Jamie P. Merisotis, President, Lumina Foundation
State of the Union address, 2012
On Tuesday, Jan. 24, President Barack Obama took note of the need to reduce the cost of higher education to assure that Americans continue to have access to the educational opportunities they need to succeed and contribute to the strengthening of our nation. As the President indicated, higher education is an economic imperative. Jobs that require skills and knowledge that can only be obtained through postsecondary education, including a growing number of advanced manufacturing jobs, are growing much faster than those that don’t.
The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that by 2018 more than 60% of American jobs will require some form of postsecondary education, including a growing number of jobs demanding skills and knowledge that can best be developed in community colleges. This trend toward increasing skills is worldwide, and many of our economic competitors are responding by increasing higher education attainment rates to levels well above ours. Lumina Foundation believes that 60% of Americans will need a high-quality postsecondary degree or credential by 2025 for the U.S. to remain economically competitive. Yet the current economic climate has made the growing cost of college a significant barrier for many Americans. The future of our economy depends on finding ways to make higher education accessible and affordable.
The only real way to increase the numbers of highly qualified college graduates to the levels we need is to redesign key components of our higher education system to make it more productive.
The nation must both reduce the cost of college and increase the number of students who succeed in postsecondary education. The only real way to increase the numbers of highly qualified college graduates to the levels we need is to redesign key components of our higher education system to make it more productive. As the President noted, there is much that can be done to lower costs while maintaining or improving quality. For example, Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative offers redesigned general education courses which can be completed much faster than traditional courses, with the same or better student performance. We are finding that more and more state and campus leaders are willing to confront the core assumptions of how higher education is structured, funded, and delivered. But we are on the cusp of a fundamental change—the shift away from a system based on time to one based on learning. In a knowledge-based economy, degrees and other credentials must represent real skills and knowledge, not the amount of time a student has spent sitting in a classroom. Degrees and credentials should also recognize skills and knowledge however or wherever they are obtained, including through workforce development programs and higher education. A new partnership including the public, private and social sectors is required to build a system of higher education capable of meeting the growing need for skills and knowledge to lead in the 21st century. We at Lumina are committed to enabling this critical shift to a learning-centered system. Our country’s future depends on it.
Related:
Would like to make two emendations to the statement: (1) drop “or credential” ’cause that can lead to us claiming some very dubious stuff than really can’t be evaluated with consistency; Canada includes certificates with its associate’s degrees and even OECD says Canadian data are thus “inflated”; (2) be explicit about the twin engines of Lumina’s program of shifting to a learner/learning-based system in the Degree Qualifications Profile and Tuning USA.
P.S. We could have a long discussion about Tony’s “60%,” particularly in an economy where the largest employer is Walmart, something emblematic of other realities.
It is urgent that we address the issues regarding college graduation rates and cost associated with higher education now before it gets too late.
I would like to comment on several issues that are important.
1. The institutions of higher education use a placement test (like Accuplacer) to place students in remedial math courses. However, the same institutions do not test these students by the same test after students have taken a college course. What is going on here?
2. During the past five-six years, we have been to eliminate the need of the remedial math courses for 70-95% students who had graduated from the D.C. public schools or Prince Georges County Public Schools in Maryland. These studies are documented on http://www.gatewayacademicprogram.org. A recent book “Math Remediation for the College Bound” can help eliminate the need of remedial math courses either during the summer eight weeks or during one semester.
3. A soon to be published book, titled, “Revolutionizing STEM Teaching: A Guide to Course Design and Delivery in Parallel” can reduce the time needed for graduation by one-third to one-half for many students in STEM disciplines. In colleges, professors waste too much time creating confusion rather than presenting the course content in a logical, clear, and intelligent manner.
4. One of the hidden culprits to all of this is the dependence of college professors on textbooks that are written in a deductive manner. Professors, therefore, have a tendency to use the most boring and failed deductive strategy in their teaching.
Your articulate response to President Obama’s address concerning higher education is so true. I sincerely believe we need to explore new paradigms and replace those strategies with ones that hold promise. To do nothing different places us all in jeopardy and further alienates a country and shrinks the middle class even further. Thank you. – John
Well said. The urgency to increase the time to degree and enhance the learning process is a national imperative. We must be careful to preserve access without sacrificing quality. At the City University of New York 74.4% of students attending community colleges need to enroll in one or more remedial courses. Furthermore, of the students who need no remediation, 42% graduate in six years while only 25% of those requiring at least 1 remedial course graduate. Therefore, one of the valves that must be attended to so as to increase graduation rates is remediation.
We are looking at segmenting the populations that require remediation. An experiment with Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (www.cuny.edu/ASAP) seems to indicate that this intervention can produce dramatic results. As of 9/10, 55% of students in this program graduated in three years. These students did not have remedial needs. Yet, when the program was offered to students with 1 or 2 remedial needs, the 2 year graduation rate jumped to 27.5% vs. 7.2% for the comparison group. We believe that the fall 2009 cohort will meet the three year graduation target of 50%.
So, if we provide an expanded ASAP type program to those students in the upper ranges of the remedial scale and an intensive CUNY Start (www.cuny.edu/academics/programs/notable/CATA/cti-cunystart.html) for those in the lower ranges, we may be able to increase the graduation rate of our community college students.
Lumina has been working with CUNY in a Latino Student Success Initiative and with other projects as well. You are making a difference!! Thank you