The Pope Center will hold its annual conference on higher education, “Building Excellence into American Higher Education, on Saturday, October 27, 2007, at the Hilton Raleigh-Durham Airport at Research Triangle Park.
The keynote speaker will be Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College and author of “Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.”
Responding to Governor Mike Easley’s plan to provide tuition-free college for two years, Shannon Blosser of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy said, “The legislature should view this program very cautiously. It could create an expensive entitlement for students that will put heavy burdens on taxpayers.”
“It seems to be more of an effort by the governor to leave an education legacy than a sound program for students and taxpayers,” said Blosser. “Most of the students who will benefit will be students who have already been planning to go to college – and preparing for it academically and financially.”
Governor Easley’s “EARN” initiative (Education Access Rewards North Carolina) would allocate $150 million over the next two fiscal years to cover scholarships in the University of North Carolina system. The scholarships, at $4,000 per year, would cover two years of college. They would dovetail into the existing Learn and Earn program, which allows high school students to attend a community college while still in high school and complete an associate’s degree in one year after high school at no charge.
In a recent Clarion Call, I lamented the fact that when higher education types get together to talk about the problem of affordability, they almost always conclude that the solution is to spend more government money to further subsidize college attendance. Very rarely do they consider ways of delivering education that will simply cost less.
At least one professor has given this some serious thought, however. Vance Fried, the Brattain Professor of Management at Oklahoma State University, has set forth a proposal that he believes will enable students to get “champagne education on a beer budget.” (You can read his proposal in full here.)
Professor Fried proposes what he calls the College of Entrepreneurial Leadership and Society (CELS) as a new model for undergraduate education that will give students more educational value for less money. His idea certainly caught my interest.
RALEIGH – Gov. Mike Easley on Thursday released his $20 billion budget recommendation to the General Assembly, which calls for a new $150 million scholarship grant as well as a special bond election for university projects.
The budget also increases spending on on-line education programs offered through the University of North Carolina and the North Carolina Community College System.
Easley presented his budget at a press conference in Raleigh. Officials from his administration will meet with legislators Tuesday morning to discuss further details of his budget proposal.
The Raleigh News and Observer has been quarrelling with a group based in Chapel Hill called the Citizens for Higher Education (CHE). CHE is the second-largest political action committee (PAC) in the state, measured by the amounts of money given to legislators. Its goal is to ”build political support for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state’s other research universities.” In other words, it lobbies the legislature to obtain special benefits for the state’s leading public campuses.
Although the recent “Emerging Issues” conference at North Carolina State University missed the boat on the big issues, there were a few bright spots that education leaders ought to know about.
While many speakers contended that American higher education is “underperforming” because some other countries graduate more people from college, a few recognized that our educational problems begin long before college. Chancellor Charlie Reed of the California State University system, for example, focused on the need to improve the quality of students entering higher education. Reed said that many students are not taking the right courses and are often unprepared for college when they arrive on campus. Others never get to college at all because they don’t get “on track.”
Part of the problem, Reed argued, is that many students, parents, and even teachers are unaware of what students need if they are to enter college. Especially among poorer families in California, students can kill their chances of going to college before they’re even in high school.
House committee assignments were handed out this week, completing the committee assignment process for the General Assembly. Senate committee assignments were announced last week.
Four committees (including subcommittees) will take up higher education issues during the 2007-08 legislative session in the state House. That also includes a committee charged with nominating members to the UNC Board of Governors.
In 2005, the selection process was
clouded in controversy when legislators failed to follow General Statutes that outline the nomination and voting procedures. General Statute 116-6, which lists the BOG election procedures, states “If a sufficient number of nominees who are legally qualified are submitted, then the slate of candidates shall list at least twice the number of candidates for the total seats open.” It also says that nominees are to be approved 30 days after legislative appointments are completed. Legislators followed neither provision in 2005, leaving some to vocally criticize the vote.
Ask a random stranger what “V-Day” is. You might get some interesting answers. Some will probably confuse it with VE-Day or VJ-Day, the days marking the end of World War II in Europe and Japan. Perhaps some will think it’s simply an abbreviation of Valentine’s Day. However, no incorrect guesses could possibly be as interesting, or as shocking, as the truth. V-Day stands for “Vagina Day” and takes place the same day as the more traditional Valentine’s Day.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of 17 universities in North Carolina hosting “The Vagina Monologues” on or around Valentine’s Day this year. Nationally, “Vagina Warriors” at over 1000 universities will participate in the unusual festivities.
RALEIGH – State Senators A.B. Swindell and Julia Boseman will be among the key legislators that will push higher education policy and funding through the North Carolina Senate during the 2007-08 legislative session.
Both were named to key leadership posts on committees that have oversight of higher education spending and policy in the state Senate. Committee assignments for state senators were announced Thursday. The state House has not made committee assignments.
Swindell and Boseman, both Democrats, will chair the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Education and Higher Education as well as the Senate Education/Higher Education Committee. Swindell is the senior chairman.
Republican Richard Stevens, of Wake County, will serve as the ranking Republican co-chairman on both committees.
Every year since 1986, the Institute for Emerging Issues has held a highly publicized conference devoted to some current policy issue. For 2007, the theme was “Transforming Higher Education: A Competitive Advantage for North Carolina.” Sadly, there was very little said about actually transforming higher education in the state over the two days of the event – that is, how it might be made a better and more valuable experience for students. Instead, the speakers were mostly fixated on the supposed need for North Carolina (and the United States as a whole) to put more students into and through college.
In other words, it was about quantity rather than quality. What needs to change, according to most of the speakers, is the number of young Americans entering and graduating from college, not the educational worth of the courses they take. This made for a rather monochromatic conference, rather like attending a concert where every piece was just a variation on the same theme.
The main theme was that America’s higher education system is “underperforming.” Whereas in the past the United States had the highest percentage of its workforce holding college degrees of any nation, today a number of countries now surpass the U.S. and more are catching up. Several speakers, including Governor Mike Easley, asserted that this situation poses a threat to our standard of living. Businessman Thomas Tierney stated that there is a “direct relationship between completion of higher education and economic growth,” and since the U.S. is losing its “lead” over other nations, our standard of living is in jeopardy.
