The University of Toronto announced Monday it is putting $100 million Canadian into recruiting top PhD students from around the world, paying each $80,000 a year, double its usual stipend, at a time when U.S. universities face uncertainty over federal research funding.
TATE Talks
BINJE sat down with Rutgers President William Tate earlier this week. Here’s the three-part series that came from it:
Wednesday: Tate’s warning: After a balanced first year, “hard decisions” are coming
Thursday: Q&A: Tate on talent, research and affordability — and the Newark and Camden campuses
Friday: 10 things: What Tate wants New Jersey to know about Rutgers
Rutgers President William Tate noticed. To him, those are students who historically would have come to American universities. That makes it a loss for Rutgers and other institutions. And not just a financial one.
“They’re not looking at it as a revenue game,” Tate told BINJE in an exclusive interview. “They’re looking at it as a talent discovery game.”
Of course, for a number of American universities, graduate and international students are part of their revenue plans. Fewer of them are coming, and Tate says that has hurt many U.S. Schools.
“It may come to hurt us at some level,” he said, “but the real loss is you can’t even calculate it.”
That’s because, to Tate, the loss isn’t tuition. It’s the people who would have done the work.
“I want to solve the cancer problem; I want people to be able to be with their grandparents for a longer period of time,” he said. “That’s the real loss.”
In a nearly hour-long interview, Tate also talked about research, rankings, the Helix, affordability and the system’s campuses in Newark and Camden.
Here’s more of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
BINJE: Rutgers is near $1 billion in research. Why does that matter to the state?
TATE: If we just take it as a straight business proposition, you usually say 2.7 to three times the amount of whatever you bring in is the economic return for the state. So that’s close to $3 billion of return to the state.
It does mean startups. It does mean that our undergrads get to experience research while they’re an undergraduate, which changes how they think about the world and how they might go into the world of work — much better able to engage with open-ended problems and be able to solve them, because that’s what you do when you do science.
BINJE: Where does the HELIX, the research campus going up in New Brunswick, fit into that?
TATE: The Helix opens the doors wide because now you’re partnering. Literally, Nokia (Bell Labs) is going to be next door. A medical school that was part of a merger will be there. And, simultaneously, it’s a big innovation hub. We’ve got a project going on with AWS, Big Data, Epic. It’s going to just drive solutions to health care problems right there in the Helix.
BINJE: All three campuses moved up in the latest U.S. News rankings. New Brunswick is No. 44 overall, Newark No. 73 and Camden No. 95, and all three are in the top 50 among public universities. How much do you pay attention to that?
TATE: You like them when you’re going up, and all our campuses went up. There’s only one other entity that has at least three top 50s, the UC system, which historically is considered the best in the world. If they were in the SEC, all three would be in the top half of the SEC in terms of ranks. It’s pretty amazing. It’s all right here in New Jersey.
BINJE: The Newark and Camden campuses haven’t always been treated as equals by New Brunswick. How do you see them?
TATE: It’s a stunning array of talent. If we look at Newark, it’s a top six or seven for social mobility. It’s one of the only cities in the United States that has a Big Ten business school, a Big Ten law school, a Big Ten medical school. It’s in the New York marketplace. I know we don’t like to say that here, but the New York marketplace is the number one media market in the world, and you have a Big Ten brand there.
Camden is top 100 national, top 50 public. You’ve got a Big Ten law school in that environment. You have a great biomedical innovation activity happening there for undergrads. Some of the cancer research down there is breakthrough research. Great nursing. It’s got all the bones.
BINJE: How do you get New Jersey families to see Rutgers the way you do?
TATE: We know from the marketing data related to enrollment management that the number one reason people pick a school is perceived academic quality.
We have a math department that’s outstanding in discrete math, one of the top 10 in the U.S. We have a philosophy department considered number one in the world by many people. We have an outstanding business school. Our Road to Wall Street program is one of the very best. I encourage anybody who ever wants to doubt the quality of what happens at Rutgers go to the senior thesis day in engineering and walk around. It’s stunning what these students are able to accomplish.
BINJE: Rutgers is rolling. Other N.J. institutions are not. Bloomfield College, New Jersey City University and others are struggling. What’s Rutgers’ responsibility as the state’s higher-ed sector shakes out?
TATE: Our job is to be very good stewards of the resources that we have, making sure that we stay the course so that our finances are in order, which allows the state to make decisions about how they want to manage the other enterprises, with us not being a burden to them.
BINJE: Speaking of being a burden. College costs are a huge issue. How do you keep Rutgers affordable?
TATE: We did have a 3% tuition increase, which was below inflation, very small relative to our peers, because the affordability part of Rutgers is part of our story. I’m super proud of the fact that all of our campuses are really top tier in terms of social mobility. And if your family is making under $65,000 a year, you can go to Rutgers, tuition free.
How do you do that? You have to keep your cost containment there so that you can actually get people out in a timely fashion without all the loans. One of our costs is being able to give scholarships.
We try to take care of people who really can’t afford to come to Rutgers but have the talent to do it.
