UH wants invitation to elite club

In her seven years leading the University of Houston, Renu Khator has pushed the longtime commuter school once derisively known as "Cougar High" to heights many thought it would never achieve.

Despite lingering low graduation rates, UH now is considered a top-tier research university. Khator, the president and system chancellor, has been able to lure some of the nation's best faculty.

But Khator's next goal could be the most ambitious yet. She wants UH to join the most elite club of North American higher education institutions, the 62-member Association of American Universities. Wrangling an invitation to join the AAU is tougher than getting evicted from it, experts say. And the organization has focused more on research prowess than on UH's traditional mission of educating working-class students.

That hasn't dissuaded Khator from pushing, however. The school has been ticking off boxes on a checklist of AAU standards such as bringing in more federal research grants, recruiting better faculty and granting more doctoral degrees.

Getting UH into the Association of American Universities, Khator told a legislative committee this week, would raise the state's overall profile in higher education.

And as Texas, under new leadership, has focused more on catching up with the likes of California - which boasts nine AAU schools, compared to Texas' three - UH is the state's best shot, advocates argue. UH, after all, was only the third public school in Texas to earn a coveted Tier One designation by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

"It makes sense for Texas to think about lifting other universities to AAU," Khator said, pointing to the thousands of patents and hundreds of start-ups coming out of AAU schools, as well as the huge amounts of federal funding the schools are able to pull in. "I think it is really important that the state of Texas has a bigger and better dream for its universities."

But the AAU's standards are based more on lofty criteria - like federally funded research and the ability to recruit elite faculty - than on grounded results like graduation rates. While membership would be a major win for the rising research university in terms of prestige, it wouldn't necessarily say much about what the school is doing for Houston and the state of Texas, some experts say.

"States need universities that will produce great schoolteachers. They need universities that will produce great social workers. They need people who will produce lawyers who will fight great civil rights cases. None of those things necessarily correlate with AAU membership," said Scott Jaschik, a national higher education expert and editor of Inside Higher Ed.

Invitation only

And beyond that, getting into the AAU is no easy task. It's an invitation-only club that has prided itself on keeping its numbers down. The AAU hasn't welcomed any new members since 2012, when Boston University joined. Before that, it was the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010, which was the first school in nearly a decade - since Texas A&M was admitted in 2001 - to get into the AAU.

During that time, the AAU booted one school, the University of Nebraska, and saw another, Syracuse University, bow out as it faced possible expulsion.

"It's very hard to get in. It's easier to get out," said Noel Tomas Radomski, the director and associate researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education. "You don't want to waste your time, and it could hurt the morale of the university and its reputation in the state if you apply and don't get it. You have to be very strategic and feel confident you're equal to the other member universities. And if you're not, it's best not to try."

UH has had a series of successes under Khator, capped in 2011 with the Carnegie designation. During Khator's tenure, UH has lured 10 new members of the prestigious national academies of science and engineering, a key measure for AAU membership.

While UH has surpassed many AAU standards - including federally financed research spending, the number of doctoral degrees the school grants, and the number of research citations the school has earned - it still lags far behind the latest two members to join the group on all of those standards.

In 2013, for example, UH has more than $61 million in federally funded research. That's above the AAU minimum of $45.3 million, but well below Georgia Tech's $372 million and Boston's $275 million, according to data provided by UH.

"There are a number of research universities with outstanding programs that want to be in the AAU," Jaschik said. "My guess is most of them won't make it anytime soon."

Khator and others, including UH regents and at least one state lawmaker, want Texas to step up and help.

The university hopes the state will put it on the same playing field as Texas' most prestigious schools, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M - both AAU members - by letting it dip into a deep state fund. UT and A&M are the only universities in the state pulling money from the Permanent University Fund, a state-owned investment fund that collects royalties from oil and gas leases on public lands and funnels billions to the schools. It's a long shot that would require a constitutional amendment, but UH wants a piece of it.

State amendment?

Access to the Permanent University Fund, which has flourished during the West Texas shale boom and boasted more than $17 billion in assets at the end of the last fiscal year, would help UH attract an AAU invitation, officials argued Wednesday. The Permanent University Fund helps UT and A&M receive millions more in state money than any other school in Texas.

In 2014, the state sent $68.9 million to UH's main campus, compared to $296.4 million to UT-Austin and $176.3 million to A&M's College Station flagship.

A state constitutional amendment letting UH dip into the fund would require approval by two-thirds of the members in both legislative chambers and a majority of voters. Lawmakers said UH's request raised important issues, however, as the state competes with the likes of California in elevating its national profile.

"I think Texas is a fertile ground," said Jerlando Jackson, the Vilas Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It's going to be a long road, that's for sure, but is it impossible? No. Can the state of Texas decide they want to increase the number of AAU institutions and invest in higher education at that level? Absolutely. Is the city of Houston equally attractive as Chicago or L.A. or some places that have drawn on their location to raise their profile? Sure. But it would need to be a very serious commitment to want to be an AAU institution."