-Kingsville system center, established on the Palo Alto Community College campus in 2000.

The 8,100-student community college feeds the tiny system center, which offers junior- and senior-level courses and serves as a seed campus for what will eventually become Texas A&M-San Antonio.

The A&M center, near Loop 410 and Highway 16, has an enrollment of 888 students and a total operating budget of $2.5 million. Eventually, backers say, they envision an $80 million, fully grown campus opening in 2009 with 4,500 students.

Within 25 years, Leo Sayavedra, vice chancellor for academic and student affairs for the Texas A&M System, expects the institution to serve 20,000 to 25,000 students.

A&M conducted a study in 1999 to make its case for the new campus, Sayavedra said.

The study included cost and enrollment estimates, surveys of high school and community college students, population projections and endorsements from local business people, elected officials and high school administrators. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board reviewed the study and approved the A&M system center as a pathway to a free-standing campus, he said.

No shovels will break ground on an A&M-San Antonio campus, however, until two things happen: The Legislature must approve $80 million in tuition revenue bonds and the city must purchase the land for the proposed site, a $15 million, 400-acre parcel in the southwest quadrant of Loop 410 and U.S. 281, and donate it to A&M.

Legislators may take up tuition revenue bonds in a special session, Madla said, but not until they have untangled the problem of public school financing. The bonds have failed to win approval in recent sessions. Hardberger said the city will buy the land as soon as it gets a commitment from A&M that it is serious about building the campus.

Sayavedra, who's spearheading the new campus, said he sees it growing into a force with its own fully formed identity.

"Initially it must focus on fulfilling education needs on the South Side," Sayavedra said. "Ultimately, it will have its own culture, its own mission."

The school would cater to local work force needs and student desires, offering business, accounting, education and technology and robotics to prepare workers for jobs at the nearby Toyota plant. It would feature an irrigation technology center to study water issues crucial to the region.

As enrollment grows, offerings would expand in response to demand, Sayavedra said.

The first structures on the main campus would include a library, faculty offices, lecture halls, classrooms and laboratories, Sayavedra said. Once the project gets started, A&M officials likely would need to solicit private donations to augment state money, he said.

He estimated the school's initial operating budget would be about $15 million, about 60 percent of which would come from the state, the remaining portion from tuition, federal grants and philanthropic contributions.

Sayavedra said he sees the school garnering a national reputation in international business and finance to fuel San Antonio's growth into an important hub for trade with Latin America.

He dreams big, but said he has seen results. Thirty years ago, critics questioned the need for a UTSA campus on the Northwest Side, he said. Today, that university has 27,000 students and is growing. Empty land that used to surround the campus now is abuzz with shopping, housing, businesses and restaurants.

Sayavedra, who led construction of Texas A&M's International University in Laredo in 1995, said he knows how to build a university from scratch. That school has gone from 300 to 5,000 students and has been embraced by the border community, he said.

"When I was trying to do this in Laredo, people thought that I was insane," Sayavedra said. "I have a similar dream for the South Side."

Mansour El-Kikhia, president of the UTSA faculty senate who also writes a weekly commentary for the San Antonio Express-News Op-Ed page, is not convinced by A&M's arguments.

"If you want to bring in a competitor, we don't mind competition," El-Kikhia said. "At least bring a campus worth competing with. Bring me Johns Hopkins or Harvard. Not Texas A&M. It's a fourth-rate institution in Kingsville. Does anyone really believe it will be first-rate if it comes to San Antonio?"

Critics say students have not shown much of an appetite for the A&M-Kingsville System Center so far, and lawmakers have passed bills to drop the enrollment requirement for system centers -- a way of determining whether there is enough demand to support a new, stand-alone campus.

Enrollment at the system center has grown from 126 to 888, 537 of them full time, in five years. That is far short of guidelines set by the Higher Education Coordinating Board, which say that a system center needs 3,500 full-time students for four semesters to graduate to a stand-alone institution.

But lawmakers itching to break ground on new campuses called the threshold unrealistic and found ways around it for their particular projects.

In 2001, lawmakers passed a bill to lower it to 2,500 to get started on a University of North Texas campus in Dallas.

In 2003, Madla authored a successful bill creating Texas A&M-San Antonio, then in 2005 got on the bandwagon and successfully pushed to lower the threshold for launching the A&M campus to 1,000. Lawmakers must approve tuition revenue bonds before that number kicks in.

"I wasn't about to allow this community to be left out of the chase for dollars," Madla said.

The coordinating board has consistently warned lawmakers against lowering that threshold. It recommended expanding UTSA's downtown campus, which is about 10 miles from the South Side, before launching a new A&M campus with only 1,000 full-time students.

"They are spending an awful lot more money per student than they would if they had 3,500 students," said Raymund Paredes, commissioner of higher education. "Given the tight state budget, 3,500 is the number is at which you reach certain economies of scale."

Paredes said he is not personally opposed to the campus, but thinks the state should follow the model.

As a 33-year veteran of the Legislature and chairman of the Senate Committee on Intergovernmental Relations, Madla said he had little trouble finding support for his campus from either side of the aisle.

"As chairman of a committee, they need help from me," Madla said. "I will give them a hearing on their bill. That's the way I pay them back. I have had a very cordial relationship across the aisle."

He dismisses concerns about an A&M campus pressing an already stressed UTSA.

"The way they compete is to provide quality education," Madla said. "UT and A&M are big rivals on the football field. If they would carry that over into the classroom, what a great asset for our students."

A&M boosters are aware UTSA is struggling to meet demand. UTSA President Ricardo Romo has said enrollment will hit 40,000 within 10 years. Last year, the university turned away students for the first time, sending them to community colleges to take care of basic classes before they could be admitted.

In addition, population growth in the region suggests the number of 18-to-24-year-old Hispanics in Bexar County is expected to increase by about 10,000 from 2005 to 2015 -- from 100,804 to 110,164, according to the Texas State Data Center.

Sayavedra's plan for A&M assumes the campus would serve students in South Bexar County and neighboring counties that may not otherwise have attended college.

It's a worthy goal, but it takes work, said Max Castillo, president of the University of Houston-Downtown.

His campus pulls ethnically diverse and low-income students from across the city and has grown from 7,500 to 12,000 students within a decade, Castillo said. To reach that population, the school has open access and partners with community colleges and local high schools to create a pipeline of students for the university.

"If A&M is going to put up stakes there, you can't do it as an independent operative," Castillo said. "You can make a difference in college-going rates. We have seen it happen here."

A&M has begun partnering with the East Central, Southside and Southwest independent school districts on programs they hope will improve student performance and increase high school graduation and college attendance. The program focuses on teacher development, mentoring, and parental involvement.

"We have targeted the elementary and middle schools because come 2009, those kids are going to be ready to come in to this institution," Sayavedra said.

Harold Oliver, a former aide to Madla who initiated work on the project in 1997, said he explored Texas Tech and UTSA as possibilities for a South Side campus, but A&M emerged as the front-runner. He imagined a campus with the kind of Aggie spirit that permeates student life at the College Station flagship.

"It is that sense of tradition we were selling on the South Side," said Oliver, who grew up on the South Side. "It's not far off of what you consider the traditional Hispanic family. They are close with all their family members. It is that same camaraderie and familial relationship you have with your relatives that you will have when you go to Texas A&M San Antonio."

Madla wonders if the competition will force the UT System to release funds to sister institutions.

Michael Warden, a spokesman for the UT System, defended its support of UTSA. Over the last decade, the system's board of regents gave UTSA $143 million out of $522 million allocated from a key fund for capital projects. That's a total of 27 percent, Warden said, more than any academic institution in the system, including UT-Austin.

National trends indicate state money represents a dwindling portion of universities' total budgets, college tuitions are rising and students are taking out more loans to shoulder the cost of higher education.

Public colleges and universities in Texas get state money based on semester hours and other factors plugged into a complicated formula. The institutions feast on a limited pie. If a new school bellies up to the table, everyone gets a smaller piece.

Schools also compete for money by asking lawmakers to bless projects through special item funding or tuition revenue bonds. The coordinating board ranks these projects for urgency, but its advice is not always followed.

Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, said limited resources are no reason to stop building campuses. He supports a new A&M campus.

"Competition for public funds will always exist," he said. "We are one of the fastest-growing economies and we can't sit idle if we are going to continue to be a great state."

Ashworth, who was known in the Legislature as "Dr. No" for his stance on the constant demand for bricks-and-mortar university projects in lawmakers' districts, disagrees. If lawmakers are going to authorize new campuses, he said, they should raise taxes to support them.

He pointed to a pharmacy school in Kingsville, which took millions to build and now sits vacant because the Legislature hasn't provided the money to staff it.

"They talk about closing the gaps (in higher education) and at the same time they are passing the costs on to the students," Ashworth said of lawmakers. "They are talking out of both sides of their mouths on this."

Lou Agnese, president of the University of the Incarnate Word, a private Catholic college with an enrollment of 5,200, said less money for everyone will mean lower quality.

"You wind up with two adequate institutions as opposed to one flagship," said Agnese, who has been a staunch opponent of the new campus. "If you put a campus on the South Side, it makes sense to me that it would be a UTSA campus."

UTSA's Romo, who recently returned from a trip to Africa, could not be reached for comment.

The A&M campus would be an anchor, along with the incoming Toyota plant, of a master plan called City South to revive the southern sector's sluggish economy, said Cindy Taylor, president of the South San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.

Taylor said the campus, along with other strategies in the master plan, would spur residential development, greenbelts, infrastructure, transportation and a host of other improvements.

She bases her view on years of community planning and a study by the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit research institute in Washington, which named the A&M campus as an important part of the South Side revival. The city commissioned the report, which cost around $110,000, according to the institute.

Taylor and other supporters also argue the new campus wouldn't just help the South Side but the whole state by serving the predominantly Hispanic South Texas region.

By 2015, Texas needs to more than double the number of Hispanic students enrolled in higher education, from 310,574 this fall to 676,100 students, according to the coordinating board. Falling short would mean a lower standard of living for all Texans, according to Steve Murdock, the state's demographer.

Historically poor and undereducated, South San Antonio is entitled to college options just like the North Side, supporters say. In South San Antonio, about 9 percent to 18 percent of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 30 percent to 66 percent in parts of North San Antonio, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Proximity is key for Hispanic students, who have strong family ties and like to stay close to home, supporters say.

"Higher-income areas will demand universities and get them," said Ana "Cha" Guzman, president of Palo Alto College. "Areas like the South Side will never get what is due to them."

As proof there is pent-up demand on the South Side, they cite their own enrollment numbers. Built for 2,000 students in 1987, the Palo Alto campus now has 8,100 students. Sixty-five percent of its students are Hispanic.

"Whenever there is a university to be placed in a high-minority area, people think it is a waste of time," Guzman said. "Time and again, we have shown it is a wise investment."

Madla, for his part, is going on faith that the Legislature eventually will pass tuition revenue bonds, and therefore the funding needed to establish his campus. In the meantime, said his former aide, Oliver, it's no surprise that the current campus isn't packing in students.

"How many students want to go to trailer park university?" he said. "There is nothing to have pride over."

The chamber's Taylor said the questions -- or "clutter," as she describes them -- surrounding the campus will die down as soon as everyone realizes it is a reality.

"It is a done deal as far as we are concerned," Taylor said. "The first time we turn dirt, everybody will be there on the front row with a shovel. Even the naysayers."

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Copyright (c) 2006, San Antonio Express-News

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Source: San Antonio Express-News

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