Be Careful What You Wish For

Over the last two days two of my UTB colleagues and I attended a conference sponsored by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The goal was to bring folks together from colleges and universities around Texas to engage in a dialogue about where we stand in the goal of making higher education accessible to all students and what more we need to do to graduate more students from college.

 In the break out sessions, key notes, and discussions between bites of crumbling cookies and slurps of hot coffee, what struck me first is that Texas, like other states, has already spent copious time, dollars, and human capital to increase the numbers of students attending college. So, hordes of students have enrolled; here they are and ....whoops, there they go!  Nationally, fifty percent of students are dropping out.  College is not sticking.

 The graduation rate is not what we hoped for both in Texas and the U.S. We gotta work harder. Damn.

The determined conference goers and I all rolled up our sleeves ready to go at it; but where to start?! The desire tackle the problem is there; the strategy of how to dig us out of the hole is fuzzy at best.

 Here is my thought:

We have to stop ignoring the elephant in the classroom.

Many proposed solutions suggested colleges need to go into high schools and change what THEY are doing wrong because students, discounting Tier 1 universities with super high entrance requirements, are largely not college ready. That was a pretty popular discussion topic.

The next popular topic was that colleges are stretched thin to accommodate the large numbers of unprepared students who need much more support than students thirty years ago who were college ready, had a grasp on career goals, and were professional students with plenty of time for study and play.

OK!  Lets look at the logic here:

One.   Students are coming to us unprepared for the rigors of college so colleges need to invest staff, faculty and money to go into the high schools to change them.

Two.  Colleges are stretched thin with not enough staff, faculty and money to give students who are prepared the retain students from freshman to graduation.

Talk about circular logic.  I was getting dizzy.  I needed something solid to talk about - like an elephant.

One discussion group did go beyond the eternal circle and started talking about that damn elephant.  The motivation for students going to college is much different than why students went to college thirty years ago when a college education met the needs of a small group of demographically and culturally similar students in a narrowly targeted jobs like science and teaching as two examples.

A high school degree would be sufficient for a well paying job in industry, business or manufacturing.  Many of these jobs now require a four year degree.

What we need is industry to define skills, knowledge and together with colleges design a multi-tiered pathway to job markets.  This is not going to be difficult because those pathways are already created:  vocational schools, certificate programs and four year applied degrees.  These, unfortunately have small numbers of students and don't carry the prestige that they should to attract students.

After World War II, there was a huge push for high schools and colleges to offer vocational degrees.  Vocational schools all but disappeared in the late 1960.  The reason for fading away wasn't because we didn't need these trained workers, the jobs for these degrees are still around and need highly skilled and trained workers.  It was because of civil rights.  During the time of desegregation, districts knew that they had to not only provide equal educational opportunities, but desegregate schools.  A quick solution to this for those was to put minority children into vocational schools declaring them not college ready or college material.  This, of course, created a huge outcry from parents of minority children who saw regular high school was for white students and vocational classes and schools were for minority children.  The solution? Get rid of vocational schools. I think we took the wrong path here.

This elephant is that child who is not ready for the rigors of obtaining a four year academic college degree, not wanting to go to college or financially unable to go. Colleges don't have the resources to go into the high schools and help get students get college ready.  Higher education can only change themselves; they cannot change others.  

Perhaps we need to rethink our system of one size fits all.  We have a much more diverse population of students with different levels of commitment and aptitude towards earning an academic degree.  Some students are not financially ready and end up in debt.   The fifty percent of the students end up in worse financial shape with debt.and no degree.  That elephant means we have to start analyzing what we are doing and how we can best serve a diverse population of students.  We need to work more with industry, provide alternative paths to careers, and provide more certificate and life long learning programs to make it affordable and convenient for workers to come back to college as they need to retool, refresh, or are at a stage of their life to be college ready.