The New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee is putting New Mexico’s largest universities under the magnifying glass.
The LFC’s office of program evaluation is assessing the efficiency of UNM’s and NMSU’s expenditures, outcomes and governance, and the evaluation should be completed by early summer.
The Regents Audit Committee announced the assessment at their Jan. 22 meeting.
Charles Sallee, program evaluation manager, said 15 or 16 percent of state money goes to higher education in New Mexico, so the LFC wants to make sure it’s being used well.
“We typically go where the money is,” he said. “Higher education has been on our work plan for the past year, and we’re just now ready to get to it. So, we’re starting an evaluation of the two largest universities that make up the bulk of higher education funding.”
Sallee said, eventually, all of New Mexico’s institutes of higher learning will be evaluated. He said this is the first time the LFC has evaluated the schools themselves.
“It wasn’t anything specific that prompted the evaluation. There wasn’t anything that the two institutions did,” he said. “Every year we do kind of a scan of state government to see where our resources are going, where have we done evaluations in the past — kind of a risk assessment — and we hadn’t done this kind of evaluation in higher education and it was time to do it.”
Regent Gene Gallegos, chair of the Audit Committee, said he’s concerned about the LFC’s ability to measure a university’s ability of “governance,” which is one of the three key areas under scrutiny. “That’s a very broad subject. How do you put a tape measure up to that?” he said. “When I saw that on the letter (announcing the assessment), I said, ‘You’ve really bitten off something. Let’s see if you can chew it.’ … That’s going to be sort of like judging ice skating or something.”
The other two areas are spending and outcomes, according to the letter sent to the Regents Audit Committee announcing the assessment by LFC director of program evaluation David Abbey.
Salle said the LFC program evaluation team has a systematic method of measuring governance, no matter how abstract it may seem.
“We’ll look at governance in terms of both the Regents and the administration,” he said. “So, we’ll look at things like strategic planning, budget development, coordination with other institutions and relationships with various adjunct organizations like (non-profit organizations) and the foundations that the universities have.”
Biology Professor Tim Lowrey, who was present at the Audit Committee meeting, said the evaluation will highlight problems in the universities, as well as things the universities have done well.
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“They’d have to present it fairly,” he said. “If used wisely, it could be useful for both UNM and NMSU.”
Lowrey said the evaluation is different from an internal audit process because it will highlight more than just financial concerns. He said it can be a useful process for the universities by showing what areas need improvement.
“This could substantiate the positive aspects, and also highlight problems that need to be corrected,” he said. “Just as long as it’s used fairly and usefully, I should say.”
