South Florida ranks above UNLV

Monday, Jan. 10, 2000 | 11:02 a.m.

If UNLV President Carol Harter is selected to run the University of South Florida, she'll be going to an institution with higher-achieving students and a stronger academic reputation.

At least that is what can be gleaned from a comparison of the two universities that is part of U.S. News and World Report's latest annual rankings of the nation's colleges.

Harter also has a chance to get a hefty salary increase and a more attractive benefits package.

She is one of seven finalists for the presidency of South Florida, which like UNLV is a public university that was founded in the 1950s. But judging from U.S. News, the Tampa school has done a better job developing its colleges.

The magazine ranked South Florida as a "third tier" college, somewhere between 121st and 176th nationally out of its top 200 schools. UNLV went unranked nationally, although U.S. News placed it in the "second tier" among Western universities.

South Florida students on average enter that university with SAT scores of 970 to 1,210 and high school grade point averages of 3.5, compared with 870 to 1,110 and 3.2 at UNLV. The South Florida graduation rate of 47 percent compares to 35 percent at UNLV. The Tampa school also has a higher faculty-to-student ratio and a higher percentage of full-time faculty.

UNLV's greatest advantage is that 38 percent of its undergraduate classes have fewer than 20 students, compared with 28 percent at South Florida with that few students.

Both colleges are in two of the fastest-growing communities in the nation. Like Las Vegas, Tampa is a Sun Belt city with a tourism industry, though far more visitors to central Florida are drawn toward Orlando's amusement parks 90 miles to the east.

But South Florida has not been rocked by major scandals such as the athletic department troubles that plagued UNLV's basketball program throughout the past decade.

Since winning the national championship in 1990, investigations into the men's basketball team have given UNLV embarrassing national publicity.

South Florida also has 34,000 undergraduate and graduate students, about 12,700 more than at UNLV, and boasts that it is one of the top 50 public research universities in the nation. UNLV's William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration has a world-class reputation for churning out future resort industry managers. But UNLV has yet to gain a national reputation as a research institution.

Harter, whose salary is $186,924 this year, also receives allowances of $6,000 for an automobile and $12,000 for housing. Betty Castor, who resigned from South Florida last year for a job in Washington, D.C., earned $227,000.

South Florida presidents also are given a house and a car. The Florida Board of Regents also has decided to pay the next South Florida president anywhere from $184,300 to $266,800, a salary that will be subject to negotiation based on experience, Regents' spokesman Keith Goldsmith said.

Goldsmith said the regents will reduce the field to four or five finalists on Feb. 1 and make their final decision at a meeting in Tampa on March 10.