UNF President John Delaney sent an email to students regarding university funding. Specifically funding from the state via UNF’s metric performance. At the beginning of the year, according to the scoring system, UNF was confirmed to have improved by 26 points, the largest improvement that any school had, according to the email. However, according to Delaney, the Board of Governors apparently made several errors in the scoring of UNF.

“We had confirmed multiple times with the Board of Governors’ staff that its data and our calculations were correct,’ stated the email. “A few weeks ago, the BOG staff contacted us and said that they had made a substantial error on one metric, dropping our improvement by 7 points, making our score 77. This would leave a 19-point improvement over last year.”

The BOG recently met at UNF two weeks ago. During their visit, they changed the point system for two different metrics; no longer measuring a six-year graduation to instead using a four-year graduation rate and to adjust the calculation for students who receive Pell Grants.

Due to these changes, UNF lost another 9 points, reducing the score to 68 points total, according to Delaney.  However, the email seemed to be critical of the changes.

“Of course, the changes impact other schools as well, and last year 68 points would have been “in the money” under a more generous scoring system,” stated the email. “Interestingly, the mathematical strategies for setting the two sets of thresholds were significantly different. A mean score was used as the cutoff for getting any improvement points on the four-year graduation, whereas all schools were given excellence points for wherever they fell on the range of PELL grant scores.  We can only guess at the rationale for using two such different methodologies in setting these thresholds, which seem to fly in the face of most measurement systems.”

Delaney goes on to say that no matter what the metrics say, UNF increased in its six-year graduation rate, its second-year retention rate, and had a decrease in excessive hours. These accomplishments were because of everyone on campus.

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