Remarks to Indiana's Education Roundtable
Jamie Merisotis, President, Lumina Foundation for Education
Indiana's education roundtable, IUPUI Campus, Indianapolis, IN
May 18, 2010
Thank you very much Commissioner Lubbers and I want to thank you and Superintendent Bennett and Governor Daniels for this invitation to be here. I am really delighted to be with you.
I think it may make sense—though many of you know Lumina Foundation to begin—to give a brief overview of what the Foundation is. I think that frames the context of my remarks this morning. As the Commissioner pointed out, Lumina Foundation occupies a fairly unique role in the context of American philanthropy—of the 7,000 or so private foundations in America, we are roughly the 30th largest in the nation with assets in excess of a billion dollars. Or I like to say in the current context—at least that was the case this morning. I'm never quite sure.
The Foundation's uniqueness—I think—is derived from the fact that among the largest foundations in the country—we are the only one with a specific mission of increasing access and success beyond high school and that is particularly true among students who traditionally face the highest barriers to success: low-income students, students of color, and adults and first-generation students—these are students who we collectively refer to as 21st Century students.
Now how we got to our Big Goal for higher education, I think is worth noting. Because when I arrived at the Foundation in January 2008, my colleagues, under the leadership of my predecessor Martha Lamkin—did a wonderful job in establishing Lumina Foundation as a national presence in higher education committed to that mission. But, I think what we came to realize fairly quickly, was that Lumina Foundation had an opportunity to be a catalyst—to be a leadership organization that could provide national leadership on these issues of access and success in higher education through a couple of ways. One was to emphasize the broad array of tools that we have at our disposal in order to be able to get to our goals: So as a foundation, we not only make grants to support programs that will improve success in colleges and universities, but we're also participating actively in advancing public policy that will lead to our goals and we are committed to contributing to the public will—that is informing the public: policy makers and business leaders about the important role of higher education and the fabric of our nation. So I think it's very important to recognize that Lumina sees that unique capacity that it has as having dimensions that take us well beyond the traditional grant-making role. At the same time we realized that we needed to be as clear as we possibly could be about what we wanted to achieve—and that ultimately became articulated in what we call, our Big Goal for higher education which is that:
By 2025, we want 60 percent of Americans to hold high-quality (postsecondary) college degrees and credentials. Today, and essentially for the last four decades, we have hovered at around 40 percent of Americans with a college degree or certificate.
So, how we got to that 60 percent is probably a story for later discussion. Part of it has to do with international comparisons—many of you are aware of the fact that the US went from first to about tenth in the world in the last decade in terms of the proportion of its citizens with college degrees and credentials. And I think that was one motivating factor, but frankly, not the main motivating factor—ultimately the main motivating factor had to do with the ways in which people with college degrees and credentials need to drive our economic and social development as a country—and I'll come back to that in a moment.
Now, I have to say that the Foundation has learned a great deal from the ideas and the initiatives that were embedded in the Commission on Higher Education's "Reaching Higher" report which the Commissioner will speak to in a few minutes. It has informed not only our work in Indiana, but it's informed much of our work across the country—and we are very grateful for the leadership that this state has shown in terms of that national work.
So, what do we want? Ultimately our goal is pretty straight forward. We want to recognize fully the benefits of investing in higher education for all Hoosiers by formally adopting, publicly, that a "Big Goal" for college completion right here in Indiana.
To provide you some sense of where we are relative to the Goal, we gave you this brief report in advance called "A Stronger Nation Through Higher Education"—starting right here in Indiana. And I'll point you only to the back page—if you will for a moment—which is figure 3—which points out a couple of things: First is that, right now, only 36 percent of Indiana's young adults, that is those who are between the ages of 25 and 34 have a college degree or credential—and only 33 percent of the entire working-age population, those 25 to 64 year olds—have at least that degree. As you can see from the handout, there are tremendous disparities by county and by regions of the state—and I think that is something that is a particular challenge that we will need to confront here in Indiana.
So, we need to start first by committing ourselves in a concrete way to this target for college degree attainment which is the 60 percent goal.
The Commission of Higher Education has already taken us a long way towards getting there by getting quite specific in terms of what we need to do to get there. The Commission has calculated that between now and 2025, we'd need 10,000 more college degrees each year, every year between now and 2025 in order to be able to get to that goal. On the one hand that sounds like a daunting goal -- it represents a grand total of about 2 million more degree holders between now and 2025. But consider just one fact: right now more than 700,000 Hoosiers—working age adults—21 percent of our workforce—have already earned some college credit, so getting just to that population of people who have already made the important step of considering higher education and earning some college credits, I think would be a big step forward.
Employers, I think have been very clear in the fact that they need a well-educated, well-prepared workforce to compete in the 21st century economy. According to the Georgetown Center on Education in the Workforce, 63 percent of all jobs created—or being developed in the next decade—will require some form of postsecondary education and training. In short, if you don't have some postsecondary degree or credential in the modern world, you are likely to be poor or to relegate yourself to the status of not having very much opportunity to gain access to the middle class.
I think also important is that increasing the supply of college educated workers actually can help to create jobs. Now, I'm not an economist, so I won't get into the nuances of productivity growth right now, but suffice it to say that the evidence over the course of the last half century a significant portion of economic growth in modern times has been attributed to two key things: technology—that is how technology has changed work processes, and increasing educational attainment. In fact, I think, a more highly educated workforce has been shown to actually change how employers organize work.
A good example would be what happened with the technology boom where this supply of highly educated people helped to create the tremendous progress we made in the 90s in terms of technology.
The system of higher education, I think, also needs to meet the needs of 21st century students and their families—these are the students of today and tomorrow, not students of yesterday.
In fact, we can't get to that Big Goal of college degree attainment with a 19th Century system of higher education—one where things like seat-time, where lectures and labs, where the traditional process for accumulating credits and graduating is the sole path to a college degree. It will continue to remain one important way, but cannot remain the sole path.
We need to recognize that these 21st Century students are essential to our future, and that we can help to move the dialogue away from this sort of deficit model that Lumina Foundation has described—where in fact the majority of students are now being described as "non-traditional"—which doesn't make a lot of sense—to a growth model, where all sectors—industry, government, higher education institutions and communities—see these students as future leaders and taxpayers and contributors to our standard of living.
So, clearly, no one-size-fits-all system of higher education will work for these students. And it's not going to serve us as a nation. To reach the Big Goal, America needs all types of students to succeed, and they need to succeed in far greater numbers at a wide array of institutions. So, in short, what this means is that we need to develop a student-centered system—one that is flexible, accessible, affordable and ultimately accountable and committed to quality.
This system needs to meet each student where they are and offer the support needed to succeed. It needs to ensure quality by fostering genuine learning, not only program completion. It needs to truly prepare students for work—and ultimately for life—in an increasingly global society. These factors are what will define a postsecondary system that serves the 21st century student—a responsive system that acts as an effective engine for the development of what is, I think, our most precious national asset: which is our human capital.
Here in Indiana I think we can pursue several strategies to get to the Big Goal.Let me focus briefly focus on two specific things that we can do that will have a big impact on our citizens and ultimately on the state of Indiana.
The first is to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of our system of higher education, with a very specific goal– and that goal is to increase the capacity to serve more students at a consistently high level of quality. Indiana is one of seven states currently participating in Lumina Foundation supported work dealing with expanding productivity in higher education. Indiana competed quite effectively among nearly 40 states that wanted to participate in this work.
As many of you know, the state has been working for several years to incorporate performance-based incentives into its higher education funding formula for public higher education. I think Commissioner Lubbers will be able to speak eloquently to that work. It's important from my perspective that we educate trustees and local chambers of commerce and legislators about performance based funding in order to sustain and expand that model.
Other promising strategies deserve more consideration. For example, there is growing interest in increasing student completion by rewarding course completion among the hardest to serve populations, providing so-called "bonus scholarships" to students who stay in school more than half time and who earn a good GPA. Louisiana has an initiative called "Opening Doors" which has showed great promise and is now being replicated in other states and may merit attention here.
In addition, I think Indiana would be well-served by creating or expanding lower-cost education options through alternative providers, including other types of accredited postsecondary institutions, there are many examples of this such as: the Western Governors University, Charter Oak State College which is based in Connecticut, and a variety of others.
The point is that there is not one type of college or university, not one path to the degrees and credentials we need to drive our economic and social development that's at stake.The important perspective to maintain is not where students learn, but ultimately what they learn, and what they should know, understand, and be able to do with a college degree or certificate that any type of institution awards.
Second, I think we need to speed up the time it takes to get a college degree. Governor Daniels, you have already proposed one useful way to do that, which is through an accelerated baccalaureate degree. I think this would not only save resources and help increase graduation rates, it also would have the important benefit of creating more capacity so that the institutions of higher education can indeed educate the increasing numbers of people we will need in order to get to that Big Goal.
We, at Lumina Foundation, advanced a similar idea a few months ago focused on accelerated associate degree programs. The idea is to build a system that treats the process of getting a postsecondary education like a job. Ivy Tech is already experimenting with one such way to do this that works with high school age students who don't really see themselves necessarily as college material.
We think this idea has even greater potential for unemployed and dislocated adults.Think about it: a major hurdle for these families who are under intense financial pressure is that many programs take too long to finish.Time is a major factor for many of these individuals—both adults and traditional age students—who are often forced to work in low-wage, low-skill jobs simply to make ends meet. This will only intensify the need, we think, for costly and additional education in the future.
So, one way to make a big step forward is to develop programs that operate on a fixed, block schedule, tightly structured into an integrated program. Many of you have heard about the examples from other states. One example is in Tennessee that has gotten some attention nationally where their certificate-granting Tennessee Tech Centers have had a very high rate of success—more than 75 percent of those who enroll in the Tennessee Tech Centers actually complete and get their credentials— so much success in Tennessee that the Governor and the Legislature have passed new legislation mandating the state's 14 community colleges apply these models to their programs at Community Colleges.
Now, in these models like Tennessee, students don't have to navigate a complex registration and course selection system. The programs are essentially cohort-based. Things like Math and English skill development is built into the curriculum and supplemented on a pullout basis as students work their way through the program—not in time-consuming, up-front remediation. Students need to commit to an intensive program of full-time, five-day a week instruction but it consolidates classroom time into five or six-hour days in order for them to do the other things they need to do in their lives. This offers the students a clear and predictable timetable and allows them to plan and balance their work and family life.
Think about how powerful the impact could be on the unemployed Hoosiers who need skills retooling in order to be able to compete effectively for the jobs that are already available TODAY that are not being filled due to skill shortages in critical fields like health care or technology and others.
And think about how much better positioned those people would be for the higher skilled, higher wage jobs that will be developed as our economy improves if they can for example get their associate's degree in a single year instead of the average time it takes which is often four to five years.
Now, nationally the need for a college degree is growing by virtually any measure and will continue to do so. The data on the benefits of a college education are linear in nature—that is, the more education you get, the better off you are.And that is true both for individuals in terms of things like higher salaries, better health, etc.—but it's also true for us collectively as the broader public such as higher voter participation rates, lower welfare program participation, etc.
These benefits particularly appear when you compare the differences between those with a high school degree or less and those with some type of postsecondary credential—especially associate's and bachelor's degrees. Now, clearly retooling our K-12 system is a vital and necessary part of our national education reform efforts. We won't get to any of this unless we fix those problems. Which is why they have appropriately have gotten so much attention and focus over the last few years, under the leadership of many of the people who are in this room.
But at the same time, it's no longer going to be sufficient to meet our economic and social needs. So we are going to have to hit that 60 percent goal as a target, both as a state and as a nation.
And ultimately I think if we do that, we'll see many important benefits.
We'll put the U.S. back into a position of global leadership. But more importantly, we'll extend the benefits of higher education to individuals for millions more Americans and we'll help address longstanding issues of social inequity that result from the challenges that we have today in terms of low degree attainment rates. Ultimately, this will improve society by generally boosting our civic and cultural well being in this country.
My challenge to all of us today is this: Let's make the Big Goal, Indiana's goal and let's work together—government, philanthropy, employers, and citizens at large—to make that happen. Thanks very much.
Board