Virginia Tomorrow

The Virginia Business- Higher Education Council announced on Monday the formation of “Grow ByDegrees,” a bipartisan initiative that will campaign for “high impact investments and innovations in Virginia’s higher education system that will help secure Virginia’s economic future and create real jobs.”

In his remarks announcing the formation of the coalition, Heywood Fralin, the chair of the Business-Higher Education Council, the former Rector of UVA, and an individual with a deep and long-standing commitment to the good of the Commonwealth, said the “Grow By Degrees Coalition is a grassroots educational initiative, funded by the private sector, that will bring to the forefront in this election year- and over the next several years- the direct connection between educational degree attainment  and economic success in the knowledge based economy.”

Fralin goes on to suggest that higher education in Virginia is at a crossroads.

As I read his comments, the nature of the choice he sees is this:  Almost everyone recognizes that college and university training is more critical to personal and societal economic success than ever before. Yet Virginia, which has an enviable system of higher education, has systematically defunded its colleges and universities over the past decade.

Fralin puts it this way: “A dramatic decrease in state funding for public higher education during this decade has charted an entirely new course:- toward mediocrity.” (emphasis mine)

To reverse this course, the coalition is calling for a bipartisan commitment to award 70,000 additional degrees by 2020, concentrated in the high demand STEM areas and in areas where there are current shortages- health care and teaching.

At the same time, they want to make college more affordable, hold down costs, and increase educational innovation in Virginia higher education.

What are we to make of this?

First, the primary goal of developing a “smarter state,” where Virginia is known around the world for the percentage of its population that is college educated and for its superb institutions of higher education is very appealing.

Intuitively, it is the right priority for a knowledge economy.

It also sends a powerful message to companies considering locating in Virginia about the core values of the Commonwealth.

Second, it may also be a way of establishing a goal and an aspiration for higher education policy that the public can actually understand and embrace.

Making Virginia one of the smartest states in the country is an aim that is much clearer to the average person than some of our recent higher education aims.

Who has any idea of what achieving “Base Adequacy” means, or how “Deregulation” was going to impact their kids,  or what happens (or doesn’t happen) when a school fulfills (or doesn’t fulfill)  its “Performance Agreement” with the State Council? 

(I must say, however, that the name of the coalition “Grow By Degrees” barely improves upon ”Base Adequacy”  in catchiness and political sex appeal. The coalition should make a quick visit to the Martin Agency and have a conversation about branding. )

Third, the coalition is correct to observe that this will only occur if it is embraced in a bipartisan manner. Support for higher education is unlikely to be permanently enhanced if it is the province of single party.

Yet.

Altering higher ed’s priority rank in Virginia’s political landscape won’t be easy.

The Council’s own polling  indicates that public support is “broad but shallow.” 

Everyone believes in the importance of higher ed, but when it comes to allocating the next dollar of public money, other priorities, especially K-12 Education,  invariably rank far higher.

And this was even the case when we knew that there would be a ”next dollar” and where it was coming from.

Elected officials tend to be very well attuned to the priority list of the citizenry and have understood that public support for major new higher education funding has rarely been Number One. 

If I recall correctly. the Business-Higher Ed Council itself was formed in the mid-1990’s to resist budget cuts in higher education proposed by the Allen administration.

15 years later, the Council issues a call to action noting that colleges and universities have been systematically underfunded for a decade in which the Governor’s office has been held by two Democrats, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine.

It’s not that Governors and legislators haven’t cared about colleges and universities- it’s just been far easier politically to allocate new dollars to other priorities such as K-12 and let colleges and universities utilize tuition increases.

The matter of prioritizing and allocating dollars will only get more challenging for the next few years.

Moreover, the science, engineering and health care programs at the top of the Council’s list are presently far and away the most expensive majors at any college and university.  The per student cost of educating a history, literature or criminal justice major does not compare to the dollar investment in an engineering student.

So what’s the bottom line.

The Business-Higher Ed Council should be applauded for taking a major step toward developing a statewide goal for Virginia higher education that the public can understand and support. This is long overdue.

I believe that setting a measureable goal for what a Better Educated Virginia would look like could well obtain bipartisan support.

But implementing the goal will be another question altogether.

My sense is that it will require more funding (a difficult enough task), but even providing a better funding stream for our existing system won’t be enough to achieve the goal.

It will also require a much higher degree of innovation.

We’ll have to think about using our community colleges even more effectively.

We’ll have to be better in using technology to share resources and creating high quality on-line opportunities.

We’ll have to do a better job promoting collaboration across our public institutions and and between public and private colleges.

 And, hopefully, having a statewide goal to rally around may be the kind of incentive that will get smart Virginians coming up with innovations that we haven’t even thought about.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I have a personal interest in the matter- having just sent a manuscript that Gene Trani and I produced off to the publisher titled The Indispensable University that examines the expanded role of higher education in promoting economic development around the globe).