Jamie P. Merisotis, President/CEO, Lumina Foundation for Education
SHEEO Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, MN
Thank you, and good morning everyone. I’m pleased to be with you today. I want to thank my friend and colleague Paul Lingenfelter personally for the invitation. Paul, I’d also like to commend you and your SHEEO colleagues for the timing of this important event. I’ve always said there’s no better place for a meeting than Minneapolis … in July.
Of course, the real reason I’m so pleased to be here today has nothing to do with timing or geography. It’s really all about people. It’s important for me to be here—and for Lumina Foundation to be represented here—because of who you are and what you do. From our perspective, there is no single group that is more critical to our success as an organization than the people in this room. You are the key higher education leaders in your states. Because of that, we at Lumina see each one of you as a vital partner in our work—and that work has profound implications for the future of this nation.
As I think you are certainly aware by now, Lumina has focused all of its energy and resources on the achievement of one ambitious national goal: that by 2025, 60 percent of Americans will have high-quality college degrees or credentials. We’re convinced that this goal is both necessary and achievable, and so we’ve made it the driving force of all we do. We’ve organized all of our work around this goal. We’ve developed a detailed Strategic Plan to achieve it. And we’ve been working aggressively to spread the word about the Big Goal so other organizations and individuals will embrace it and work with us toward its achievement.
So far, I’m happy to say, our efforts seem to be paying off. I’ve been involved in higher education policy and research for more than two decades, and I can’t recall a time when so many people representing such a wide array of stakeholders were so focused on increasing college success.
Many of you in this room have developed similar statewide goals, or are in the process of doing so. President Obama has pledged to make the United States the best-educated nation in the world by 2020. Employers are stepping up to better define workforce needs and then working with institutions and systems to help shape programs and policies that meet those needs. And of course Governor Manchin has made increasing degree attainment the focus of his Chair’s Initiative at NGA.
A growing number of our peers in philanthropy—including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, Gates Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation, just to name a few—are making significant investments in efforts to improve college degree attainment. This is a welcome shift from just a few years ago, when many foundations were directing their resources away from higher education.
Though Lumina certainly can’t take the credit, it’s clear that we are right in the middle of a significant trend. And it’s a trend that should be very encouraging for everyone here today. Suddenly, it seems that higher education—specifically, the commitment to increase college success—is where the action is. Obviously, that is a very good thing for all of us who care about postsecondary education and see the enormous benefits that it can provide for individual Americans and for our society as a whole.
Still, there’s a down side to all of this that I want to recognize. After all, if Lumina is bold enough to take even a little credit for focusing attention on this issue, I want to make sure that we accept our share of the blame as well. So, I’m here this morning, in part, to acknowledge that we at Lumina have contributed to what is obviously becoming a growing affliction in this field. I’ve heard the ailment described in various ways. Some call it “initiative fatigue” or “policy-idea-of-the-month syndrome.” I’ve even heard the term “project-itis.”
Now, the cause of the affliction is obvious: Too many worthwhile efforts demanding the attention of too few well-intentioned people. Even in your specific area—state higher education policy—the options for meaningful involvement seem endless. Right now, Lumina and other organizations are pursuing multiple projects of national scope that feature a state policy component. Let’s just run down a brief list: There’s Achieving the Dream, the American Diploma Project, the Data Quality Campaign, Complete College America, the Developmental Education Initiative, the Delta Project, the KnowHow2GO campaign, Lumina’s Productivity grants … I could go on, but you get the idea.
Multiple agencies and organizations—including SHEEO itself—are being asked to do state-focused work, many of them with Lumina funding. Again, just a brief sampling: There’s the New America Foundation, Education Sector, the Brookings Institution, Education Trust, American Legislative Exchange Council, ECS, HCM, IHEP, NCHEMS, NGA, NCSL, and on and on … an unbroken string of acronyms from here to the horizon.
It’s not that these individual efforts aren’t worthwhile … or that these various organizations aren’t valued and effective. Quite the contrary. With a goal as big and challenging as ours, progress must be made in several directions at once, by as many committed partners as we can find, working in every possible area.
Still, we recognize that “project-itis” can be a serious problem for our partners, particularly for SHEEOs, who hold pivotal positions in their states. Many of you might be thinking that we’re asking you to go in too many directions at once or that we’re actually making work for you. Well, we recognize those concerns … and we want to address them.
One of our important aims right now is to pull all of these various strands of work together. And we have always known that the proper place to pull those strings is overwhelmingly at the state level. In this country, real and lasting progress in higher education usually doesn’t start at the federal level and trickle down. And if it bubbles up from the institutional or system level, it too often does not spread far enough to have the dramatic impact I think many of us feel is necessary. State by state; that’s the way to get things done in higher education. States are often in the best position to hit the proverbial sweet spot: where change is big enough to matter and small enough to work.
So we need to ask some critical questions. How do we put you—as state education leaders—in the driver’s seat? How do we engage each of you as a genuine partner in shaping the specific agenda that your state will follow as we work together toward the Big Goal?
While I’m in a self-diagnostic mood, let me make another admission. We don’t want you in the driver’s seat because we’re altruistic … not even because we feel guilty for afflicting you with “project-itis.” Frankly, we want you to drive because we’re pretty sure you know the way—and we know we can’t get there without you.
So let me speak for a few moments about how this might happen. To do that, I need to take at least some of you back to the document that has driven our work at Lumina for the past year and a half—our Strategic Plan. As those of you who have read it know, the Plan is really a blueprint for what needs to happen in the nation—supported through the work of Lumina and many, many others—in order to achieve that Big Goal of 60% by 2025. Simply put, we suggest that three critical outcomes must happen concurrently:
First, students must be prepared academically, financially and socially for success in education beyond high school.
Second, higher education success and completion rates must be improved significantly.
Third: postsecondary institutions and systems must become more productive so they can increase capacity and serve more students.
As you know, Lumina has major work underway in the states around each of these outcomes. This is all good and important work, and we will continue to support it. However, state policy isn’t always so neatly categorized. Governors, legislators, and, yes, SHEEOs don’t work on preparation on Monday, completion on Tuesday, and productivity on Wednesday. To really be effective, this work must come together in a comprehensive policy agenda for each state to increase attainment and reach the Big Goal.
How do we do this? How do we contribute to a reduction in initiative fatigue and help you deliver on these critical outcomes? For sure, we don’t have all the answers, but we have some ideas which we are beginning to implement.
First, for the foreseeable future, no more big, multi-year, multimillion dollar initiatives that require you to commit your time, energy, and resources to more hoop-jumping. We will of course continue to support the work we are doing, and have ambitious plans to expand our work at the state level. But not through additional initiatives. It’s time for a moratorium on that from Lumina’s perspective.
Second, it has become clear to us that sharing information across all the existing efforts is essential. I hope you have noticed that we are paying a lot of attention to how to pool information and streamline communication, and I think we are making progress. We increasingly see all of our major pieces of work—like KnowHow2Go, our productivity work, and our emerging work on quality and degree frameworks—as networks, and we have built networking tools into all of them. I hope you are using those tools—like the Knowledge Collaborative in our productivity work—or will take a look at them if you are not. I also ask you to give us your honest feedback about their utility and how we can improve them. And if they don’t work, we should jettison them in favor of other tools.
Likewise, as I hope you know, we have made a commitment to being an effective convener of diverse voices and key decisionmakers in public policy and higher education. We think this could serve as a valuable resource to states, and many others. The new convening center at our Indianapolis headquarters is nearly ready, and we believe the convenings we will hold there and elsewhere will greatly enhance how we frame issues, help in the early identification of promising approaches, and provide a space for the development of shared strategies that result in a commitment to action.
Significantly, we have brought Haley Glover on board as our Director of Convening Strategy. Haley, as many of you know, has worked in two different SHEEO agencies—most recently in Indiana—and is working to frame our convening strategy as a core element of our work.
We have also made the decision to strengthen our internal capacity to support effective state higher education policy by hiring Liz Gutierrez, formerly on the staff of Governor Bill Richardson and the New Mexico Department of Higher Education, as our Director of State Policy. Liz has a task few in philanthropy share; namely, to support collaboration in and across states at a policy level in order to assure that we truly endeavor to tie all of this work together. She will be working with Dewayne Matthews to refine our policy agenda and figure out how we can be most effective in our work with each of you and the organizations that work with states on higher education policy issues—including SHEEO. All are essential partners in this work.
Right now we are refining the approaches Liz and Dewayne will take to this critical work, and we would love to get your input about how Lumina can be most helpful. But we have a pretty good idea of what we need to do, and we’re well under way.
We also are refining Lumina’s policy agenda—which is a clear and transparent public statement of our policy objectives and priorities. Our intent is to be much more strategic in moving policy from the “good idea” stage to implementation. When we believe a policy approach has been proven—in other words, when the evidence and policy momentum is sufficient to move forward—we will take it public. For example, we believe the evidence is clear that the time it takes many students to complete both Associate and Bachelor’s degrees can be shortened through effective public policy. So we are supporting the implementation of accelerated degree programs as part of our policy agenda.
We also want to be more systematic in moving promising—but not yet proven—approaches forward. A good example of this is our work with many of you on approaches geared to returning adult students. We are convinced we can do a much better job meeting the need of the millions of potential students who have some college credit but not a degree, but we need to find out which approaches are the most effective. In short order, and with your help, we should have some answers.
Finally, we believe Lumina can play a unique role in framing the national and state discussions about higher education. I believe we have done that with the Big Goal of increasing attainment, and I think we use our unique position to frame issues in ways that make them more transparent to the public and policymakers, and that can lead to new solutions to our pressing needs.
We believe strongly that higher education must be far more focused on the needs of students and less on the needs of higher education institutions, but it’s important that we truly focus on today’s students—the ever-growing number of low-income, first-generation, minority and adult students who constitute what we are calling 21st century students, those who constitute the “real world” on campuses these days.
Today’s 21st century students run the gamut—racially, ethnically, and socially. And referring to them as 21st century students is more than just a semantic exercise. We must recognize them as essential to our future. We must help shift the dialogue from a deficit model to a growth model—one in which all of society sees these students as future leaders, as taxpayers, and as full contributors to the quality of life we all cherish.
Clearly, no one-size-fits-all system of higher education will work for these students. And it won’t serve us as a nation. To reach the Big Goal, America needs all types of students to succeed, and they must succeed in far greater numbers. That means we need a student-centered system—one that is flexible, accessible, accountable and committed to quality.
And that brings us to the need to explicitly address the quality of higher education. At Lumina, we believe it is time to move away from defining quality in higher education on the basis of inputs—things like resources, faculty workload, and institutional selectivity—and shift to defining quality in terms of student outcomes, specifically the quality and relevance of degrees and credentials.
There is no question that the global economy has raised the bar for today’s workforce. You’ve all heard the statistics: Labor economist Tony Carnevale at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce has estimated that by 2018, 63 percent of all jobs will require some form of postsecondary education or training. That’s a huge increase since the mid-’70s, when less than 30 percent of jobs required any education beyond high school. Carnevale’s analysis shows that in virtually every major job category, more postsecondary education is critical to job success.
By the way, if you haven’t seen the report, please make sure you do. It includes individual state profiles on the job market and educational needs which I think you will find extremely useful. These reports are also a good example of how we are trying to support the kind of work that you can use to improve higher education policy in your states.
Quality, then, is key. And for us, quality means learning. Lumina will be continuing to support the development of ways to assure that the learning that any college credential represents is explicit and transparent to all concerned. Faculty are essential to this discussion, as we’ve seen through our Tuning USA work, because they must agree on—and students must clearly understand—what skills and knowledge a graduate in a particular discipline should possess. Policymakers must be able to allocate resources based on those required outcomes, and employers must be able to hire graduates with confidence, knowing that students have attained those outcomes. To really shift higher education decision-making to focus on quality outcomes, we believe we need to explore alternatives to the credit-hour system, especially competency-based formats that involve assessment of prior learning. We also intend to support efforts to assess the wide array of certificate programs and their comparative value in the workplace.
For all of this to happen, at Lumina we will continue our efforts to frame the issue of productivity in higher education—in order to convince both policymakers and those who work in higher education systems that the rules of the game have changed, and that higher education must become more effective and efficient in serving students and the public.
We know the Big Goal presents an immense challenge, one that requires significant changes in the nation’s postsecondary system. “Business as usual” simply won’t work. For the goal to be reached, institutions—and yes, entire systems and states—must contain costs and reallocate their resources to programs that help more students succeed. They must be rewarded, not merely for enrolling students, but for graduating them from high-quality programs. They must expand and strengthen lower-cost, innovative options for delivering coursework. They also need high-quality data-systems that include student outcome data and that are used top to bottom to make day-to-day decisions about how to serve students more effectively. These priorities really are at the core of Governor Manchin’s Chair’s Initiative at NGA.
So that, in a nutshell, is the way we are framing the work that lies ahead, and that is represented in all of those projects, initiatives, and strategies that your partners in philanthropy have been supporting over the last couple of years. Stated even more plainly, it’s a who, what, how framework. Who we want to see educated by our higher education system are the 21st century students who form the backbone of our economy, our civic well-being, and our collective prosperity. What we want them to get is a quality higher education that is well-defined and transparent and is focused on the learning that a degree or credential represents. And how we want to get there is through a productive system of higher education that efficiently and effectively delivers higher education to those dramatically larger numbers of people who need it.
As higher education leaders in your states, you are well aware of the growing demands that you and your systems must meet. I hope I have made it clear today that Lumina is eager to help you explore ways to meet those demands.
In fact, we are more than eager. We are committed to that cause—despite the challenges it poses—because we know that higher education reform is critical to the success of every state. We also know—as you know—that those state-by-state successes can add up to tremendous nationwide progress.
We are convinced that we can achieve that progress if we work toward the Big Goal in a thoughtful, coordinated, collaborative way. We know that much of that work has to be done in your individual back yards; and frankly, that’s just the way we want it to work.
After all, that’s how the best neighborhoods are built … house by house, block by block, by conscientious and committed residents. The houses all look a bit different, of course, but everybody wants to live there. My Lumina colleagues and I look forward to being the best neighbors we possibly can to help each of your states succeed.
Thank you for your continuing partnership and support, and for the privilege of inviting me to be with you here today.
