'Unacceptable': Florida Board of Governors threatening to eliminate these FAMU programs

With Florida A&M University’s licensure exam pass rates remaining lower than benchmarks and goals, Florida Board of Governors Vice Chair Alan Levine says he is ready to get rid of the programs if there is no turnaround.

This comes as FAMU falls short of hitting the marks in all of its professional licensure programs — law, nursing, pharmacy and physical therapy.

“I’m prepared to vote to take these programs away if we can’t do it the right way,” Levine said. “This is a disservice to those students and to the taxpayers who are paying for this, and the result they are getting is they can’t pass their boards to go practice what they went to school for.”

Levine expressed his concerns during the board’s Strategic Planning Committee Thursday on the University of Central Florida’s campus, where the accountability plans of the State University System’s 12 institutions were reviewed ahead of Friday morning’s full board meeting.

FAMU's exam pass rates show that only 41% of the university's College of Law students passed during their first attempt in 2023 — an outcome that falls 39% short of the university's 80% approved goal, according to a 2024 FAMU accountability plan.

The program’s 2023 pass rate is also a 12% decrease from 2022's results, and the program has not met the national benchmark’s average in five years.

By February 2024, FAMU was still well below the benchmark but hit a 47% first-time passage rate of the Florida Bar exam, which was a better passage rate than Florida State University's 40%.

The poor passage rates for the law school were not the only issue for Levine.

Although FAMU’s nursing pass rate was 82% in 2023 — a 14% increase from the year prior — it falls 8% short of the 90% approved goal.

In addition, licensure exam passage rates in FAMU’s College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences program fell 22% below the 92% approved goal in 2023 — a 15% decrease from 2022 — while the university’s physical therapy program was 13% short of the 92% goal.

“I’m a huge fan of the work that’s been done at FAMU, and I’ve been a huge advocate for giving everybody the opportunity to correct these things,” Levine said. “But not hitting our threshold for pass rates is completely unacceptable. It’s table stakes. This is a must-do.”

“To have a plan, and then to go backwards from the plan, there’s no excuse for it,” he added.

Florida Board of Governors member Ken Jones — chair of the Strategic Planning Committee — urged the university to review what it is and isn't doing and says the results are “troubling” as the university programs are at a “tipping point” right now.

“I think you’re really at an inflection point, to be candid,” Jones told FAMU President Larry Robinson during the board meeting.

“The rates are continuing to go down, and what happens when that happens is you start to get into that spiral where the rates go down, you get less students, the rates go down, you get less students and then you have less students wanting to be there because they see statistics like this.”

Robinson says the university submitted “fairly comprehensive” improvement plans for its four programs and is fully implementing them.

But he explained how the university is not yet at the level where results will put the programs in yellow or green anytime soon, with yellow indicating scores within 5% of a goal and green reflecting results that either meet or exceed a goal.

“We really have to pay attention to our at-risk students, perhaps in a way that we haven’t been doing,” Robinson said, referring to the university’s College of Law.

He says the university is reviewing the College of Law’s curriculum to ensure it more closely aligns with what students will be tested on during the Florida Bar examination.

“I think making a stronger correlation between the curriculum and the exam itself, as well as making the test prep a mandatory part of the student experience is going to make a significant difference.”

Earlier this year, the FAMU College of Law's former Dean Deidré Keller resigned amid the school’s long trend of worsening bar exam passage rates. The College of Law’s Associate Provost for Academic Programs Cecil Howard is filling in until an interim dean is appointed.

Keller's resignation letter alleged that the university was micromanaging her attempts to turn around the program. Her objections to "constant board interaction" “fell on deaf ears" and she wrote that the university's vision for the College of Law no longer resonated with her vision for sustained success at the school.

More: Former FAMU law dean says in resignation letter 'abusive' oversight was reason she quit

Besides FAMU’s four licensure programs, Florida Atlantic University’s nursing program is also in the red, and Levine’s warning about taking away unsuccessful programs addressed the Boca Raton-based institution as well.

The 2023 passage rate of the nursing program at FAU’s main campus in Boca Raton was 81% in 2023, and on its satellite campus in Davie, Florida it was 69%, according to an FAU accountability plan. Both rates fell below the 86% approved goal.

Jones says a lot of hard looks need to be done.

“If we can’t get the right metrics in place and the right curriculum to get these students to pass these exams, then we need to think about things more holistically.”

Contact Tarah Jean at tjean@tallahassee.com or follow her on X: @tarahjean_.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: State says Florida A&M law, nursing, pharmacy programs in jeopardy