♪♪ From DEI to dollars and cents, higher education in Iowa is feeling the pinch.

We will talk with University of Northern Iowa President Mark Nook about how his institution is adapting on this edition of Iowa Press.

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♪♪ For decades, Iowa Press has brought you political leaders and newsmakers from across Iowa and beyond.

Celebrating more than 50 years on statewide Iowa PBS, this is the Friday, February 28th edition of Iowa Press.

Here is Dave Price.

♪♪ [Price] Hi, Kay Henderson is off this week.

Thanks for being with us.

Colleges and universities constantly change and adapt, from new technology to workforce needs, economic conditions, population shifts, funding and government relations.

A lot to think about.

Our guest today has to deal with all of this firsthand.

He is Mark Nook.

He is the President of the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls and he is the Dean.

This month marked the beginning of his ninth year at UNI making him the longest tenured of the three current Regents university leaders.

President Nook, welcome back.

Thanks for being here.

[Nook] Thank you.

Thank you for the invitation.

[Price] And for bringing the purple.

We appreciate it.

[Nook] Yeah, always got to represent it.

[Price] All right, across the table this week, Amanda Rooker, the Chief Political Reporter for KCCI-TV in Des Moines.

Hello.

[Rooker] Hello.

[Price] And Erin Murphy, Des Moines Bureau Chief for the Gazette in Cedar Rapids.

And Erin, best lead off.

[Murphy] President Nook, obviously at the state level we've seen a lot of changes in policy regarding higher education, specifically around diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

And republican majorities have wanted to eliminate those from the Regents universities, including your own.

I wanted to start with because it has sort of become one of those terms that means different things to different people.

So, what was DEI to UNI?

[Nook] You know, our DEI program was set up really for the most part around making sure that every single student that comes to our campus has the support that they need to be successful in achieving their educational goals, their professional goals and as importantly, their personal life goals.

So, it really grew out of that philosophy that has been a part of the UNI education since its founding in 1876.

So, in particular as we developed specific DEI goals, those were aligned pretty much with affirmative action backgrounds.

So, our programs served a wide range and a broad spectrum of people inside our DEI envelope, included race and gender and gender identity, it also included disability, our disability and accessibility services as well as our veterans affairs.

So, it was a pretty broad spectrum of the people that had been identified at various times as being underserved or having difficulty accessing higher education and being successful in a higher education environment when they're there.

So, it was really, really broad.

And so, when we think about diversity and we're talking about diversity, we had this really broad view of what that meant and have always worked from that space.

[Rooker] Now, based on some of the restrictions that Erin mentioned coming from the legislature, walk me through what has changed for your campus, but also even if the terminology DEI is gone, how do you approach -- is inclusion, diversity, equity, are those things that you are still talking about on your campus?

[Nook] Yeah, so when we were faced with both the changes in Regents policy as well as the changes in state law, what we did was go back to the statement that I mentioned earlier that what we really are committed to as an institution is making sure that every student can be successful, every faculty member, every staff member, every community member that engages with our university can be successful in reaching their goals and supporting them.

And with the change in the state law, some of our processes and some of our language was going to have to change.

Well, we're smart people, we can figure out how to make those changes and serve everyone.

And that doesn't mean that we decided we were going to do these things in some way that was under the table, we were really going to rethink what we did.

And we ended up completely reorganizing our student life section within our university.

We had already gone through a change in our gen ed curriculum several years ago.

And we were in agreement with what was in the state law at that time.

So, it was a big change.

We wrestled with it.

But we went back to this first principle of why are we doing all of these things in the first place?

And it really was about making sure we could support every single student, every single faculty member, and make sure they've got what they need to be successful, not just on our campus, but when they leave our campus and move into their professions and move into their personal lives.

[Price] Let's be blunt, if we can here, some critics of DEI say that bottom line this is racist.

Has it been?

[Nook] You know, we've really been trying to take the approach that we've got the law, we know what the law is, we've got to fit it, we'll do that and move forward on that and figure out how to continue to serve all of our students.

I was at an event last night that included a lot of our students who are members of racial and ethnic minorities.

They feel very comfortable and supported on our campus.

So, the changes they wrestled with a lot when they happened, it was we're used to seeing services in this way and now how are we going to get the support we need?

What are the services?

Where are they?

We've reached out to them to let them know exactly where they are.

We repositioned many of those services to really expand in our ability to serve all of our students on campus.

So, I think we're in a spot where most of our students, most of our faculty have come to a place where we know how to serve all of our students and serve them well without necessarily having an office that is specified this is where you go, this is who represents you and this is who represents you.

[Price] Republicans in the legislature just took out civil protections based on gender identity.

Does that have any impact on your outreach, recruiting students, meeting their needs on campus?

[Nook] It's really too early to see exactly how all that is going to play out on our campus.

We certainly do have students with a wide range of gender identities.

So, we're going to have to look at that and what that means and how we continue to support all of our students.

We do have several entities that are not part of the university but are part of the greater community that continue to support students from different gender identities, sexual orientations and things.

I know those will continue.

And we of course have people on campus that identify and we'll be supportive of individuals without necessarily having a structure in place, a defined structure in place.

So, there are always ways that we can continue to support students because of the people we have on our campus without putting structures in place.

[Murphy] Back out a little bit and talk about a lot of these proposals, most of these proposals are coming from a new committee, new legislative committee in the Iowa House on higher education.

We talked about the DEI stuff, there are bills that are even dealing with specific curriculum requirements.

Do you have any concerns that this committee is micromanaging the Regents universities?

[Nook] It's a legislature's prerogative to set up and manage their business the way they need to manage their business.

And how the Board of Regents interacts with the legislature, how the Board of Regents interacts with the institutions is changing, that's pretty clear.

So, the legislature absolutely has the prerogative to set laws for all of the agencies in the state.

And the way they go about doing that is up to them.

So, it's up to us and up to the Regents to continue to work with the structures that are in place in our government and continue to effectively lead the higher education institutions here in the state of Iowa.

[Rooker] Representative Collins chairs the House Higher Education Committee.

He has said that this committee is necessary because the Board of Regents isn't doing its job.

When the House Higher Education Committee is telling you to do one thing, but the Board of Regents aren't they also your boss?

Do you feel like you have two bosses now?

[Nook] No, I think what I see, one, I really respect the job that the Regents do.

They've got an incredibly difficult job.

They're volunteers.

It's an unpaid position and they have the fiduciary responsibility for three incredible universities.

So, it's a tremendous job and every Regent that I have worked with over the eight plus years now that I've been here have been really dedicated to that.

They spent a lot of time preparing for those meetings and understanding the materials that's in there, asking questions of us, so that they can really understand the issues and what is going to make the most difference.

We've been working now closely and they have been working closely with the Higher Ed Committee and we have worked with legislators in the past to help them understand what is going on and build that.

We're in a time where things are changing very, very rapidly and it can feel like some things are moving too fast and some things are moving too slow.

And I think that's what we're feeling.

We're in this really polarized time and this time of great change and I really, really respect what the Regents are doing.

I greatly respect what our legislature is doing.

And they've got to work together.

And I think that is where we're coming to.

Our Regents have just put together a new committee that will look at the bills that are coming out of the legislature so that they can respond a little bit more quickly and be able to effectively get information to the legislative committees so that we can answer their questions and they can understand what is going on and make decisions that really will be in the best interest of not just the universities, not just our students, but the entire state of Iowa, but especially our students.

[Murphy] I'm glad you brought that up, I had that in my notes here.

I'm curious -- that new committee could conceivably lobby and register as in support of or opposed to bills.

Do you think that would be an improvement on the current communication between all of these entities we're talking about?

[Nook] I think it might speed it up a little bit.

And that, I know, is the aim of the Board of Regents.

We have always registered either for, against or neutral on bills as they come out and we have legislative liaisons that work, are employed to work with the legislature and help them understand what is going on and provide that liaisonship between the legislature and the Regents.

This committee will be able to get together and meet a little bit more frequently than trying to get the whole board together, be able to discuss those issues, reach out to presidents, reach out to provosts, other people on our campus, get the information they need and get it back and hopefully be able to build a stronger relationship with the legislature so they feel a lot more comfortable with where things are going and the information flow.

[Price] Some of republican legislators have talked about the need to really laser focus, zero in on making sure the Regents are cranking out students that are focused on current workforce shortages.

And I'm wondering how you would respond to that?

Do you think you are doing that now as an institution?

And is there any retooling in the works to meet this concern?

[Nook] Yeah, one of the things that I've always recognized is we need to think about this term workforce much more broadly than we generally do.

When I think about workforce, I recognize that it's a broad, broad spectrum of employment opportunities that are out there.

There's jobs in agriculture and some of them are, like the friends I grew up with who are farmers running family farms.

There are others in ag business that are agronomists that need a baccalaureate degree.

There are people that clearly need very advanced degrees that are surgeons and are doctors or attorneys or accountants.

We need people who are teachers.

I think we need to realize that when we saw workforce, and I certainly do, we're not talking about a piece of that, we're talking about all of that.

And the universities in this state were really created to help especially with those jobs that are in the workforce that require a baccalaureate degree or higher.

And we take that very seriously at UNI and focus a lot of attention on what are the workforce needs in this state that require a baccalaureate degree?

Recently there was Iowa Workforce Development put out a list of the ten jobs requiring a bachelor's degree that are going to have the most openings over the next ten years.

Number one is registered nurses.

So, a year ago we added a nursing program.

After that, the next nine are all either in education, elementary education, middle school education, high school education, coaching or they're in things like accounting and business.

It looks like UNI's curriculum.

[Price] What does UNI know about teaching though, right?

[Nook] Yeah, we started there, that's why we exist.

So, we've really aligned our curriculum with what are the workforce needs of the state.

And it's really what has driven some of our -- this focus on workforce has driven one of our budget requests and that is for us to help solve what I see as the biggest economic challenge that the state faces.

When I got here eight years ago there were 60,000 job openings and 40,000 unemployed people.

That's a disaster.

We've got to get our population up.

We've got to build the workforce.

At UNI we have, we know that somewhere between 40% and 50% given the year of the students that come to us from out of state take their first job in this state.

We can help solve that problem.

And we've got capacity.

So, let's reach out and help bring some students from out of state in here, let them pay tuition and room and board, build our economy while they're here as students, but then recognize that we're going to grow the workforce by doing that.

It's an incredibly effective way to help handle what is the largest economic problem that this state faces.

[Murphy] We're doing really well here because that is literally the next question, I was going to ask you is about the reciprocity program that is being pitched.

Tell us a little bit more about that.

You're offering, you want to be able to offer in-state tuition to I think it's every state that borders Iowa?

[Nook] Every state -- it's the six states that border Iowa.

And why just those six?

A couple of reasons.

One, most of the students that we have come to us from out of state are coming from those six states.

Secondly, those states have cultures, backgrounds, that are very similar to ours.

So, it's not a big culture shift for a student to come from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, the Dakotas, Missouri, it's just not a big shift to come into Iowa.

It's not like coming from one of the coastal states, one of the extreme southern states, Hawaii or Alaska.

They're pretty comfortable here.

And once they see what we have to offer they get comfortable with the culture here, which is no big change for them.

They see the job opportunities, they see the jobs that are available, they tend to stay.

So, with what we're proposing it's pretty clear looking at the data that we expect at least a three-fold increase in the number of people who will take jobs coming out of UNI who come from out of state.

So, we're asking the state to invest $3 million every year.

[Murphy] And that would be to cover the difference of what you would normally get for an out of state tuition?

[Nook] Just for the students that we would have if we don't start this program.

This gets a little bit complicated but we have about 450 students on campus now from those states.

And if all of a sudden, we drop down to everybody is paying in-state tuition, we create a $3 million hole.

So, we're just asking cover that, don't worry about the new ones we get, we'll handle that.

So, we just want to take care of what we would have for a student population if we don't do this.

So, the gain, we'd gain somewhere -- the data says somewhere between a factor of three enrollment and a factor of seven enrollment.

The data actually says a factor of seven.

But I'm from Iowa and tend to be a little conservative.

I love to under promise and over deliver, so we're saying we'll get a factor of three.

A factor of three says that we'll go from 1,400 students to over 1,300, we'll have more than a thousand gain in our enrollment, but more importantly we'll have more than 100 people every single year going into Iowa's workforce.

So that means it's costing about $30,000 per person to recruit that individual into Iowa's workforce.

Nationally, the statistic that I've been handed is that it takes about $100,000 to recruit a person from out of state to a job.

We're going to do this, we'll put $3 million in, and then over four years those people are going to pay tuition, $10,000 a year, in-state tuition, they're going to pay room and board, another $10,000, and there's going to be some other students that come that may not stay, but if we get a factor of three then those students are going to put about $26 million into our economy in exchange for a $3 million investment.

And oh, in the end we get 100 of them to stay and take jobs.

Now, realistically I think it's closer to seven.

So, they'll drop $54 million into our economy and we'll get 300 new workers in the workforce.

This is not about building UNI's enrollment, this is about solving an economic problem in this state and that's our population and not having the workers for the jobs that are here, especially those that require a baccalaureate or higher.

[Murphy] Speaking of tuition real quick before we move on, one of the proposals, and this has come up in recent years and in different forms, is trying to cap tuition and how exactly that would be done.

Obviously, everybody understands the goal of that, to keep tuition costs down for students.

What do you see as the right way to approach that?

[Nook] We've been working really hard to keep our tuition under control and actually try to differentiate a little bit from Iowa and Iowa State.

This is the only state that I could find where the tuition levels at the research institutions was the same as that at the comprehensive universities, universities like UNI.

And so, we've been working to separate.

We've gotten a little bit of separation.

We want to continue to grow that and I want to do that not necessarily for our enrollment.

Again, it's for the people in Iowa.

I really want the students of Iowa to have a price point choice.

The community colleges, UNI, the research institutions, the privates, we should all be at a little different price point so people can make a selection based on what they want out of their education, what they are willing to pay for it.

So, as we move forward, we've always been conscientious about keeping our tuition as low as possible, that it is important for us to have the resources we need to be able to fund that education.

And so, as long as we can make sure that we're keeping up with the consumer price index and can afford to put the resources in front of our students so that they can get that high quality education, then we will continue to push that tuition as low as possible.

Our resources come both from state appropriation, which amounts to about 60% of our general fund operations, the things we educate students with, and then 40% from tuition.

So, we really do need the help of the state and we need the students to recognize that there are some costs involved.

And most of our students are pretty happy with the value they see that they're receiving in their education for what they're having to pay for it.

[Murphy] And I don't want to belabor this, we need to move on.

But, let me decipher a little bit, correct me if I'm wrong, you're okay with the tuition cap but we need some help from the state to fund that?

[Nook] We're always going to work within whatever the state laws are and we'll figure the budget out.

But it can put some real pressure on us in ways that could be detrimental to education if we're not very, very careful about the entire resource, entire set of resources needed to educate the students of Iowa for the jobs that are going to be here in the future.

[Rooker] And we do want to turn the page to something else new for UNI.

You're establishing a civics education center.

Tell me about what that is, why you feel you need it, what the timeline would be for it and then also in a time where we're talking about less money and DOGE is king, do you need money for this and how much?

[Nook] Yeah, so this is actually something that started more than five years ago.

Faculty in the political science department and the history department, philosophy department had recognized the need to really expand what we do across the state, not just at UNI, but across the state, K-12, at colleges and universities, in terms of civic education and helping people understand their civic responsibility.

So, both rights and responsibilities.

And so, the center has been under development and a year ago in the last legislature there was a bill that was put forward to provide a million dollars to each of the Regents institutions to start a civic education center.

And since we pretty much had everything ready to go, we decided to move forward and we have approval from the Board of Regents to set that up.

We are requesting from the legislature the million dollars that was put in the budget, well wasn't put in the budget but was suggested in one of the bills that came forward, it wasn't passed.

What we really want to do, the million dollars will help us get the thing up and running.

Ultimately, we want this to be a center that with grants and private support would be able to run itself and keep it working in that direction.

There's a few advantages that we have.

One, we have some very strong programs around civic education.

We've been doing this for a long time.

We've been educating educators as well as our students.

We're a big supporter of the model UN and host it on our campus, those sorts of things that are all about getting involved in the civic life of our country and of the world.

So, we also have all of Senator Grassley's papers coming to the university.

He is an alum and a very proud alum and so he has gifted to us not only his papers while he was here in the Statehouse, but we have all of his papers for when he was a member of the U.S. House and we will get all of his Senate papers then when he leaves office at the Senate.

So, we'll have a repository of materials that students, researchers, grade school kids will be able to access about sort of how our government works and one particular example.

So, we're kind of uniquely positioned to be able to create a center around not just civic education, but what it means to be a civil servant and to really give back to your community through whether it's political service or whether it's service in your community simply volunteering.

So, kind of uniquely positioned to do this.

And that is why we've moved forward so aggressively with it.

[Price] We only have about a half a minute left, but we could talk wrestling, basketball, volleyball because you're having great success in all of those sports right now.

What does the president think when he hears a legislator say that you may be required to bring back baseball?

You got rid of it about fifteen years ago.

So how do you react?

[Nook] Yeah, I had a conversation with the person that put that on the table actually during the Condition of the State Address.

It takes a lot to bring a sport up and the funding is going to be the important part and of course we also have to balance out Title IX requirements as well.

So, it would take a lot to do it and to pull it off and things.

So, if it passes, we'll take a look at what it would take to do that.

But it's a pretty big lift given the budget constraints.

We don't have a single sport that in and by itself generates enough revenue to support it.

So, we've always got private donations coming in and especially with the chaotic nature of Division I athletics right now, it would be a difficult lift but we'll find a way to do it if we need to.

[Price] Mr. President, we appreciate it.

Thank you.

[Nook] Thank you very much.

[Price] One programming note before we go, Iowa Press will be off next week because Iowa PBS is devoting coverage to the Girls State Basketball Tournament.

Good luck to all of the ladies involved in there.

That means two weeks from now, Iowa Press returns and so does Kay Henderson.

Thanks for joining us.

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