Jamie P. Merisotis, President, Lumina Foundation for Education
AAC&U’s Network for Academic Renewal Conference, Long Beach, CA
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here this evening.
I know: every speech begins with those words, doesn’t it? “It’s a pleasure to be here…” I wish there were a better way to say that because, in this case, it truly is my great pleasure to be able to talk with you today. That’s because this conference—and all of you here—represent such an important movement in higher education: a trend that has huge implications for the lives of so many individual students, and really, for the future of this nation.
In fact, when you come right down to it, there is no more important task in higher education today than to find a way to fully connect inclusion and excellence—to make these two concepts mutually supportive and inseparable.
As a nation, we need excellence more than ever—and we can’t afford to wait for it. And because we are an increasingly diverse nation, we can’t afford a single brand of excellence. Excellence can’t be one color. It can’t speak just one language. It can’t be limited to a certain age range or confined to a specific geographic area. We need excellence that is widespread, varied, rigorous and robust.
That’s the purpose of this conference: To foster and support the pursuit of that kind of excellence. And that’s why I’m excited to be here. In a very real sense, it’s my life’s work.
I don’t want to go into a long recitation of my biography, but a little background here might be helpful. As my brief bio in your conference program points out, I’ve spent most of my professional career working to improve college access and success among underserved students. It’s sort of personal with me, you see, because I was in that category myself. I was a first-generation student, the son of Greek immigrants who settled in the Northeast. To make it to college, I studied hard … I worked a lot of part-time jobs … I went after Pell Grants and any other form of financial assistance I could get my hands on. And I made it. As a matter of fact, I made it at one of AAC&U’s member schools—Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
While at Bates, I learned about another alum of that college — someone who graduated more than a half century before me, but still had a profound influence on my life. His name was Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays. Most you here are well aware of Dr. Mays’ impressive legacy. He was the son of slaves, had dropped in and out of college several times to work for the railroad so he could pay his way, all the way, through grad school. He went on to become president of Morehouse College, was Martin Luther King Jr.’s mentor, and was head of the Atlanta school board when that city peacefully integrated its schools. His philosophy was that we’re all responsible for our future, but in being responsible for our future, we also have a responsibility to others. That philosophy drove his life … and I guess it drove mine, too.
After graduation, I knew I wanted to do something to broaden college opportunity for others, so I decided to work in the education policy arena. After working as a policy analyst with the College Board and spending a few years as a consultant, I had what seemed like a crazy idea: to establish an independent, non-partisan Washington-based research and policy organization. Fifteen years later, the Institute for Higher Education Policy is now thriving, especially so under the capable leadership of its new CEO Michelle Asha Cooper. And then—this past January, I became president of Lumina Foundation for Education in Indianapolis.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with our organization, let me fill in the blanks a little. Lumina, a private foundation established in 2000, is the nation’s largest foundation focused exclusively on college access and success. We have more than a billion dollars in assets, and we gave away $50 million in grants in 2007. That’s a significant amount, but as you all are aware, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to needs and challenges that bedevil higher education.
That’s why, in addition to our grants budget, we at Lumina try to use all of the tools in our toolbox as we work to increase college success rates, particularly among underserved student populations. We support important research that can assist college leaders and faculty and can inform and influence policymakers. We use our printed and Web-based communications—as well as our relationships with the media and the policy community—to advocate for positive change. Also, Lumina Foundation aims to serve an important convening role, bringing together interested stakeholders to address the many issues that affect college access and success.
We do all of these things in pursuit of one specific aim—what we call our “Big Goal.” At Lumina, our Big Goal is this: By the year 2025, we want 60 percent of the American population to hold high-quality, two- or four-year college degrees and credentials. Note that I said “high-quality” degrees—a very important point, and one that I’ll come back to a bit later. For now, though, let’s focus on that 60 percent figure. That number represents a sizable increase over the current degree-attainment rate of 39 percent. That national rate of 39 percent has remained stagnant for nearly 30 years—and that’s a real problem.
A generation ago, 39 percent was fine. In fact, it was good enough to give the United States the best-educated population in the world. Well, those days are long gone. According to the latest figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, our nation ranks 10th among industrialized countries in the percentage of young adults who hold college degrees. Tenth. We’ve been stuck in the same place for nearly three decades. Meantime, developed nations in Europe, Asia, and the Americas are sprinting ahead — working in different and innovative ways to significantly increase their attainment levels. We must do the same—and, again, we can’t afford to wait.
Now, Lumina doesn’t call this a “Big Goal” for nothing. We know that 60 percent is an ambitious target. In fact, to get there, this nation will have to produce 16 million more degree holders than are expected at the current 39 percent rate. The good news is that it doesn’t have to cost us a lot more to educate a greater share of the U.S. population. Our nation already spends significantly more than the average industrialized nation on a per-student basis. Better, wiser investments can indeed lead to better results.
But we certainly need to work harder — and faster — than we’ve been working so far. In short, we need to increase the productivity of our higher-ed system, because we feel very strongly that this is a goal we MUST achieve. In fact, as ambitious as the 60 percent attainment rate might seem, we believe it is the minimum required to meet three compelling national needs:
- The first need is to reach international benchmarks for college attainment, and thereby return the United States to a world-class level of global competitiveness.
- The second compelling need is to meet the ever-growing demand for a well-prepared and adaptable workforce.
- The third need is one you’re familiar with because many of you, like me, have been working for decades to meet it. It is to close achievement gaps for underrepresented students.
Obviously, this last compelling need—closing those pernicious and persistent gaps in student achievement—is what we’re focused on here at this conference. We need to focus on it. In fact, we at Lumina feel that all of higher education must focus on it.
The math is clear: If we hope to reach our goal of 60 percent degree attainment, achievement rates among the nation’s underserved students will have to rise dramatically. Demographic trends make that fact inescapably obvious. That means we must find ways to ensure that every American has the opportunity to succeed in higher education, especially those from groups that today are grossly underrepresented or face particular challenges—low-income students, students of color, first-generation students, working adults.
Disparities in educational attainment are, at their core, affronts to our nation’s commitment to social justice. When we say higher education has become the only reliable path into the middle class, this has implications far beyond mere earnings potential. We all know that higher education can transform lives for the better. To take that a step further: We believe higher education also can transform society for the better. College matters; it’s that simple. Statistics show that college degree holders earn more, save more and produce more in their lifetimes. They’re happier, healthier, and they even live longer. They pay taxes; they’re more likely to vote, volunteer, give blood, support charity, and take on leadership roles in their communities.
The consequences of not earning a degree are increasingly dire, and these consequences are sure to fall disproportionately on students who face the highest barriers to success: low-income students, students of color, first-generation students. Again, you know all of this—otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.
But it’s not about earning just any degree. Remember what I said about “high-quality” degrees? That’s where the “excellence” part of the equation comes in. It’s not sufficient for us to increase the number of degree holders by the quickest and simplest means possible. That might make the numbers look better, but it won’t get us anywhere. It won’t help individual students, and it certainly won’t help us as a nation. As Wall Street’s reaction to the subprime mortgage mess has shown us with brutal clarity, there’s a very important difference between perceived worth and genuine value.
Our students need degrees that have—and can demonstrate—real value. That’s why the focus on learning outcomes must go hand in hand with our efforts to increase diversity and emphasize inclusion. At Lumina, we believe it’s vital that institutions define high-quality learning outcomes in clear, measurable ways, and then help their students achieve those outcomes. Institutions must offer high-quality courses and programs that meet the needs of students, the workforce, and society in general; and institutions must also support the success of students as they work toward their goals.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to determine whether institutions are providing high-quality courses—or ably assisting their students—largely because far too many schools collect far too little data on the students’ learning outcomes. Without a clear definition of quality learning, and lacking student-performance data that can be shared and compared, how can we expect to pinpoint the approaches that improve learning outcomes and ensure the excellence we need?
That’s why Lumina is committed to supporting national efforts to encourage institutions, systems and states to establish clear learning outcomes, to help their students reach those outcomes, and to be transparent and accountable about their performance of those tasks. We know this effort is also important to you here at AAC&U, and we are very encouraged by your work in this area. We’re also interested in other, similar initiatives that focus on institutional accountability for student learning: the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the National Survey of Student Engagement, and the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, among others. All are initiatives in which we are proud to have made substantial investments. That’s because all work to ensure a standard of educational quality that we need to maintain.
Lumina is also looking beyond the borders of the United States for ideas that can increase the quality and number of degrees. After all, if so many developed nations are increasing college attainment—often to levels well above that of the U.S.—they clearly have something to teach us.
In particular, we at Lumina feel the Bologna process of higher education reform has significant implications for U.S. higher education. At its core, Bologna—named for the Italian city in which it was born in 1999—is an effort to promote transparency, coordination and quality assurance among the various higher education systems in Europe. It seeks to create a simplified and more-or-less seamless higher-ed system—a two-cycle system that awards easily readable and comparable degrees, promotes student mobility, defines learning outcomes and ensures quality.
My friend and former colleague Cliff Adelman has written an excellent paper about this effort titled Learning Accountability from Bologna. It’s available free from the Institute for Higher Education Policy. I commend it to your attention. I won’t attempt to summarize Cliff’s paper in full, but it does explain an important feature of the Bologna process that I want to talk about this evening. It’s the feature called “tuning,” and it’s related directly to all of those goals I mentioned earlier: readily comparable degrees, student mobility, well-defined learning outcomes, and quality assurance.
Under the tuning methodology, each discipline—business, history, engineering, philosophy, what have you—each discipline establishes a specific set of basic competencies and learning outcomes that students must attain to earn a degree in that area of study. Once these common outcomes are established—once there is a clear definition of what a student is expected to know and what skills to possess at the end of the degree program—each institution designs its programs the way it considers best to help students attain those outcomes.
The idea is not to create a monolithic system that limits institutions or forces them to adopt a particular approach. The degree programs at various colleges are not uniform or prescribed. To repeat the musical metaphor, the institutions aren’t all playing the same song. Rather, they are “tuned” to perform in the same key: business in G-minor, history in B-flat and so on.
By doing this, the tuning process creates a common language to describe subject-specific knowledge. It builds a series of clearly visible reference points for all who work in the discipline. These points can be seen—and this common language clearly understood, not only by students, faculty and administrators at the various colleges, but also—and this is critically important—by employers and members of the general public.
In short, the tuning process makes the value of any degree more clearly visible and more directly comparable. It also highlights—in real-world terms—the college’s contribution to the value of that degree. It serves as at least a starting point for a shared definition of excellence. And it does so without limiting or circumscribing that definition, without excluding the flexibility and diversity of the individual institutions.
In other words, the tuning process does for these various colleges what we must do for the students it is our mission to serve: It combines inclusion and excellence. As I said early on, we need to find more ways to create that combination, to link those two concepts inextricably as we serve our students.
There are other ways to make this happen, of course—and Lumina Foundation is certainly pursuing many angles that I’ve not touched on here today. I’m happy to discuss those efforts in the question-and-answer session that follows. And I hope you’ll take time during that session to fill me in on some programs and projects that my Lumina colleagues and I haven’t even thought of.
After all, we need all of the good ideas we can get—because the task before us is huge, and it is vitally important. There are hundreds of thousands of students out there right now who deserve their chance at excellence, and millions more are on the way. When I think about them—and our obligation to them—I can’t help but again recall the words of my fellow Bates College alum, Dr. Benjamin Mays. They apply very well to those students—and, I hope, to all of us:
“It is within your power,” said Dr. Mays, “to dream, to build air castles, to think great thoughts, to aim at the stars, and grasp the moon. Whatever you do, strive to do it so well that no person living, no person dead, and no person yet to be born could do it any better.”
Thank you again for the opportunity to be with you here today.
