A more centralized administration would help the Kansas University Graduate School compete for money.

That was among the determinations of a KU task force meeting to decide how the Graduate School could be improved to help put KU among the top 25 public universities in the nation.

“The good thing about that is you have a unified voice, rather than everyone asking for individual pots of resources,” said John Colombo, associate dean of the Graduate School and the task force’s chairman.

The committee, which began meeting in January, is conducting a series of meetings the next two weeks to discuss a draft of the report they’ll submit to David Shulenburger, provost and executive vice chancellor.

The task force said the Graduate School had “a conspicuous lack of a visible, vocal advocacy for graduate education” because most administrators and faculty work through other schools on campus.

James Owen, a law student and president of KU’s Graduate Professional Assn., said a more centralized administration could help KU tie the Graduate School to economic development in Kansas. That, he said, would help attract grant and other private money.

“The Graduate School here is something that has been neglected and can be put to good use,” he said.

Richard Morrell, university registrar, said his office did much of the data-gathering for the Graduate School. If the school handled the statistics itself, he said, administrators could make better use of the data to track such issues as the time it takes to graduate, drop-out rates and acceptance rates.

“If these things were centralized, a lot of these issues would have been addressed,” he said.

The task force also said graduate students needed to have stronger ties to the KU Center for Research. It suggested portions of the Graduate School and KUCR could merge to work together. Members also recommended continued increases in graduate teaching and research stipends.

“Our basic finding was that the Graduate School isn’t organized in a way that it has all the resources it needs and prestige it needs to build and improve,” Morrell said.