May 2021 – After Thoughts

At the end of this year-and-a-half long effort to create great educational experiences in the face of a global pandemic, it is easy to get too focused on triage instead of big ideas. We have all been busy monitoring COVID cases and becoming experts in contact tracing. We’ve been transforming student support to try to reach out to students who are drowning in the online environment. Faculty have been trying hard to reshape their teaching strategies for online and hybrid modalities, all the while worrying about the learning taking place and the missing interactions that take place in the normal classroom settings. We’re developing strategies to encourage our students to get vaccinated and wondering if we’ll ever get to remove our masks. And, of course, we are all worried about surviving the fiscal challenges that we face due to this disaster because we know it will take multiple years to get back to normal enrollment patterns. In short, we have a lot on our collective minds.

While every single detail matters, when we stay too long in the slog of managing those details, there is a tendency to reduce our dreams to the immediate future. Well, consider this a reminder to step back, look up from the spreadsheets and grading, and take a moment to dream big.

I’m thinking today about the graduates that I will greet next weekend. They have had a heck of a finish to their education. They have attended to the details necessary to complete their programs in less that optimal ways. I am proud of them for getting to this point under these unique conditions. They are now facing a world of work that is strange to say the least. It would be a normal reaction to feel despair in the face of so much uncertainty. It would also be normal to limit the scope of one’s job search to safe bets, nearby things, and the less than ambiguous, just to mitigate all of that uncertainty. But I urge them not to do so.

Now is the time for our graduates to dream big. It is time to think clearly about what a good life looks like, what a rewarding career looks like, and what contributions to the world might be possible. This is a time to reflect on one’s values and align one’s goals with those values. It is time to think about the arc of one’s life and some long range goals. This will make that job search more rewarding and fruitful. It may be that the first post-college job is not a big step up from the work done to pay the bills during college. That’s fine. But make sure that the next job has something for you to learn on your path to your bigger dreams. In short, aim for the most that you want, not the least, and build a plan accordingly.

For my colleagues at WCSU, we need to heed the same advice. We have worked so hard this past year just to survive this crisis. The work has made me very proud. Faculty have reimagined pedagogy, experimented with new technologies, and kept the struggles of their students foremost in their minds. Our Information Technology team and Instructional Designers have continuously supported faculty and students as they’ve navigated new tools and connectivity. Student Affairs has worked hard to develop a semblance of student life in this virtual context and invested in more mental health support because it was so desperately needed. Athletics has managed to achieve some big wins, even with such limited opportunities to compete. Yes, we’ve done an excellent job of triage.

But we are going to face a few more years of challenges because of COVID-19 and the continued drop in high school graduates in New England. It would be normal to look at our chances to recover as something that can be managed by small cuts and status quo behaviors. That won’t work anymore. It is time to think clearly about what we want to look like in five years and in ten years. What does a great university look like for the students we serve and the communities that depend on us? How should we evolve to achieve that greatness? What steps do we need to take to feel that our work is rewarding and exciting? What contributions to the world do we want to make and how should we organize ourselves to get there? It may be that the next year or two of working toward this great university might feel mired in minutia and even more triage, but if we are working toward greatness together, it will be purposeful triage that can inspire us, rather than drag us down.

Yes, as we come to the end point of our academic-year and finish up reports, grades, and the usual closing of the year details, it is important to rekindle the capacity for big dreams. It is the dreams that make room for good ideas and inspire us to continue re-imagining all that we do. They give us hope when we need it the most and they are the start of any good plan. Let’s lift up our heads from the day-to-day and take the time to dream big. We owe it to ourselves and I know that good things will come of it.

In President Biden’s American Families Plan, he proposes increasing free education by four years (2 in pre-school, 2 in community college) and increasing college affordability by raising the maximum Pell Grants by $1,400. Halleluiah! As our nation rebuilds for a post-COVID world, I am thrilled to see so much attention given to that oh so necessary component of our economy, education. It is clear that Biden and his team recognize that access to education is one of the most important equity issues in America.

Equity in the pre-K world is essential and we have long known that students who have access to quality pre-K options do better than those who do not. Starting with the need for lots of interaction so that the right paths in the brains are developed to the muscles developed when holding crayons to the social skills like sharing, taking turns, and playing together, pre-school is just wonderful for child development. We have long understood the benefits of this investment as we supported Head Start for low-income families and pre-K for students who have identified learning needs. But access to Pre-K is inconsistent and the quality of programs varies. Putting pre-K into our assumptions about what public education means can invigorate conversations about what pre-school should be and how it might align with the larger goals of K-12. So, yes, pre-K for everyone. Let’s take the leap.

Free community college is great, too. There are very few careers that do not rely on some education beyond K-12. Yet, access to education, even at the reduced costs of most community college systems, can be elusive for many families. Here in Connecticut our community colleges offer a variety of straight to career options, advanced manufacturing and RN degrees, for example. They also provide lots of support for English Language Learners, which is vital for students and the state. And, most important for my university, they provide a pathway to the four-year degree. Like many states, we have worked on Transfer Articulation Pathways (TAP) to ensure that students who start in community college can move on to the four-year degree without having to backtrack on various degree requirements. This important effort is benefitting students throughout Connecticut.

If you dig in further, you’ll also note that Biden’s plan reflects a much more informed understanding of higher education than we’ve seen in, well ever. Perhaps it is the influence of Dr. Jill Biden, but someone is finally reading the data and realizing that the way we have been evaluating university outcomes incentivizes creating more barriers to entry instead of improving support for the many students interested in striving for an undergraduate degree. It is easy to have great retention and graduation rates (and therefore rise in the rankings) if you simply do not admit students who may need support beyond financial aid. Those of us who have been supporting students who have those needs know this only too well. We’ve been ignored or punished for years, by way of inadequate funding and low rankings, while we strive to meet these needs and make access to public education a reality for the many, not just the few. We try to squeeze retention efforts into our existing budgets, often sacrificing other university needs or underfunding these programs. So, I was thrilled to see that 62 million dollars in the plan is being focused on retention and degree completion. This must be what the world looks like when we actually commit to equity in education.

Finally, the new plan will increase Pell, $1,400. This is long overdue, of course. Pell has not increased at anywhere near the pace of the cost of education. Students from families of limited means desperately need these funds to keep them from having to skip college or, worse, try to succeed while working three jobs. While I am proud of our students who are managing this juggle, too much work often leads to slower progress to degree completion, which just costs more money in the end. Sufficient funding at the start is a much better approach.

As thrilled as I am with all of this, though, there is just one more piece that I’d like to see. For public universities, the cost of education has increased because our fixed costs have risen. This is just normal living wages for those who work in higher ed and the cost of maintaining our facilities – not extravagant salaries and lazy rivers. As those costs have risen, our state appropriations have not kept pace, and we have had no choice but to raise tuition. I want to be clear; we are not doing a lot of “nice to have” things. We are simply supporting quality educational experiences, aligned with the expectations of regional and specialized accrediting bodies. We are working hard to be as efficient as possible, but education is a labor-intensive endeavor and you just can’t job it out to packaged learning products. The ever-increasing costs of tuition at public universities is making higher education a stretch for the middle class, not just low-income families.

So, here’s the ask– let’s fund the state universities enough so that we do not exceed $10,000 a year in tuition and fees. It is true we’ll still have to charge another $10-12,000 for residential experiences, but for the many (majority) who commute to our campuses, this cap will mean a cap on the debt they will acquire as they piece together their contributions and some student loans. It is still a lot of money, but even if a student needed loans for all of it, the earnings benefit from completing their degrees would make this manageable. I don’t love it, but it is so much better than the endless creeping up of tuition and fee costs for students.

What is invisible in the funding of free community college is the way that it disrupts the four-year economic model. There is just no way for us to keep our costs low and take the enrollment hits as students opt for the free two years. Add to that shifting demographics and the fact that state colleges and universities are increasingly tuition dependent as the percentage of our funding from the state has dropped, and you can see the extent of the strain we are feeling. The entire mess is leading to the reality that we will need to reduce the number of programs we offer and keep raising our costs. This does not further educational equity.

So, let’s re-write the way we fund four-year state colleges and universities. Instead of just looking at the number of students enrolled, let’s add keeping tuition and fees to $10,000 to the formula. We will have to increase the percentage of state funding to meet this target. I know that this is difficult for our elected officials who manage many constituent opinions about education, but if we talk about the benefits to all families and to the state economy, I think it just isn’t that tough a sell. While we’re at it, align the maximum Pell with that tuition number so all students can choose two- or four-year programs from the start. It isn’t perfect, but it is a start. Or we could go ahead and make the four-year universities free, too. But I’m guessing that’s too much to dream of at this time.

Month: May 2021

Dream Big

Educational Equity: The American Families Plan