Notes from the Sept. 18, 2007 Regents Meeting

by George Zamora

SOCORRO, N.M., Sept. 19, 2007 – The New Mexico Tech Board of Regents was informed at its monthly meeting that this fall semester’s student enrollment at the state-supported research university is showing an increase of slightly less than one percent over last year’s fall enrollment figure of 1,889 undergraduates and graduate students.

New Mexico Tech President Daniel H. López told the university’s governing board at its September 18 meeting that with this academic year’s increase to a total headcount of 1,903 students, “student enrollment at New Mexico Tech continues to experience only modest growth.”

This fall semester’s slight increase in enrollment at the university was also mirrored by the total credit hours being taken at New Mexico Tech, which also inched upward by about one-half of a percentile, the Tech President added.

López also told the regents that recent efforts mounted at the university to increase student retention from freshmen to sophomore years appeared to be working, with current statistics compiled showing an increase in student retention from 69 percent to 73 percent over the course of the last academic year at New Mexico Tech.

The New Mexico Tech President also presented a synopsis of recently published college guidebooks and periodicals that have ranked Tech highly among the nation’s top colleges and universities.

“There’s always been an ongoing debate about the importance and relevance of national college rankings, but it seems the only ones that don’t care about them are the ones that aren’t listed,” López said.

During its meeting, the New Mexico Tech Board of Regents was also given an overview of last week’s President’s Tuition Assistance Golf Tournament, which preliminary tallies show raised more than $150,000, as well as a status report on the ongoing capital campaign for the university’s new Children’s Center.

In other matters considered at the board meeting, regents approved the following measures:

• an annual resolution to comply with the New Mexico Open Meetings Act;
• annual resolutions excluding the members and chair of the Board of Regents from authority to obtain details or view classified documents concerning any high-security contracts the university’s various research divisions may have entered into;
• an official request to draw matching state funds for university endowment funds authorized by the 2007 New Mexico State Legislature, in this particular case for New Mexico Tech’s Dr. Marvin H. Wilkening Endowed Faculty Development Program in Physics; and,
• an amendment to the New Mexico Tech Consulting Policy (subject to review and possible revision by Tech’s legal counsel).

In addition, the New Mexico Tech Board of Regents conferred Master’s of Science for Teachers (MST) academic degrees on Marcia Barton and Ann Shea (Ahern-Gomez), two recent graduates of the school’s MST program.

The Tech regents also were notified during their regular monthly meeting that five recent expenditures of more than $100,000 were made by the university with restricted funds, including:

• a $400,000 subcontract issued to the University of New Mexico (UNM) for a collaborative technology transfer project to establish and operate a Field Programmable Gate Arrays Mission Assurance Center;
• a $120,000 subcontract issued to UNM for a collaborative research project associated with the New Mexico State Hydrogen Initiative;
• two subcontracts, totaling $225,685 and $556,569 respectively, issued to Syndetix Incorporated to provide development, integration, evaluation and engineering support for the university’s Microelectronics Test & Technology Obsolescence Program (METTOP); and,
• a $115,075 subcontract to Zapata Engineering/Blackhawk to provide field data for the Southwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership — Phase II.

Later in the meeting, the regents, acting in their capacity as trustees of the New Mexico Tech Employee Benefit Trust, were reminded by university administrators that recommendations for proposed changes in the employee benefits plan will be presented during the November meeting scheduled for the New Mexico Tech Board of Regents.

-NMT-