LINCOLN - Chancellor Rodney Bennett is proposing to cut meteorology-climatology and five other programs to address a $27.5 million budget deficit.

“I was in shock, because I knew that budget cuts were going to happen, but I wasn’t thinking about it applying to me in my program. But then it did,” she said. Aurit’s program and five others are on the chopping block for one reason – metrics.

The university developed a set of metrics, which Bennett called a “strategic, data-driven approach to identify programs for consolidation or elimination.” "A budget reduction of this size requires us to think about this in terms of our core strategic priorities, to do it in a way that’s data-informed, informed by performance metrics and that it’s closely aligned with the NU strategic plan,” Executive Vice Chancellor Mark Button said to reporters in September.

The teaching and research metrics, developed by the executive leadership team, measure and rank every program and ultimately were used to identify programs to be cut.

Some of these include the number of students in a program, the number of degrees awarded over a five-year period, student retention rates, and the number of credit hours generated by a program. The research metrics largely align with values of the American Association of Universities, such as federal research expenditures, external grants, book publications, awards and citations.

Based on these metrics, the university used numbers to put every program on the same scale and produce a list of programs that scored poorly and were ultimately selected for elimination.

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