[Senate Hearing 109-134]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 109-134
ROUNDTABLE: HIGHER EDUCATION AND CORPORATE LEADERS: WORKING TOGETHER TO
STRENGTHEN AMERICA'S WORKFORCE
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HEARING
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION,
LABOR, AND PENSIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
ON
EXAMINING ISSUES RELATING TO HIGHER EDUCATION AND CORPORATE LEADERS,
FOCUSING ON DEFINING THE ROLES INDUSTRY AND INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER
EDUCATION WILL HAVE TO ENSURE THAT THE UNITED STATES HAS THE SKILLED
AND DIVERSE WORKFORCE IT WILL NEED TO SUCCEED TODAY AND IN THE FUTURE
__________
MAY 19, 2005
__________
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Pensions
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COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, AND PENSIONS
MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming, Chairman
JUDD GREGG, New Hampshire EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts
BILL FRIST, Tennessee CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut
LAMAR ALEXANDER, Tennessee TOM HARKIN, Iowa
RICHARD BURR, North Carolina BARBARA A. MIKULSKI, Maryland
JOHNNY ISAKSON, Georgia JAMES M. JEFFORDS (I), Vermont
MIKE DeWINE, Ohio JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico
JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada PATTY MURRAY, Washington
ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah JACK REED, Rhode Island
JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York
PAT ROBERTS, Kansas
Katherine Brunett McGuire, Staff Director
J. Michael Myers, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
__________
STATEMENTS
THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2005
Page
Enzi, Hon. Michael B., Chairman, Committee on Health, Education,
Labor, and Pensions, opening statement......................... 1
Kennedy, Hon. Edward M., a U.S. Senator from the State of
Massachusetts, opening statement............................... 3
Murray, Hon. Patty, a U.S. Senator from the State of Washington.. 4
Isakson, Hon. Johnny, a U.S. Senator from the State of Georgia,
opening statement.............................................. 5
Caldera, Louis, president, University of New Mexico.............. 7
Hoff, Edward, vice president, Learning for IBM................... 8
McGuire, Patricia, president, Trinity University................. 9
Mullen, James, president and ceo, Biogen......................... 10
Jackson, Edison O., president, Medgar Evers College.............. 11
Prepared statement........................................... 12
Sweeney, Patrick, president and ceo, Odin Technologies........... 18
Craves, Robert, founder, Costco Corporation, currently ceo and
president, Washington Education Foundation..................... 19
Prepared statement........................................... 20
Nolte, Walter, president, Casper College......................... 21
Reed, Charles, chancellor, California State University........... 22
Prepared statement........................................... 23
Palmer-Noone, Laura, president, University of Phoenix............ 26
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Statements, articles, publications, letters, etc.:
Sheeran, Rev. Michael, S.J., president, Regis University..... 37
(iii)
ROUNDTABLE: HIGHER EDUCATION AND CORPORATE LEADERS: WORKING TOGETHER TO
STRENGTHEN AMERICA'S WORKFORCE
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THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2005
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:05 a.m., in
room 106, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator Enzi
(chairman of the committee) presiding.
Present: Senators Enzi, Alexander, Isakson, Kennedy,
Murray, and Reed.
Opening Statement of Senator Enzi
The Chairman. Good morning and welcome to today's
roundtable discussion with higher education and corporate
leaders on how we can work together to strengthen America's
workforce. I want to thank today's participants for coming and
for their help in defining the roles industry and institutions
of higher education will need to ensure that America has the
skilled, diverse workforce that it will need to succeed in
today's marketplace and for many tomorrows to come.
Education beyond high school and lifelong education
opportunities are vital if we are going to retain our
competitive edge in the global market and make every American a
part of our Nation's success. To provide our workforce with
education and training they will need to meet the needs of
tomorrow's workplace, we will need to strengthen the
connections between postsecondary education institutions and
businesses. Technology, demographics, and diversity have
brought far-reaching changes to the U.S. economy and the
workplace, including an increase in demand for a well-educated
and highly-skilled workforce.
Why do we need to be concerned about ensuring our workers
have the right skills today and access to quality education and
job training to keep their skills current so our businesses
will remain competitive? Simply put, if we continue on the path
we are on, we will not have the people with the talent and the
skills they will need for the jobs that will be created over
the next few years. I say this because within the next 5 years,
it is predicted we will face a workers' gap of 7 million
workers. Two-thirds of that gap will be due to a shortage in
skilled workers.
Let me share a few facts that support the seriousness of
this skills gap. Approximately 60 percent of tomorrow's jobs
will require skills that only 20 percent of today's workers
possess. In this decade, 40 percent of the job growth will be
in jobs requiring a postsecondary education. Those jobs
requiring associate degrees will grow the fastest. Seventy-five
percent of today's workforce will need to be retrained to keep
their current job.
The skills gap promises to get worse unless Congress acts
now to provide the guidance and vision necessary to train a
generation of workers to fill those jobs of tomorrow. In this
global economy, the process of learning is never over and
school is never out. Technology will continue to demand that
everyone learn and gain the skills they need to remain
competitive in the workplace. If our students and workers are
to have the best chance to succeed in life and employers to
remain competitive, we must ensure that everyone has the
opportunity to achieve academically and obtain the skills they
need to succeed regardless of their background.
We must address the current shortage of well-educated and
highly-skilled workers through partnerships among businesses,
institutions of higher education, and the government, and we
must do so before the shortage becomes any worse. Improving
communication so universities will know what businesses need,
and then providing the necessary training and education to
address those needs will be critical if we are going to succeed
in retooling the workforce.
For many people, acquiring postsecondary education or
training is the key to their success. To prepare workers for
high-wage, high-skill, and high-demand occupations, we have to
support rigorous training and education programs that will lead
to degrees or industry-recognized credentials in employment. We
need to provide training and relevant job skills to small
business owners or operators to facilitate small business
development in high-growth industries. We need to expand or
create programs for distance, evening, weekend, modular, or
compressed training opportunities that will provide skilled
training in high-growth, high-demand industries.
We need to promote entrepreneurial skill and micro
enterprise training. We need to strengthen connections between
employers and postsecondary education and training, and we need
to provide the incentives for collaborative planning.
The Higher Education Act provides us with the opportunity
we need to encourage greater cooperation and collaboration
between business and postsecondary education. We must find ways
to encourage students from diverse backgrounds to pursue
education and training in high-demand fields.
Our focus will not only be on new students attending
college for the first time, but also on adult learners who will
be returning to college for additional training. Institutions
of higher education need to work with employers and their
employees, who must have access to continuing education and
training that is flexible and responsive to rapid changes in
the marketplace.
The task before us is not easy. There are many challenges
with serious consequences. I prefer to think of them as
opportunities. The decisions we will make about education and
workforce development will have a dramatic impact on the
economy and our society for a long time to come.
There is no monopoly on good ideas here in Washington, and
that is why I am looking forward to hearing from all of you. I
like the roundtable format. It gives us a lot more information
than we would otherwise be able to get.
We will be somewhat limited on time. I am told that we will
have to conclude by 11:30 a.m., under some of the Senate rules
today, so we will work toward that goal.
I will turn it over to Senator Kennedy.
Opening Statement of Senator Kennedy
Senator Kennedy. Thank you very much, Chairman Enzi. First
of all, I want to thank Chairman Enzi for the opportunity to
bring all of us together in this different format that is the
Enzi creation. Instead of having the traditional panels of
speakers this format permits an interaction which I think has
been remarkably successful when we considered some other
challenging issues, pensions, for example, and so I want to
thank him for giving us the opportunity to bring some really
extraordinary individuals and thoughtful leaders of our
community together and emphasizing the connection between
business and higher education. This is very, very important.
I want to say that this is, I think, one of the most
important hearings, certainly one of the most important issues
that we face. When we were facing the industrial revolution, we
developed the public school systems. That was actually in
Massachusetts.
After World War II, when so many of the young men and women
had given up 5, 7, 8 years of their lives to save their
country, President Roosevelt decided to create the GI bill. It
was enormously successful, and paid $7 into the Treasury for
every dollar invested in veterans' education.
We faced Sputnik and we reacted and responded with the
National Defense Education Act. Out of every dollar that was
expended, 5 cents of that dollar was expended in education, not
that money is everything, but it is a pretty clear indication
of a Nation's priority.
We are now down to a cent-and-a-half, and I thought it was
just really unfortunate in this last budget when the Senate
committed $5.5 billion in new money for education. It was
stripped in conference. That is the wrong priority. We have
some rather basic ideas in response to a number of the things
the chairman says, but we have to try and at least get it
straight, even as we are dealing with the current problems of
today.
Today, it is globalization. We are either going to be run
out of town or we are going to get on top of it, and to get on
top of it, it means we are going to have to invest in
education. We have now 300,000 Chinese engineers that are
graduating annually, 200,000 in India. We are graduating 50,000
engineers and half of them are from overseas. We have a
problem.
We have a problem, because access to higher education in
the United States is going down in terms of our college-age
population, and in every other industrial Nation of the world,
it is going up. What is it that other countries understand that
we don't? It is the importance of investing in education and
research and development.
When we see some of the cutting-edge companies that are
expanding and growing, not just outsourcing jobs to India, but
putting some of their research centers into India, we know that
we have some very serious problems.
We need to make this investment for a number of reasons.
One, in order to remain the commercial leader of the free
world. Two, so we have a national security that is second to
none. And three, to have educated men and women that are going
to be able to lead our democratic systems.
John Adams, one of my great heroes, wrote in the
Massachusetts Constitution, in 1780, 8 years before the Federal
Constitution, the education of our citizens is necessary for
the preservation of their rights and liberties. Every single
State Constitution has a reference to the importance of
education. Yet we are not hearing it here in the U.S. Congress.
The American people, I think, are well ahead of us. We have got
some enormously talented people who understand this.
I want to thank my friend Jim Mullen from Massachusetts,
the president of Biogen, who has been very much involved in
caring about this issue. We are very, very grateful. I am to
all of the people that are here. And Ted Hoff, who I have known
for years, this has been an area in which he has been
enormously energetic and he has been an important leader, as
well. I thank all of those, one way or another, who I have had
a chance to meet and work with in different ways.
I thank the chairman and I thank our colleagues who are
joining us in our committee this morning. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Senator Murray, did you have some comments you would like
to make?
Opening Statement of Senator Murray
Senator Murray. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I really
appreciate the opportunity to be at this hearing and thank you
and Senator Kennedy for having this hearing and to all of our
participants for coming today to talk about what is a
critically important topic, as both our chair and ranking
member have discussed already.
I particularly want to welcome from my home State Bob
Craves, who is here with us today, and thank him for traveling
across the country to be here. When I heard we were having this
hearing, I couldn't think of a better person to be here to talk
to us about how we can make college more accessible and
affordable for low-income students. Bob was a founder of Costco
and served there for a long time as senior vice president. He
has a tremendous education background and served on the
Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board and was
co-chair of the 2020 Commission on the Future of Postsecondary
Education.
But I think what is most important is his contribution in
co-founding a group called the Washington Education Foundation,
which brings together community leaders in my State to help
thousands of students who are left behind, who aren't
adequately served or don't have any kind of support to give
them college education. And through his foundation, he has
raised more than $150 million and provided 2,500 scholarships
as well as providing college mentors for students. He has made
a real difference in the lives of many students who would have
been left behind, and it is through his business experience and
his community pride that he has really contributed in our State
and I think he will be an excellent voice here. Bob, thank you
so much for all you do and for being here as part of this
discussion.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Isakson, any opening statement?
Opening Statement of Senator Isakson
Senator Isakson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will just take
a minute. I was looking at the panelists. I am delighted to
welcome Dr. Palmer. I just had the pleasure of speaking to
Phoenix's commencement in Atlanta and got to see first-hand the
reach that they are making. IBM's presence in Georgia with a
lady by the name of Ann Cramer, who I think is probably
familiar to our IBM people, has done a tremendous job in
helping public education and access to education in our State.
The one comment I would make is my perception is that too
many of us in policy think of students and education in the
sense of when we went to school and who we were, and what we
called nontraditional students when I went to school in the
1960s is more the traditional student of today. I think we have
to make sure that education is accessible in that way, both at
the traditional State institutions, as well as the privately-
operated schools, as well as all those schools that deal with
specificity of trades or specialties.
I am delighted to be a part of the panel today and
appreciate the chairman putting together this type of format.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
I appreciate all of you being here. Today's discussion, as
Senator Kennedy mentioned, will proceed in a little different
manner than a typical Senate hearing. We want a little bit more
interaction. The purpose of the roundtable is to hear from the
participants on a variety of viewpoints, how institutions of
higher education and business can work together to strengthen
the workforce.
We have requested that the participants not make an
official oral opening statement. However, the hearing record
will remain open for 10 days so if participants wish to submit
statements, a prepared statement that they may already have or
one that they may want to prepare after hearing the discussion,
any expanded comments that you might have, the record will be
open for 10 days so that the supplemental statements or opening
statements can be made a part of the record of today's
roundtable.
Before we begin, I would like to discuss a couple of
guidelines of a roundtable. If any of you would like to answer
a question that is being asked by us or would like to respond
to a comment made by one of your colleagues, kindly stand your
name tag on end and we will keep track of the order in which
those come up and call on you in that order.
In order to keep the dialogue moving, we do request that
your responses be 2 minutes or less. There is a lot of ground
to cover. We may vary the format occasionally to fit the
discussion.
I would like to introduce our distinguished panel of
participants who represent a wide variety of institutions and
businesses. We are extremely fortunate today to have a
distinguished and formidable panel of peers. Each one of our
participants is an expert in the respective area.
Our participants today are Mr. Louis Caldera, the president
of the University of New Mexico; Mr. Robert Craves, the founder
of Costco Wholesale Corporation and currently the ceo and
president of the Washington Education Foundation; Mr. Edward
Hoff, the vice president for Learning of IBM; Dr. Edison
Jackson, the president of Medgar Evers College; Mr. James
Mullen, the president and ceo of Biogen; Dr. Laura Palmer-
Noone, the president of the University of Phoenix; Dr. Walter
Nolte, the president of Casper College.
I would like to take a moment to do a special welcome for
Dr. Nolte, who is the president of Casper College of Casper,
WY, a city that dominates the center of the State. It varies
between being the largest city in Wyoming and the second-
largest city in Wyoming, with a population around 52,000
people. But it is right at the heart and it is a college that
has a little different role than some of the other community
colleges because it also provides some 4-year degrees. I would
like to welcome you and thank you for being with us today. I
know what the journey entails.
We have Dr. Charles Reed, who is the Chancellor of the
California State University; and Mr. Patrick Sweeney, who is
the president and ceo of Odin Technologies. Reverend Michael
Sheeran, the president of Regis University would like to have
been here, but he is under the weather and sends his regrets.
In light of his illness, Ms. Patricia McGuire, the president of
Trinity University, will be participating in this panel.
I do want to extend a special welcome to Sally Stroup, who
is the Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education in the
Department of Education. She is with us today and we feel very
fortunate to have a representative from the Department of
Education of your caliber here listening. It is really a help
when the administration shows up to absorb along with us so
that they understand the direction we are going as we develop
legislation based on what we have heard at these meetings. So
thank you for being here today.
To each and every one of you, welcome. Thank you for taking
time out of your busy schedules to be with us today. I know
many of you have traveled great distances to be here. Since we
do have a little bit of a deadline to meet, I will start with
the first question.
The topic, of course, is how to form partnerships between
businesses, institutions, and the government to ensure that the
American workforce has the skills needed to remain globally
competitive. Questions we asked you to consider are, what are
the respective roles of each partner, and what can be done to
facilitate communication and coordination between the partners?
Does anybody want to lead off? Mr. Caldera.
STATEMENT OF LOUIS CALDERA, PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO
Mr. Caldera. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We deeply appreciate
your holding this hearing and inviting us to participate.
Clearly, the partnership structure is absolutely the right
way to go. We could not do our jobs as research universities
without Federal support for research and for education.
Corporate America can't be walled off from what happens in our
schools, colleges, or universities, waiting to see if the end
product is something that works. They have got to be active
participants in that process. And universities have to be
innovative and change so that we are not just doing what worked
in the past, but doing what is going to be important to prepare
the right kind of workforce and the right kind of research and
scientific breakthroughs for the future.
That this is the right strategy is clearly underscored by
what is happening in other countries and the level of
investment that is occurring in the European Union, in China,
in Singapore, and in India, and to travel to those places and
to look and to see the level of involvement by businesses in
support of those universities from the educational programs to
the construction of research facilities and laboratories to
research partnerships that lead to commercialization is to see
people pursuing exactly a strategy of closer cooperation
between the three.
Just two points I would like to make very quickly. One is
one of the things that we have found has worked the best is
when we have education that involves students and corporate
America coming together. So, for example, we have the
manufacturing, technology, and training center that was funded
in part through EDA funding, Department of Commerce EDA
funding, in part through State funding, where it is involved in
both undergraduate and graduate education, because students are
very active participants in the clean room that is comprised by
this manufacturing, technology, and training center, and small
businesses and start-ups are able to use it with the support of
Intel and folks, semiconductors and others, we have a
laboratory where students aren't just learning but start-ups
are being able to, at much lower costs to themselves,
manufacture products that they are using as the basis for
creating new companies and a very different kind of knowledge-
based economy in New Mexico. That kind of hands-on involvement
in real world applications, not just in theoretical classroom
discussions, I think is critically important.
I think one of the challenges is how do we get business
engaged with more institutions across the spectrum of higher
education in our country. I happen to lead a Hispanic-serving
institution that is the most diverse public flagship university
in the country, 44 percent minority enrollment. Yet I know that
many of the kinds of employers who should be coming to or
involved with an institution like mine aren't.
And I will tell a story that I thought about on the way
over here. I have served and serve on several corporate boards,
Fortune 500, and Fortune 1,000 companies. I have never met a
minority accountant on any engagement on any of those boards,
ever. And I have asked those--and as we have done our rehiring
of the corporate board, I have asked them and they assure me
that there are minority partners and minority accountants at
the firms. So then I would ask them, where do you recruit? All
of the schools that they named as the schools where they
recruit are schools that have very, very low minority
enrollment. They are not recruiting and are not engaged with
institutions like mine, that have superb accounting programs--
every single one of our graduates was placed last year.
So that engagement has to be broader than with just those
handful of institutions that have been, for whatever reason,
that is where we go to get the top graduates. There are top
graduates at State universities and at very diverse
universities that also have the potential to make tremendous
contributions to our country. So that engagement has to be
broader than with just the very top of our elite research
universities.
The Chairman. Thank you. I would ask people to keep their
comments short because we are going to have a lot of people
that will want to contribute and, in some cases, counter things
that were said or add to them.
Thank you.
Mr. Hoff.
STATEMENT OF EDWARD HOFF, VICE PRESIDENT, LEARNING FOR IBM
Mr. Hoff. I just want to convey a point of view from IBM
about the partnership that exists between the business and the
universities that we have today, but what might be a role of
government to foster that, as well.
We are seeing in IBM that what we need to deliver value to
our clients is people who, yes, know technology--we are a
technology-based company--but people who also know business and
understand the services and the processes that are embedded in
businesses and people who have some leadership skills to be
able to bring people together across different dimensions.
So as a company, we are trying today to work with
universities to establish a curricula that is more
interdisciplinary and actually change some of the degrees that
the universities are providing. We are calling it a services-
sciences curricula and degrees.
Now, in IBM, we did this 40 years ago when we essentially
created the commercialization of IT and all the processes
underneath this. We worked with a number of universities to
establish the curricula and the degrees around information
technology. We have concluded that, as a firm and as a society
in the United States, we need to do that again. So we are
working with all the universities that are primary partners
with us, and that is working fine. It is working very well.
But my perspective is that there is a role of government in
here. If you go back to some of the statements that were made
earlier, there was a point of view that the government took in
the late 1950s, early 1960s about what was going to be needed
for the United States to be able to respond and around that,
there was an investment that was made, the National Sciences
Foundation and so forth, that essentially pulled both
universities and businesses toward this point of view about how
we needed to develop people.
So one thought that I might convey is that the government
could play a role if it has a point of view about where the
future is headed and about what kind of skills are needed and
what kind of investment is going to be made. And it is part
about money, and people do follow the money. But it is also
about the statement about where we are headed as a world and
what we need to do to compete.
I will just say very quickly, when we work with China and
India, the governments and the universities are very tightly
combined with us as a three-part partnership--us, the
universities, and the government around what kind of people are
needed and how we are going to develop them. My own perspective
is that that is the--the part of that three-part partnership
that may need to be strengthened here is the government part of
it. We know what universities we work with. We are going to
work with them to try to create this services-sciences. But
there may be a need right now because of globalization for the
government to take the kind of role it had taken before in our
history.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Ms. McGuire.
STATEMENT OF PATRICIA McGUIRE, PRESIDENT, TRINITY UNIVERSITY
Ms. McGuire. Thank you, Senator Enzi, and thank you for
convening this important meeting today.
I think the story of Trinity in Washington is illustrative
of how concern for workforce education has worked with the
business community and with government to transform
institutions, as well, and I hope our story can help inspire
continuing transformation. We are one of the Nation's historic
catholic women's colleges that today serves a remarkably
different population than we did when I attended Trinity and
when our distinguished alum Nancy Pelosi attended Trinity in
the early 1960s.
Today, Trinity serves a highly diverse population that is
85 percent African American and Latina. Ninety-five percent are
low-income, and 75 percent are over the age of 25. Our median
family income today is about $35,000 a year, which is
remarkably different from the public institutions in our
region, which have significantly higher median family incomes.
And we are able to serve the several thousand students we serve
largely as a result of the very generous Federal financial aid
programs, which we applaud and are grateful for and our
students are grateful for.
As we considered how to create a new institution for the
21st century, we turned to our business community, and I, like
all of the university presidents here in the District of
Columbia and the Washington region, serve as a board member of
the Greater Washington Board of Trade. Through our work with
the Board of Trade, we have all been deeply involved with
workforce development issues in the Washington region, and that
is a key component of the model.
Directly as a result of that work, we began to change our
curriculum at Trinity in order to be responsive in a more
direct way to the changing workforce needs of this region and
we received considerable support from our business community as
a result. One of the partnerships that we formed was with Time-
Warner, America-on-Line, and thanks to their support and also
the support of the U.S. Department of Education through the PT3
program, Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers for Today's Technology,
we were able to revamp the way in which we use technology in
our classrooms to train teachers, and as a byproduct, to train
all of the new professionals that are coming out of our
programs.
In a similar way, the Department of Labor had a Workforce
Investment Program for information technology, and with another
grant through the Department of Labor, the local Workforce
Investment Council in DC., and a coalition of corporate
partners, such as Marriott, Deloitte Touche, and others, we
created another program that focused on workforce development
for individuals who were not yet in college and needed a
pipeline to come into college in order to be able to acquire
the information technology, the skills they needed to be
successful, including targeting workers such as custodians who
worked in the hospitality industry who wanted to move up into
front-line positions, working desks, and so forth.
We are now working on another kind of partnership for the
health care industry. Just this morning--I am on the board of
the Washington Hospital Center--I told them I had to leave the
meeting to come here, and I told them why and they said, please
go because workforce development for the health care industry
is one of the great critical needs. We are partnering with
MedStar and Kaiser Permanente to build out our health
professions programs, nursing and allied health, as well. And
as a result of that, another piece of what we are doing is, for
the first time ever, moving across the river to a new location
in Southeast Washington in Ward 8 to open higher education
program specifically targeting health professions in the
Southeast Washington neighborhoods that are critically
underserved by higher education.
These are just some examples of how partnerships with
business in the critical workforce areas have helped to change
our curriculum. Our faculty has been very open to it. And all
of this has been made possible, as well, thanks to leadership
and initiative by the Department of Education and also most
critically by the kind of support our students receive through
the Pell grants as well as the Federal loan programs.
We serve a population here in the District of Columbia that
is critically low-income. Some of the poorest of the poor are
actually enrolled at Trinity, a private institution. We provide
a significant amount of tuition discount. We are not well
endowed. Our endowment is only $10 million, so it is not like
we have a lot to give. But we discount our tuition heavily and
we leverage the aid significantly to help our students become
successful and they really are.
So that is just some models for you to consider.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Mr. Mullen.
STATEMENT OF JAMES MULLEN, PRESIDENT AND CEO, BIOGEN
Mr. Mullen. Thank you, Senator. I wanted to focus on,
without going back over territory that has already been
covered, and I wanted to pick up on one of your opening
statements, which is this numbers gap and that is quite
concerning.
I represent not only a health care company, but a health
care industry, I think, in saying this, and we have focused on
the front end of the pipeline as well as the back end of the
pipeline, which is how you excite kids when they are in
elementary school, in middle school, in high school, and I
think there are some creative ways to do that. A simple
government approach there was a conversation with the mayor and
I said, we will open up our labs if you will open up your
schools. We have constructed labs and we have now put about 90
percent of the 8th graders in the City of Cambridge through
courses in our own laboratories. The goal, just to excite a few
of these kids, and then second, also to make sure we are
exciting all the kids.
So it was, traditionally, you see a lot of, as you go
through the graduate programs and what not, get into secondary
education, you see plenty of Northern European descent, plenty
of Asian, but we are not seeing the black community and we are
not seeing the Latino community and we are able to get more of
that going.
Second, we have had great success with some help from
government funding on really setting up and enabling
partnerships between the industry and the community colleges or
the universities for workforce retraining. So where we see a
shift in the industry base to really put together programs that
are going to be appropriate for a broader range of people, to
retrain them and move them from one industry to another. We
have had great success with that in North Carolina as they have
moved from software and other high technologies to
biotechnology manufacturing.
The last point I would make is to make sure we keep our eye
on the NIH and the NSF funding. That is the funding source that
really drives the graduate-level programs in higher education,
in science, engineering, and math. We have got to do everything
we can to keep that going. That is a foundation of basic
science that is important to competitiveness, but it also is
the money that enables these students to go on and get Ph.D.s,
M.D.s, and advanced degrees.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Jackson.
STATEMENT OF EDISON O. JACKSON, PRESIDENT, MEDGAR EVERS COLLEGE
Mr. Jackson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to come
at the question a little differently. When you spoke about, in
your opening statement, about diversity, increasing diversity,
one of the challenges that we have in this Nation and we need
to acknowledge, that there is increasingly a disinvestment in
higher education in the education. We have got two issues. We
have a short-term--we need to have a short-term solution as
well as a long-term solution.
I represent Medgar Evers College and the City University of
New York, 5,346 students, most of whom are of African descent,
and I also speak on behalf of the NAFIO institutions. What I
would like to challenge the business community is to begin to
look at those wonderful institutions for potential employees.
They are highly competent and capable, but we don't often look
to them but we look to the same institutions over and over
again, and yet we have this huge potential of fantastic
graduates who could do great work.
I want to talk about what is happening in our country, and
particularly in minority communities. We are pricing higher
education out of the reach of the most needy in our society and
something has to be done about this. Otherwise, we will
relegate that segment of our society, the margin of society,
and the social costs associated with that sector will be
enormous, and it is increasing.
If you look at the graduation rates of minorities in this
country, and particularly urban areas, instead of increasing,
particularly males, black and Hispanic males, the graduation
rate is not going up, it is going down. We know how to fix the
problem. The question is, for me, do we have the will to do it?
And that is the challenge for us in higher education. That is
the challenge for us in government. That is the challenge for
us in terms of industry.
We have to think about how do we change the paradigm. How
do we change the paradigm to increase not only access, but also
equity of success in higher education and the K-12 system.
So as we talk about models for business, government, and
higher education, we need to think about how we increase the
pipeline, those coming through the pipeline, and I want to
share with you for a moment, in the historically black
colleges, we have an agenda gap. Over 60 percent of the
students enrolled in higher education in our institutions are
female. At Medgar Evers College, I created a Male Empowerment
Center because I want to change the paradigm. Last fall, I
increased the male enrollment at Medgar Evers College by 23
percent, and what we were able to do was to go out into the
various communities and provide opportunities in education and
information and showing people that education does matter and
it can make a difference.
So we need to begin to, as we talk about how we create
greater models and collaboration, we need to talk about how we
increase those who are disengaged in our society, who want to
succeed but have not provided the opportunity or the
encouragement or the mentoring and/or the information to get
there.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Jackson follows:]
Prepared Statement of Edison O. Jackson
Good morning Chairman Enzi, Ranking Member Kennedy, Senator
Clinton, the Senator of the great State of New York, other members of
the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee here
assembled, I thank you for affording me the opportunity to participate
in this important discussion about strengthening the relationship
between the Federal Government, industry, and higher education
institutions to prepare a diverse cohort of well-trained professionals
for tomorrow's labor force.
I am pleased to appear before you this morning in my capacity of
president of Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York.
The foundation of Medgar Evers College was unlike that of any other
college within the City University system. The community, in a
collaborative effort that included the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration
Corporation, the NAACP, the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council,
local elected officials, and Central Brooklyn residents, formed the
Coalition on Educational Needs and Services that successfully lobbied
to establish the college to serve the educational, social, and economic
needs of Central Brooklyn. When in 1971 the college opened its doors to
its first class of 1,069 students, it was in the spirit of Medgar Wiley
Evers, of James Meredith, of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all who
believed in the transformative powers of education and the absolute
right to equality.
On July 30, 1970, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller approved the
``establishment of an experimental 4-year college of professional
studies offering both career and transfer associate degrees and the
baccalaureate degree, to be located in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of
Brooklyn.''
Densely populated and ethnically diverse, Central Brooklyn is
characterized as a primarily low-income, minority area, with low
educational attainment rates, high unemployment, and faces many of the
other urban challenges associated with economically depressed, inner
city areas. Central Brooklyn is as well, home to the largest Caribbean
population outside of the Caribbean.
Named Medgar Evers College in memory of the courageous African
American civil rights leader killed in his native Mississippi in June
1963, the college opened its doors to its first class of students in
1971. Integral to the mission of Medgar Evers College is the belief
that education has the power to positively transform the lives of
individuals and is the right of all individuals in the pursuit of self-
actualization. Consequently, the college offers programs both at the
baccalaureate and at the associate degree levels, giving close
attention to the articulation between the 2-year and the 4-year
programs.
To date, the college has graduated approximately 10,000 students.
Just over a thousand are expected to graduate at our May 2005
Commencement, of which approximately 600 are Baccalaureate degree
recipients.
I am also pleased to be here today as a member of the National
Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, NAFEO, the
membership professional association of the presidents and chancellors
of the Nation's 105 historically black colleges and universities, and
the emerging predominately black colleges and universities: public and
private, 2-year and 4-year, urban, rural, and land-grant, located in 25
States, the District of Columbia, Virgin Islands, and Brazil. NAFEO
president, Lezli Baskerville, is accompanying me here this morning.
As many of you are aware, but others are not, NAFEO was founded 35
years ago as the umbrella association of all of the Nation's
historically and predominately black colleges and universities. Its
mission is to champion the interests of HBCUs and PBCUs with the
executive, legislative, regulatory, and judicial branches of Federal
and State Government, and with corporations, foundations, associations,
and non-governmental organizations; to provide services to NAFEO
members; build the capacity of HBCUs, PBCUs, their executives,
administrators, faculty, staff, and students; and serve as a voice for
blacks in higher education.
Today, the world into which HBCUs and PBCUs are sending students is
much different than it was 35 years ago when NAFEO was founded, or 40
years ago when HEA was initially passed. The institutions in which our
students are enrolling are different and are evolving still to meet the
changing characteristics of today's students, today's civic, social,
political, ecumenical and labor force needs. These evolutionary
occurrences are the driving forces behind the particular need for a
strong industry/MSI partnership today. I cite just a few of the
contextual predicates for this discussion from the vantage of HBCUs and
PBCUs.
In the 40 years since the Higher Education Act was passed, the
Nation has become more colored, more culturally diverse, more global,
more technological, and more virtual. The cost of higher education has
escalated to keep pace with the growing scientific, security, and
technological demands of the day: demands for information now,
information on-the-go, and to expand the reach of the information we
have and information we need beyond the boarders of campuses, counties,
States, regions, and nations.
Yesterday's non-traditional students are the traditional students
of today and tomorrow. Today students older than 24 years or enrolled
on a part-time basis are the majority of all students. An estimated 55
percent of students fall into these categories.
Today, most new jobs require a postsecondary education. To meet
these employment needs will require training a more diverse and
technologically sophisticated workforce. The projected labor market
needs and demographic shifts into 2014 dictate a re-examination of who
will receive and who must be able to access and achieve a postsecondary
education. The number of high school graduates is growing and is
becomingly increasingly diverse. By 2007-08, 43 percent of graduating
seniors will be racial and ethnic minorities. By 2014 roughly 50
percent of the students ``Knocking at the College Door'' will be
traditionally underrepresented minorities, according to a December 2003
report of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education
(WICHE) in partnership with the College Board and ACT.
Not only is the racial and ethnic distribution shifting, but the
gender distribution is shifting as well. Today in excess of 55 percent
of college students are women, up from 45 percent in 1976. An alarming
nearly 70 percent of students on many HBCU campuses are female on
average, in part because of a tragic trend documented in a report by
the Schott Foundation, that shows that nearly 60 percent of African
American males are not graduating with their high school cohort for a
number of well documented psycho-socio-economic reasons.
The South, where most HBCUs are located, will experience the
greatest growth in high school enrollment, with nearly 751,700 more
students expected in 2007-08 than in 2001-02 or a 5 percent growth
rate. It will also experience the greatest gender gap with fewer than
50 percent of African American males graduating with their cohort in
all Southern States except Virginia, where according to Public
Education and Black Male Students: A State Report Card, prepared by the
Schott Foundation, 55 percent of African American males will graduate
with their cohort, as compared with 73 percent of White males. This
reflects a 17 percent achievement gap.
The Northeast is projected to see a decline in public school
enrollment between 2007 and 2008, with an estimated numerical loss of
207,700--a 2 percent decline. This reflects the largest projected
decline in high school enrollment of any region in the Nation. By 2018,
it is projected that the Northeast will experience a slight enrollment
increase; with 700 more graduates in the class of 2018 than in the
class of 2014.
It is projected that the high school graduates of all regions will
become increasingly diverse. As college-eligible students become
increasingly diverse and increasingly non-traditional, there is
evidence that 25 percent of high-ability, low-income high school
graduates are locked out of college despite 30 years of systematic
investment in student aid; and despite the best efforts of this and
past administrations. These high-ability, low-income students are
locked out of college because they have unmet financial need--$3,700
per year, on average. (Access Denied, Restoring the Nation's Commitment
to Equal Educational Opportunity. A Report of the Advisory Committee on
Student Financial Assistance, 2001).
High ability, low-income students are also increasingly locked out
of college because State flagship universities, that have a legal
responsibility by Federal mandate to be ``the peoples' universities''
are doing a poor job of enrolling and graduating African American
students, Hispanic students, and American Indian students. According to
a recently released report by Thomas G. Mortenson, the Senior Scholar
at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education,
at this time when State public higher education institutions should be
doing more to enroll and graduate traditionally underrepresented
populations, because of their growing numbers in the population, most
of our flagship universities are doing a grossly inadequate job of
enrolling African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians.
Despite some recent progress, among the universities that Dr.
Mortenson found to be least engaged in enrolling underrepresented
minorities present in higher education in their States, and most
segregated are: the University of Georgia, University of Mississippi at
Oxford, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, University of
Tennessee, Knoxville, University of Delaware, University of Texas,
Austin, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. These are all States with
HBCUs. The Mortenson report goes further to conclude,
``As these State flagship universities disengage from the
demographic changes occurring in their States, they diminish their
justification for further State financial support for their operations.
As flagships increasingly focus on the affluent shrinking majority
populations in their States, then State political leaders should
reallocate State higher education investment resources toward those
institutions and programs that are serving these growing populations on
which the State futures depend.
``To maximize social welfare and diminish the many divisions that
fracture our Nation, Federal resources devoted to broadening higher
education should also be reallocated. Institutions that are disengaged
from serving the growing demographic groups on which our country's
future depends should be suspended from further title IV student
financial aid program eligibility. Institutions that are disengaged
should be placed on probation and challenged to engage or face
suspension. And those institutions that are reaching out to these
growing demographic groups should be strongly supported for the
important work they are doing.
``Moreover, many of these same State flagship universities that are
turning away from addressing demographic opportunities have accumulated
significant endowments (profits) that remain tax free: UT system
($8.7B), Univ. of VA ($1.8B), Ohio State U ($1.2B) UNC CH ($1.1B) Penn
State U ($.900M), University of Illinois ($900M), University of
Delaware ($900M).
``These public universities have accumulated huge profits but most
appear unable or unwilling to enroll their State shares of
underrepresented minority populations. They do not lack resources--they
lack will.''
The Mortenson Report has public policy implications worthy of our
consideration. As we seek to invest more equitably and efficiently in
higher education, to prod higher education access and success, and to
focus on outcomes-based education, we should invest proportionately
more in those institutions, like HBCUs, that continue to enroll and
graduate disproportionate numbers of traditionally underserved
students. This approach would foster at least three of the
administration's higher education goals: (1) promoting access to
postsecondary education; (2) containing college costs and prices; and
(3) fostering standards and accountability.
Relative to promoting access and success, educating more diverse
students has long been the province of the Nation's historically and
predominately black colleges and universities. As one author noted,
``HBCUs remain the patron saints of universal access.'' HBCUs and PBCUs
are, in fact, the ``patron saints of universal access AND
opportunity.''
By patron saints of ``access and opportunity'' I emphasize that
HBCUs and PBCUs are not just opening their doors to opportunity to a
broad and diverse group of students, many of whom have been
traditionally underserved, but also offering students a college
opportunity that is appropriate for their aspirations, preparation, and
abilities. They are giving traditionally underserved students--the
growing majority in America--an opportunity for a successful
postsecondary experience.
Regarding the national effort to contain college costs, HBCUs and
PBCUs are generally offering a good return on the investment. According
to data from The College Board's Trends in College Pricing 2004, and
the 2004 NAFEO Enrollment Survey of HBCUs, private HBCUs on average
cost $10,000 per year less than their white counterparts, when tuition,
fees, room and board are factored in. Public HBCUs on average cost
$1,000 less than their white counterparts. That HBCUs are by-and-large
offering a good return on their investment is supported by some of the
outcomes:
HBCUs represent only 3 percent of all colleges and
universities, yet they enroll 16 percent of all African Americans in 4-
year degree granting institutions;
They graduate 30 percent of African Americans receiving 4-
year degrees, and 40 percent of African Americans receiving 4-year
degrees in STEM areas;
Twenty-four percent (24 percent) of all Ph.D.'s earned
each year by African Americans are conferred by 24 HBCUs;
Eighteen (18) of the top 23 producers of African Americans
who go on to receive science related Ph.D.'s are HBCUs;
Four (4) of the top 10 producers of successful African
American medical school applicants are HBCUs. These HBCUs produce 20
percent more African American applicants than the other six (6)
institutions combined;
Eight (8) of the top 10 producers of African American
engineers are HBCUs.
The outcomes are not all good, as you know. HBCUs and PBCUs like
their white counterparts, are losing far too many students. According
to a new survey by The Education Trust, only 60 percent of all college
students are completing undergraduate study in 6 years. The graduation
rates at HBCUs and PBCUs are as varied as they are at HWCUs and we must
reverse this trend. HBCUs and PBCUs have a responsibility and unique
qualifications to improve the education outcomes of their students.
HBCUs have a rich history of enrolling, nurturing, transforming,
graduating and sending disproportionate numbers of African American
students to graduate and professional schools, especially in the STEM
areas. HBCUS and PBCUs must do better.
This leads to my final contextual observation I believe in
standards and accountability. Medgar Evers and other predominately
black colleges and universities want to work with Members of Congress
and a business partnership to ensure an accountability system that is
equitable and efficient; a system that factors in developing
scholarship, expanding diversity and access, increasing learning,
retention, and graduation; and facilitating post-graduate public and
private service in areas of high need. I believe that such an
accountability system can be designed in a manner that does not have a
chilling impact on creative teaching and learning; and that does not
infringe the First Amendment Academic Freedom of a college or
university to determine for itself who may teach, what may be taught,
how it shall be taught, who may be admitted to study and how successful
completion will be gauged. Medgar Evers College, and our national
umbrella association NAFEO, look forward to working with you to craft
such a system.
TITLE II--TEACHER QUALITY ENHANCEMENT GRANTS FOR STATES AND
PARTNERSHIPS
Title II currently provides competitive grants to improve teacher
education programs, strengthen teacher recruitment efforts, train
future teachers to utilize technology more fully, and improve student
achievement. In addition, this title establishes certain evaluation and
reporting requirements for States that receive grants, and higher
education institutions, in an effort to assess the quality of teacher
education programs, primarily through the reporting of pass rates on
teacher certification examinations. Institutions in which a teacher
education program is designated ``low performing'' are ineligible for
faculty development funding and barred from accepting into its teacher
ed program any student receiving title IV funding.
Improving teacher education is a key component to improving
tomorrow's education workforce. There simply are not enough teachers
for the classrooms. The teaching profession serves as a gateway to all
other professions, and the path through which a literate democracy must
tread. With the ever increasing standards that have emerged since the
landmark, A Nation At Risk Report, class size reduction initiatives,
swelling numbers of immigrant and baby boomer children, and the
``graying'' teaching force, the United States is experiencing critical
teacher shortages. The problem--especially acute in urban and rural
districts and in the hard-to-fill areas of special education,
mathematics, and science--is so severe that:
Forty-two States issue emergency credentials to people who
have taken no education courses and have not taught a day in their
lives. Many teachers are hired based solely on their experience leading
church or camping groups.
One-fourth of new teachers--if they are licensed--are not
licensed to teach in the field they are teaching.
Twenty percent of new teachers leave within the first 3
years; most likely to leave are those with the highest college-entrance
exam scores. A whopping 49 percent of those who leave do so because of
job dissatisfaction or to pursue another career.
In addition to the growing number of students, new standards that
require smaller teacher-student ratios, and retirement and attrition,
other factors have contributed to the current situation. A lack of
teacher mobility, inadequate induction programs, poor working
conditions, the lowest unemployment rate in 3 decades, and a growing
salary gap between teachers with master's degrees--all help to explain
why our Nation is experiencing the worst shortage of qualified teachers
ever in its history.
To meet the demands for qualified, diverse, culturally sensitive
teachers, especially in traditionally underserved areas, we need well-
prepared teachers that can perform to high standards. Students
attending predominately black colleges and universities, like their
counterparts attending historically and predominately white
institutions, are capable of meeting any and all certification
requirements when afforded the necessary resources. However, undue
reliance on a single evaluation measure disproportionately
disadvantages institutions that constantly battle chronic under-funding
and financial insecurity, while producing disproportionate numbers of
qualified teachers of color who are important to the success of
minority students and the Nation.
It is important, however, that the criteria utilized to evaluate
the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs must include not only
a keen understanding of the pedagogy, but also reflect the pluralism
and diversity of the Nation and the classrooms into which the teachers
will go. The aim of any State program must include increasing diversity
in the State teacher corps; increasing the percentage of elementary and
secondary school classes taught by diverse teachers; and increasing the
extent to which any new teachers will help to achieve pluralism among
the ranks in the State, in districts and individual schools.
The U.S. Congress and the business community can be of immense
assistance in ensuring that under-resourced institutions are provided
the necessary tools and resources to ensure that students are able to
pass the PRAXIS and other exams. This can be done without increasing
the level of public investment in this very important undertaking, but
rather, by making a more efficient investment of limited public
dollars, in those institutions with least resources. This more
efficient investment of sparse funds would facilitate access to the
resources necessary to enhance teacher preparation programs, such as
technology.
While technology is vital, human resources remain indispensable
components of the learning process. Time and resources for faculty
development to expand knowledge and skills are essential to the
progress and success of both faculty and students.
A key piece to ensuring that faculty development is successful in
promoting student success is the need to forge effective business, and
governmental partnerships in key areas necessary to maintain a
competitive edge not only for faculty, but also for their students.
Partnerships with research universities or other specialized
institutions of higher learning are key to exposing faculty to cutting
edge thinkers, techniques, curricula, equipment, etc. The world has
witnessed an information and knowledge explosion in the last 40 years,
making it increasingly difficult for under-resourced schools to
graduate students who can effectively compete with other, better
financed institutions. While information and knowledge management is
critical to the sciences and information technologies, advances in
theory or applications of existing fields of knowledge impact on the
curriculum and pedagogies in the humanities, social sciences, and even
fine and applied arts.
Such partnerships will prevent faculty from becoming stale in their
fields, and eliminate the risk of teaching a curriculum that no longer
provides the essential skills and critical knowledge graduates need to
enter and remain competitive in the workforce. Models for such
partnerships may include faculty ``internships'' with corporations or
organizations in their field of expertise; the ``visiting scholar''
model whereby selected industry leaders are attached to a particular
colleges, formalized faculty/industry mentoring, etc. An immediate
benefit of such partnerships is clearly a better educated teacher and
college faculty corps.
The business world strongly supports such partnerships (Sharing
Responsibility: How Business Leaders and Higher Education Can Improve
America's Schools, 2001, Business-Higher Education Forum) and has
strongly urged further involvement of the two sectors in improving the
K-16 pipeline.
NAFEO has proposed and I offer for consideration by this august
body, the joint public-private funding of Ten Collaborative Centers of
Excellence for Minority Teacher Education on HBCU campuses and PBCU
campuses throughout the country. These centers will play a critical
role in increasing the production of highly qualified minority
teachers.
The centers will be provided resources sufficient to establish
state-of-the-art teacher training facilities equipped with the latest
technology, where curriculum will be reviewed and assessed, best
practices and strategies identified and replicated, professional
development and training for teachers provided. In addition, necessary
and meaningful research will be conducted on critical issues related to
the education of minority children/students that will not only be used
to address such vexing issues as eliminating the education achievement
gaps of minorities, but also to provide critical data essential to
developing and shaping public policy more effectively at all levels of
government. The centers will not merely benefit the institutions at
which they are housed, but also provide resources for educational
institutions proximately, regionally and nationally.
The overall goals of these centers will be to develop more highly
qualified minority teachers, improve the educational prospects of
minority students, and further the goal of equal educational
opportunity for all Americans.
One approach that Medgar Evers College has developed is a model
approach to enhancing the K-16 pipeline through an innovative program
at its Middle College High School at Medgar Evers College (MCHS). We
intend to improve the economic and academic outcomes of our primarily
minority student population by rolling out a program that permits
selected students the option of choosing a curriculum that will allow
them to graduate with both a high school diploma and an Associate's
degree. Graduates can then choose to enter the work force directly, or
continue their academic career thus graduating by the age of 20 with a
baccalaureate degree. We hope to enhance retention of high school
students by reinforcing the value of what is increasingly becoming the
entry level credential in the workforce, the Associate's degree.
Furthermore, since many minority students are unable to continue on to
graduate school due to both personal and familial economic
responsibilities, the opportunity to earn a baccalaureate by 20
decreases the amount of time spent outside the workforce while also
reducing the burden of financial aid.
Global Education
Among other things, the tragic events of September 11, 2001
highlighted the critical need to cultivate more people of color to be
involved in our global outreach and national security efforts. Current
programmatic efforts have proven to be inadequate. Additional
strategies must be employed and resources provided to strengthen and
expand the capacities of HBCUs, PBCUs and other MSIs to participate
more fully in this arena. Systematic and focused efforts to enhance the
capacities of MSIs to increase the numbers of minority students
knowledgeable about the world regions, foreign languages and
international affairs to play crucial roles in advancing our Nation's
diplomacy and security efforts are essential to America's continued
safety and prosperity, and to industrial growth.
I propose the idea of the establishment of a joint public-private
partnership to establish ten area studies centers at Minority Serving
Institutions. These centers would feature programs involving student
and faculty exchanges, area studies, foreign languages studies, global
cultures studies, global faiths, economies, and political systems
studies. The goal would be to expand the cadre of people of color, well
equipped to assist to shape the Nation's foreign policy priorities and
secure our homeland.
A critical element of achieving global education is enhanced
technology capability, especially and minority-serving institutions and
historically and currently under-resourced institutions.
Medgar Evers Government-Institution-Business Partnerships
Medgar Evers College has identified a particular sector to
effectively enhance employment opportunities for our students and local
constituencies. In analyzing industry statistics and projections, the
college has identified the Allied Health and Biotechnological field as
a focus for developing career ladders for its student population. The
School of Continuing Education and Community Programs and the School of
Science Health and Technology have established agreements to develop
career ladders locally. The college is working in collaboration with
the State University of New York Downstate Medical Biotech Incubator to
establish career tracks in biotechnology.
The area of healthcare practitioners and associated technical
occupations are projected to grow by over 18 percent between 2000 and
2010, with support occupations growing over the same time period.
Advancement in the direct patient care side of the industry is defined
by an extensive system of professional certifications.
Biotechnology is another sector with growth potential in New York
City. However, it requires economic development support. The field is
projected to be one of the Nation's fastest growing industries over the
next few decades. New York City possesses all of the ingredients that
have fueled the industry's growth--research facilities, top education
institutions and renowned scientists, according to a 2002 Center for an
Urban Future report. But many biotechnology firms in the city are
concerned that a shortage of trained technical workers and real estate
expenses will hamper growth. Biotech projects frequently require
significant start up funding from public sources to pay for space and
equipment. However, the likely possibility of the development of the
Brooklyn Army Terminal into hundreds of thousands of square feet of
biotechnology manufacturing space increases the probability of job
growth in the near future. Biotech career opportunities in New York
City are currently ``top-heavy,'' but experts project a growing need
for front-line workers as research and development projects move toward
commercialization and economic developments such as the Brooklyn Army
Terminal come on line.
Through its established relationships with professional unions, the
health and hospitals sector in New York City, and its academic degree
programs in The School of Science Health and Technology, Medgar Evers
College has positioned itself to address the needs of these expanding
employment sectors.
I thank the committee for providing me the opportunity to
participate in this important dialogue. The membership association of
NAFEO and I stand ready to work with this committee as it continues to
explore the important questions that have brought us to this hearing.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Sweeney.
STATEMENT OF PATRICK SWEENEY, PRESIDENT AND CEO, ODIN
TECHNOLOGIES
Mr. Sweeney. Thank you very much, Senator, and thank you
for inviting me here. To address the question of the various
roles of those three entities in terms of helping future
generations in keeping our country competitive.
I think, in general, there are three components. The
government needs to support the infrastructure. The
corporations of the United States need to define the problem
and figure out where there are shortcomings. And then, third,
education needs to respond in kind to those two things.
Just to give a little bit of my perspective on it, I sit on
the board of Darden Graduate School of Business's Alumni Board
down at UVA, but one of the more interesting things I do is I
am the only North American board member for Trinity College in
Dublin, not in Washington, DC. I tell my wife that I think they
ask me onto those boards because of my largely unspectacular
undergraduate career and they wanted to figure out what not to
do-- [Laughter.]
But in the case of Trinity over in Dublin, in Ireland in
general, most people don't know the fact that Ireland is number
two in the world in exportation of software. A country of just
a few million people is second only to the United States in the
exportation of software. That came about through an incredible
partnership between corporations, government, and then the
higher education system.
It came about in Ireland because of need. There was a 20
percent unemployment rate and Ireland clearly wasn't going to
participate in the industrial revolution. They had to go from
the agricultural revolution to the technology revolution, and
they said, how can we do that?
And government decided that they would support the
infrastructure. They were the first country in the E.U. to put
in something that was called an OC-48, a very large bandwidth
pipe running around the country to give access to high
bandwidth, because they knew if they were going to export
technology and export their intellectual property, they would
need the super highway to do that. So the government built
that.
The educational system came in behind that and put a focus
on technology, put a focus on software, put a focus on driving
innovation. Now Trinity is taking the tack that those things
are becoming commodity items, so now we have to look and figure
out what the next revolution is going to be, and I think there
is an awful lot that we can learn about that in the United
States as a much bigger country and say, look, let us not try
and fight something that is going to happen in terms of things
becoming commoditized or things being outsourced. Let us figure
out what the next revolution is and be on the leading edge of
that.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Craves.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT CRAVES, FOUNDER, COSTCO CORPORATION,
CURRENTLY CEO AND PRESIDENT, WASHINGTON EDUCATION FOUNDATION
Mr. Craves. Thank you. You are probably wondering why a guy
that sells you mayonnaise in 50-gallon drums is talking about
higher education--[Laughter.]--but the Governor of the State of
Washington put me on more boards and commissions than I know
what to do with, and even a retailer got it pretty soon that
there is an alarming problem out there.
Things that we learned, of course, is that the percentage
of kids on free or reduced lunch is going up in our State. For
example, in 1999, we were at 30 percent. Today, we are at over
37 percent. We were looking around in a county that arguably is
one of the more highly educated workforces in the country, King
County, which houses, of course, Microsoft and many others,
except that everybody that got good jobs was coming from
someplace else.
So my associates at Costco and I looked at this and said,
what a waste of human capital. So what we did--this is just an
example of what business can do, and appreciate we are low-tech
or no-tech, so we kind of look at educating the whole person.
There are about 60,000 graduates in the State of Washington
every year. Thirty-thousand go to some kind of college. Thirty-
thousand don't. Our question was, of the 30,000 that don't, how
many of them can earn a baccalaureate degree or better, and the
numbers we came up with through the Department of Education,
some independent research we did, and the Higher Education
Coordinating Board of the State was about 6,000 on the low
side. It was 6,000 to 12,000.
So we used the 6,000, and so we put together, in
cooperation with all our public and private universities and
community colleges, this foundation which provides college
scholarships and mentoring to low-income, high-potential
students. The idea here is to try to put a national coalition
of these foundations together to try to raise in this decade a
billion dollars to help these poor kids go to school.
We think higher education has certainly signed on. We have
agreements with all the institutions to help these poor kids.
The definition, obviously, of low-income is going up. Our
public universities are increasing tuition by 7 percent a year.
Our privates, in general, are 5 percent, but remember, their
base is $28,000 instead of $5,000, so it is getting to be more
and more costly. Trying to help kids with their part of the
education finance is, at least to us, is incredibly important.
As we go State to State to try to open up more education
foundations, a couple of things that the government could do is
certainly make money available to build the infrastructure of
these foundations, which is minor, maybe a couple million
dollars for start-up money.
The other thing that you have going right now is the new
piece of funding which would give private philanthropy a match
of, I believe, 50 cents on the dollar. So if we raise a million
dollars, let us say, for scholarships, that the Federal
Government comes in with $500,000, which makes it infinitely
easier for people like me to raise money when I go to the
Starbucks of the world and the Microsofts of the world raising
money, to say that we have a partner here.
So I think that is what businesses can do. We have had the
buy-in of perhaps 500 different companies. Lots of them are
vendors, of course, who love to come to this party and give us
money for this. But it is out there and people, when they can
put a face on something and they can see the money going to
help an individual, it is a significantly easier sale than just
saying, give me money for higher education. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Craves follows:]
Prepared Statement of Bob Craves
Every year, thousands of young people across the country dream of
attending college, but they don't go because they don't have the means
to pay for it.
We think of them as the children left behind; the students that
aren't adequately served or supported by existing government and
scholarship programs.
We felt we could do better, which is why we created the Washington
Education Foundation in 2000. Working together with several private
organizations and companies--including the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation and the Costco Warehouse Corporation--we've been able to
provide scholarships and mentoring to thousands of low-income, high-
potential students in Washington State.
None of this would have been possible without the support and
active participation of several leading figures in our State
government, including the current and prior Governor, the
Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the Higher Education
Coordinating Board, a citizen board responsible for overseeing various
aspects of State public policy including the distribution of
scholarship funds to both public and private institutions.
Education beyond high school is increasingly essential as a way out
of joblessness and poverty. Higher education increases productivity and
creates a well-educated citizenry that can contribute to the vitality
of our Nation.
Yet for many children who live in low-income homes, postsecondary
education is simply not considered possible. And in fact, the disparity
in educational attainment between young adults with low incomes versus
kids from high-income families is large, pervasive, persistent, and the
gap is growing larger every year.
It's such a terrible waste. Because with a relatively small level
of support--partly financial, partly in guidance and mentoring--most of
these students could succeed, and ultimately contribute their brains,
their talents, and their energies to society.
This Spring, we at the Washington Education Foundation are
celebrating our first full graduating class of students who have been
recipients of our programs. We have a unique and pro-active approach to
our scholarship programs--we don't just throw money at the students and
then walk away. The Achievers Scholarships, for example, are granted to
students at the end of their Junior Year in High School. That's really
just the beginning of the process--from then, our statewide network of
more than a thousand volunteer Hometown Mentors goes to work helping
students through the complicated process of selecting and applying for
colleges, which is essential since many of these students represent the
first generation of their families to attend college, and can't get
that sort of advice at home. Support for each student continues once he
or she begins attending university, through a network of college
mentors that help to assist and monitor the students through this
often-difficult transitional period.
I describe this because we've been fortunate in Washington State to
forge a public/private partnership with our State government. Through
the generosity of our benefactors and volunteers, we've been able to
raise nearly $150 million in scholarship funds from private
foundations, companies, and individuals. The State has supported our
efforts through the commitment of resources to manage, oversee and
ensure the success of the Mentoring portion of our program. I like to
point out that the State is getting a great bargain--its financial
contribution is less than 10 percent a year of what we grant in
scholarships, but that contribution allows us to focus our resources on
the students themselves. By working in concert, the contribution of the
State is multiplied 10 times over, meaning that we all win.
That's essential to accomplishing what the Roundtable discussion
will be focusing on--strengthening our workforce to meet the needs of
industry and our country. I've met many of our scholarship recipients
personally. I can assure you they have the brains, the grades, and
certainly the drive that demonstrates they can succeed. All they need
are the financial and other resources to ensure they get on the track
to success.
To that end, there are two ways I believe the Federal Government
can support the efforts of foundations such as ours in delivering on
the current and future needs of education across the country:
A matching program that encourages private philanthropy by
providing dollar-for-dollar matches of donations made for university
scholarships. Through our efforts, we've raised $150 million in the
State of Washington--if we could double those resources, we could
support thousands of additional students and allow them to reach their
full potentials.
As other States look to initiate their own education
foundations built on our model, it would be a great boon if the Federal
Government could support those efforts through making an investment in
the start-up costs. Thanks to the generosity of the Gates Foundation
and Costco, we were able to fast-track our efforts in the State of
Washington and get our programs going in months instead of years. But
not every State will be so fortunate as we were to have such
outstanding benefactors right from the start; and in my view it would
be better for their fundraising efforts to be focused on developing
scholarships instead of building infrastructure. A small investment in
start-up costs by the Federal Government would reap huge rewards later.
Thanks for the opportunity to participate in today's Roundtable;
and thanks also for bringing these critical educational issues to the
forefront.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Nolte.
STATEMENT OF WALTER NOLTE, PRESIDENT, CASPER COLLEGE
Mr. Nolte. Thank you. Thank you, Senator Enzi. I will have
to admit that I bought one of Mr. Craves' 50-gallon jars of
mayonnaise when I left Washington in 1993. I still have it.
[Laughter.]
I want to follow up a little bit on what Mr. Mullen said. I
agree that one of our challenges is how to keep young people
interested in high-skill, high-wage jobs. How do we keep young
people in school, I think is one of our challenges.
Wyoming is in an interesting position right now where
fiscally, the State is very strong. We have developed--you
asked the question, how can government be involved. Recently,
the State of Wyoming passed a $400 million scholarship
endowment for high school graduates, and basically when that
ramps up over the next 5 or 6 years and the endowment is full,
any high school student with any motivation at all should be
able to go to college tuition and fee free. We might be unique
in the Nation in that respect, but it is a tremendous resource
for our high school students and we are hoping that this will
be a powerful incentive for parents to encourage their young
people to continue in school and to achieve the standards
necessary to receive this scholarship.
One of the other things that we are doing, again, it is a
partnership with government, with our school district, and with
the local private sector, is that we are looking at the
development of a skill center located either on our campus or
near our campus, a joint facility run by the high school
district and the college with input from the private sector, a
modular facility that we can change instantly to meet private
sector and business and industry needs with an open entry, open
exit curricula. We are hoping that this facility will address
the high school drop-out problem.
We will react to the programs that we need very quickly
when this facility is developed over the next few years based
on private sector input. We are hoping that the private sector
will help us equip this facility because those are the high-
cost items for any college, community college, or high school
district in running a program.
We are also hoping to jump-start this with an application
for President Bush's Community College Job Training. We really
think that this is an adaptable program that we can move
quickly on what private sector employers are telling us their
immediate needs are.
The challenge will be to get young people involved in this,
to keep them involved. And again, I agree with Mr. Mullen that
that is something that has to start at an early age in the
education career.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Reed.
STATEMENT OF CHARLES REED, CHANCELLOR, CALIFORNIA STATE
UNIVERSITY
Mr. Reed. The California State University has 420,000
students, probably about the same number of people that live in
Wyoming. [Laughter.]
Senator Enzi, thank you for convening this very important
meeting. I want to take a little different approach and be
maybe a little more specific. We will be graduating 88,000
students this spring. We began last week and we will run our
commencements through the second week in June. It is very
important, of those 420,000 students, approximately 54 percent
of them are students of color. We are the largest feeder of the
workforce in California, which is the seventh-largest economy
in the world.
Having said that, my colleagues here have all talked about
this pipeline and they have talked about partnerships. If we
all say those words, we all need to live those words, and that
partnership and those pipelines, as Senator Kennedy said, start
in K through 12, and that is the preparation of students in K
through 12 for the workforce and for college, and college
awareness is a huge, huge issue among minority students.
I can say this. College is no longer a luxury in our
society. It is a necessity. So, therefore, I have a suggestion.
I think yesterday you passed S. 1021, which is the Workforce
Reinvestment Act, which included the President's Community
College Initiative. I would like to suggest that you add to
that bill the possibility that higher education, 4-year
institutions could join in a partnership with community
colleges. The community colleges can be the direct-funded
organization, but require that they have this partnership with
K through 12 and with higher education, 4-year institutions.
In California, the California State University accepts 7 of
every 10 students from the community colleges, and this is a
continuum. So if that bill would allow us at the 4-year level
to focus on workforce development with our partners, the
community colleges, and their partners, K through 12, I think
we are going to be so much better off.
One of the things that I have tried to do is to form what
we call Chancellors' Advisory Commissions of business and
industry in California. For instance, the agriculture industry,
the largest industry in the United States, in California. I
have about 20 of the largest agricultural producers in
California advise me twice a year. What do they say they need?
Students who can communicate, both orally and in writing. Two,
students who can work together in teams across all their
businesses. Three, students who understand technology. Now,
they also come back and say, chancellor, you need to work more
and harder with your community colleges, and so I would like to
see that added to S. 1021.
The Chairman. Thank you. We are talking about the Higher
Education Act primarily today, but we are trying to make this
all seamless with the Workforce Investment Act and there is a
provision in there, we might not have it clear enough, that
colleges, 4-year institutions, can work through the community
colleges and a partnership as business can work through, but we
may not have that clear enough and it is an excellent
suggestion.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Reed follows:]
Prepared Statement of Charles B. Reed
Chairman Enzi, Ranking Member Kennedy, and members of the
committee, thank you for inviting me to participate in this important
discussion about the preparation of our Nation's workforce. Few, if
any, university systems can match the scope of the California State
University (CSU) system. Nationally, about 1.25 million bachelor's
degrees are awarded annually in the United States by about 2,000
colleges and universities with a combined student population in excess
of 15 million. As the Nation's largest 4-year university system, the
California State University's 23 campuses award more than 4.5 percent
of those bachelor's degrees, giving the CSU a significant national
presence. In California, a State boasting 372 public and private
institutions, the CSU plays an even stronger role. It serves nearly
400,000 students, twice as many as the University of California and
more than all private colleges and universities in California combined.
It accounts for almost half of the bachelor degrees granted in
California, and a third of the master's degrees.
And those bachelor degrees are not narrowly focused. Because of the
breadth of its offerings, which includes more than 1,800 degree
programs, the California State University serves as the essential
engine of California's skill-dependent economy. Its role in workforce
preparation is unrivaled. It provides the majority of the State's new
teachers, 40 percent of its engineering and nearly half of its business
graduates, and more graduates in agriculture, communications, health,
and public administration than all other California colleges and
universities combined. Our focus is on quality, access, and
affordability. We are proud to say that the CSU is working for
California.
In order for our country to remain globally competitive, we must
build strong and effective partnerships between education, business,
and the government. No matter which sector we represent, our work is
essentially interconnected. The strength of our country's educational
system relies on the participation of businesses and government, and in
turn, a strong educational system helps us build successful businesses
and a strong economy. It is all part of a continuum in which we must be
active partners.
Point 1: Our Efforts Must Begin With K-12
For as long as I have been at the California State University, I
have made it a priority to work with our K-12 schools. The vast
majority of our students come from California's public schools, and the
more K-12 and higher education work together, the better prepared our
students will be for success in college.
Point 2: College Awareness and Preparation Are Key
College is no longer a luxury in our society, it is a necessity. We
know that a person with a bachelor's degree will earn nearly twice as
much over a lifetime as a high school graduate. Before I came to
California, it had never occurred to me that many young people didn't
know how to prepare for college. But our population is rapidly growing
and shifting. California is now a majority-minority State. Many of our
students come from homes where the parents are not from this country
and do not speak English. Plus, many of our students are the first in
their families to attend college. These students often need assistance
in making sure they get the right classes in high school, filling out
applications, and filling out financial aid forms.
Also, even when many of our students arrive at college, they still
face a need for remedial education. Remedial courses are expensive for
students, costing them added time to their degree, additional tuition
payments, and often increased student indebtedness. Remedial education
is also costly to the institution, demanding scarce resources, and
ultimately reducing seats available to the next class of students at a
time when enrollment demand is outpacing the capacity of our colleges
and universities. The CSU is working with California's schools to
reduce the need for remediation at the college level. Our efforts to
address this issue include:
Early Assessment Program: The CSU has worked with the California
Department of Education and State Board of Education to create this
testing program, which is embedded in the 11th grade California
Standards Tests. It is designed to give students an ``early signal''
about their level of college readiness. Once they take this test,
students have the opportunity to do any additional preparation that
they need to do for college while in the 12th grade. Our early
assessment focuses on mathematics and English, two areas that are
essential to preparing students to participate in a highly skilled
workforce.
GEAR UP and TRIO: The GEAR UP and TRIO programs are essential to
our efforts to prepare disadvantaged students for a college education,
and indeed to let them know that college is a possibility for them. The
California State University participates in more GEAR UP programs than
any other entity in the Nation, and I urge you to strengthen and
maintain these two essential programs.
Poster: We created a ``How to Get to College'' poster to distribute
to every middle school and high school in the State. This poster spells
out exactly what courses and tests a student needs to take to prepare
for the California State University or the University of California.
The demand for these posters has been overwhelming. We now distribute
posters all around the State in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese,
and Korean. Boeing has been a strong supporter and lead partner in
underwriting this effort.
Point 3: All Americans Must Have an Opportunity to Participate and
Contribute
At the CSU, approximately 54 percent of our students are from
minority populations and 40 percent come from households where English
is not the main language spoken. In an increasingly diverse society, it
is essential to ensure that all sectors of that society are prepared to
participate. Unfortunately, there is still an achievement gap across
all levels of higher education. The reality is that we need to build a
``pipeline'' for under-represented students from high school to
graduate school to business. To do this, we must increase the number of
role models, including teachers, who can reach out to diverse
communities. We must also improve on the graduate opportunities
available to under-represented populations. For example, adding a
graduate component to Title V of the Higher Education Act (HEA) would
be a step in the right direction to greater inclusion of American
Latinos.
Ensuring that all young people have a chance to participate is a
critical component in building a highly skilled workforce. American
business needs individuals who can design, produce, and ultimately
market products to every community in America and increase the demand
for America's products throughout the world.
Point 4: We Need Partnerships With Business to Prepare Students for
Workforce Success
The fact that there is a gap between what students are learning and
what future employers need from our graduates tells us that higher
education needs to pay closer attention to workforce preparation. Our
credibility with our business and community partners ultimately depends
on our ability to prepare students who are equipped with the tools for
future success.
According to the public policy and research firm Public Works,
three key attributes necessary for success in the 21st century
workforce include the ability to think critically and creatively, the
ability to relate collaboratively, and the ability to adapt and
transact in a global economy. If we give students the opportunity to
work in teams, challenge them to work across divisions, and offer them
more exposure to real-life situations, they will be better prepared for
what today's jobs require of them.
Several of our most successful recent graduates have told us that
the key to their university experiences was working with professors who
knew about workforce needs and having a flexible curriculum that
allowed them to get maximum exposure to the latest technology,
equipment, and techniques.
There are plenty of opportunities for us to work closely with
business partners in our community, including the sponsoring of
scholarships, internships, and job placement opportunities.
Additionally, several of our campuses have undertaken innovative joint
ventures that benefit all parties involved. For example, Cal Poly
Pomona is launching a joint public/private partnership known as
Innovation Village. The new Red Cross regional headquarters that just
opened at Innovation Village will be the largest blood-processing
facility in the country. The university offers the Red Cross a
strategic location and access to vast university resources. In return,
having that facility offers the university prime educational and
research opportunities.
Point 5: We Must Continue to Inform our Community Partners About the
Impact/Importance of Higher Education
The California State University recently did a comprehensive study
of the impact of the university and its 23 campuses. The study found
that CSU-related expenditures create $13.6 billion in economic
activity, support 207,000 jobs, and generate $760 million in State
taxes. We have been conducting events all across the State that
highlight the CSU's role in several key industries to industry and
community audiences. By raising awareness about the role of the
university, we hope to build stronger partnerships that will allow us
to make new inroads into these industries--and to hear more about how
we can better prepare students for the workforce.
Thank you again for this opportunity to present the views of the
California State University. I hope you will continue to view our
system as a resource as you work on the reauthorization of the Higher
Education Act and other matters related to workforce preparation.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Palmer-Noone.
STATEMENT OF LAURA PALMER-NOONE, PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF
PHOENIX
Ms. Palmer-Noone. Thank you, Chairman, for convening this
today and for inviting me to participate.
I am the president of the University of Phoenix, a for-
profit regionally accredited institution with over 233,000
students, not quite as large as the Cal State system, but watch
out, Dr. Reed. We are on our way. [Laughter.]
The average age of our students right now, Senator, is a
little over 34 years of age, and about 41 percent of our
students identify themselves from being from racial and ethnic
minorities.
My point in giving you that background is that I think it
would be a mistake for us to limit our consideration today to
what we refer to as young people, the 18- to 22-year-olds. We
need to assist in the workforce development of the people in
the workforce now. We simply don't have the luxury of waiting 4
or 5 or 6 years for some of these things to take root.
With regard to your question about increasing the
partnership between universities and business, I think that
higher education has been somewhat remiss. We need but only to
ask. If we ask those companies what it is that they need, as
Dr. Reed has indicated, they tell us some very interesting
things.
We conducted some research in December of this past year.
About 300 national employers were asked, what is it that you
are looking for? What are the skills that are missing? What do
you promote on? Why do you hire people? And they told us, they
want communications skills, they want critical thinking, they
want collaboration and teamwork, they want adaptability, a
commitment to lifelong learning, a commitment to a willingness
to change with the organization. All of those things ranked
ahead of the technical skills of the positions.
What is government's role, then? I think it is that we have
to have some help in increasing access. The reason that
students are not going to school now has nothing to do with
geography. We have done a wonderful job in higher education,
putting a college on every corner or putting it onto the
Internet or some way for people to go. The barrier to their
being part of the higher education scene is money. They need to
have funding. They need to have a way to get access.
If I had a recommendation for the rallying cry for the
Higher Education Reauthorization, it should be that we should
change ``No Child Left Behind'' to ``No One Left Behind.''
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
We will need to move on to a second question here. Again,
we have to be through by 11:30 a.m., under some Senate rules
that are being invoked today. And this has been alluded to by
many of you while you have been talking, but I really want to
thank you for all of the comments that you have made so far. I
have got a pile of notes here on some additional follow-up
questions that I am going to have to do with each of you,
because I think you are really getting to the heart of some of
the things that we need to study and get answers for as we do
the Higher Education Act.
This pipeline that we have referred to, there is a huge
concern in this country, and we need to have it, we have always
been the leaders in math and science and health and technology
and that has really made the economy what it is. We lead the
rest of the world. We develop a product. Eventually, that
becomes kind of a standard product and they make it everywhere
in the world. The reason that we are able to be successful is
we go ahead and we develop new products. We have been staying
ahead of the curve so far, but I am a little discouraged with
the number of kids that are going into math and science and
health and technology and the ones that are going to be the
inventors of the future that will keep that technology going.
So how do we encourage students to prepare for and enter
those high-skill fields? What can we be doing to get the kids
excited, as was mentioned? How do we do that? Ideas?
Dr. Jackson, I think you had your card up first.
Mr. Jackson. We have many programs that are federally
funded that are doing a terrific job. GEAR UP is doing a
tremendous job in working with young people to get them to,
first to understand that college is possible, second, that
these professions are available to and for them, but also to
give them the kinds of skills that they need so that they don't
feel that the science, health, and technology professions are
not for them.
But I want to go back. We had in 1960, the Sputnik era,
National Defense, Science Defense Act. I was one of those who
went to college, Howard University, majored in science, because
there were resources available for me. If we don't increase the
number of faculty or teaching in our K through 12 system, we
have too many people teaching out of their discipline in math
and science. How can you encourage young people to love science
and math when you have people who are not qualified and just
simply doing it? The modeling that it seems to me is necessary
and the love of the profession, you have to have people who are
qualified. We can't produce enough of those.
We are talking about very high-cost programs, and somehow
or another, if you are asking what is the role of government,
what is the role of the Federal Government, you have the model.
It worked. Why not go back and embrace that model again, or at
least examine it for those things that were successful and then
to try to fund those programs.
I think we have a lot of opportunity. We have the models.
We can go back to them. They are successful. They were
successful. And you are seeing the fruit of that or proof of
that with a lot of people who are now like me, perhaps could
not have gone to college were it not for that act.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Reed.
Mr. Reed. Senator Enzi, I think that--I support what Dr.
Jackson said about the National Defense Education Act. He and I
are probably about the same age, so there are a lot of good
ideas there that I would commend you and your staff to look at,
especially in preparing math and science and foreign language
teachers for the future.
Mr. Jackson. Yes.
Mr. Reed. Let me say this, that awareness and understanding
by parents and students of what it takes to join the workforce
and to be able to go to college is really important. Senator
Isakson was talking about students don't look like we did when
we went to college. Eighty percent of the students in
California State University work, many full-time. Forty percent
of them come from homes where English is not the first language
spoken.
One of the things that I learned just by walking around is
students and some of their teachers and their parents have no
idea what it takes to go into the workforce or go to college.
One of the things that we did is we printed a half-million
posters that we send out every year in Spanish, English,
Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, so that these families can be much
more informed of the importance of taking algebra I and algebra
II by their junior year in high school.
The California State University, and I think the Federal
Government could help all of us, could incentivize us to push
down into K through 12 the expectations. We are now offering an
11th grade exam--I am paying for that--in all of the junior
year, 11th grades in California which just simply says, are you
prepared for the workforce? Are you prepared to go to college?
And, frankly, about 80 percent of the students are not
prepared.
But what we are asking, Louis Caldera and I served on a
committee and one of the things that we found out is the 12th
grade in America is the biggest wasteland. Nothing happens in
the 12th grade. Kids go out and get jobs about 11 o'clock in
the morning at McDonald's so they can buy a car, but they are
not going to school. They are not taking math, real math. They
are taking--sometimes it will be math, maybe it will be math,
never will it be math. I saw a high school that had 34 math
discipline courses. There is not that much math out there in
the world. There are only about five or six maths. So if we can
focus on algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, we
would do these kids a great favor.
We are trying to push our expectations, our workforce
expectations, down into the public schools.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Mullen.
Mr. Mullen. I will pick up on a couple of things; one I
said before and agree with Dr. Jackson. You have got to hook
these kids early and get them excited about education. I am
particularly focused on the math and science and the
engineering, and the reason for that are a couple-fold. One,
that is what drives the economy and the technology and the new
jobs. But the other is just a simple observation. I have rarely
seen somebody go through training in liberal arts or business
and then follow that on with a science education. I have seen
the reverse thousands of times. So if you do not get them
involved early they just simply do not get the skills and they
get more and more distant.
So I think we have to have better teachers, so teachers
that are highly qualified to teach these subjects down in the
grade school levels. I think the government industry can help a
lot in helping shape curricula. So what is important and also
making it relevant and exciting for the students, and exposure.
So one of the keys that we had around this community lab
was the excitement and the exposure. Show them what the jobs
are. In the minority community--and I sit on a board called the
Biosciences Career Program that is completely aimed at bringing
minority kids into these group programs. Most minority kids,
the only person they ever saw in health sciences was a
physician. They do not know what all these other jobs are so
there is nothing to get excited about.
So part of that is exposure. That is a place where both the
industry is happy to play a role because we all have kids and
students in school too. And I think the government can play a
role in the curriculum shaping as well as the access to some
resources.
Thank you
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Caldera.
Mr. Caldera. Thank you, Senator. Three bullet points. The
first one has to do with the emphasis on K-12 and on teachers
who are well-prepared and subject matter experts in science and
math. A great science teacher will turn you on to science. One
who does not understand science or math is going to turn you
off to math or science, perhaps permanently.
The second bullet point is the importance of involving
undergraduates in research. There is nothing like the antidote
to the large lecture class, to work in a small lab with a
scientist, with a professor, as part of a small team. The same
is true with hands-on involvement, whether it is in a lab or
whether it is at a company near you, to turn you on and to help
you understand the real-world applications, to let you know
what scientists and researchers are doing and how their
breakthroughs have real-world applications. It has a huge
impact on career field selection, decisions to go on to get
master's and Ph.D.'s, just commitment to education, if we can
find ways to support more undergraduate involvement in
research.
The third, and that is particularly important to
institutions like mine, is support for a graduate program for
Hispanic-serving institutions. We have done a pretty good job
in this country of increasing the minority enrollment at the
baccalaureate level, but the message for a lot of those kids,
especially those who came from families where no one had ever
graduated from college, was that the goal should be graduating
from college. We have got to raise that. The goal should be
getting a Ph.D.
So creating more opportunities for some of those students
to not limit themselves to the baccalaureate level but to be
thinking about the master's and Ph.D. level is very important,
and an HSI graduate program could help support that.
The Chairman. Ms. McGuire.
Ms. McGuire. Thank you. I was struck by the passion and
clarity with which Dr. Reed described the problem. My heart was
leaping with resonance at the description.
I think those of us who work in urban centers in
particular, and urban universities--and I do not mean to
exclude others but being a university in the District of
Columbia--I understand the catastrophe that is called senior
high school. Senior high schools just do not work in this city
and they probably do not work in a lot of cities. We see
children coming into college who absolutely are so unprepared
they do not know what calculus is. They have never heard the
word trigonometry before. They do not even have the vocabulary
to understand what the course schedule titles are in order to
know what they need.
Now I happen to be one of those college presidents who is
not embarrassed or ashamed to say that my institution does a
heck of a lot of remediation. There is nothing wrong with that
word because there is nothing wrong with the brains of these
students. They simply have not had the platform prepared for
them to be as successful at the gate as other students from
better high schools. I believe absolutely, passionately, that
every student can learn that instead of saying no child left
behind, let us say, every student can and will learn and be
successful.
One of the things I have come to understand is that those
of us who are colleges and universities, particularly in the
urban centers again, could and will and are willing to create
that bridge from whatever grade school level, maybe it is 2nd
grade, maybe it is 1st, maybe it is pre-K, the student needs to
get into to become successful. I think the traditional notions
of Federal financial aid and institutional support need to have
a whole new layer put on them specifically for the urban
student who has been under-prepared. Traditional financial aid
is great but it does not necessarily help all the students I
have who need to have 13th and 14th grade before they can
become college freshmen. We call it college freshmen right now
because we do not know what else to do with them.
Our students at Trinity, on average, are completing in 7,
8, and 9 years. They are not even completing in 6 years any
more. So we look at completion rates and everybody says, oh,
that is terrible. It is not terrible. They are completing, for
heaven's sake. But we are having to repeat 9th, 10th, and 11th
grade in order to get them to finish and be successful at the
other end.
Now this relates to math and science in particular because
the math, science skills are the particular problem that we
see. The quantitative skills are just simply nonexistent. It is
not that they are poor. They are nonexistent, and it is not the
child's fault. It is in fact all of the other issues. We cannot
wait for K-12 to reform itself in order to solve this problem
because then you will have no scientists or mathematicians for
many generations to come.
I would challenge Congress to think, and the Senate and
this committee in particular, to think of how we could work
with you to create a very new program that would incentivize
those colleges and universities who are willing to work with
you, with the Department of Education, and with industry in the
creation of some new model programs that would be, frankly, a
little less complicated than GEAR UP, more focused on the
senior high school level, and that would--in fact some of the
things I would like to see would be 12 months of education. I
do not think the students need to take off the summertime, but
they need to be supported in the jobs that they would otherwise
be taking in the summertime. They need to have their stipends
replaced.
We are willing to do summer camps that remediate in math
and science in the summertime, but there is no support for the
children and we do not just have money dropping from the sky to
do that. We need that kind of support.
We need the kind of support that would say that teachers
who want to participate and want to be retrained can indeed be
retrained to teach students who have no parents at home to hear
their homework and to work with them on homework. There is an
assumption that parents have to do it, and let us face it, that
is another piece of the problem. But we are not going to fix
that problem anytime soon either.
Now there are some new models. They are called charter
schools, they are called different kinds of private schools.
But those models are not big enough and there is not enough of
them to be able to help bridge this problem. I submit that
colleges and universities working with industries and with the
right kind of support would be willing to create some of those
new models with the focus that you are asking for.
Senator Kennedy. Let me ask you, is this not what the
National Science Foundation is supposed to be doing? Is that
not what we support the National Science Foundation to try to
do? Are we supposed to have a new program? We have tasked them
to try to develop this type of program I would be interested,
do you hear from them? Are they involved? Or what is your
evaluation?
I apologize for having to be away for a while, but that is
one of the challenges the National Science Foundation is
supposed to be working on in this area, trying to develop these
kinds of programs and then present them to us after they have
been tried and tested and what is working and what is not,
rather than starting from scratch. What is your sense? Have you
tried to get them to do this and have they turned it down, or
what is your own experience?
Ms. McGuire. We certainly have had support from the
National Science Foundation for the upper level collegiate
programs, and I think there are excellent for the upper level
collegiate programs. But the problem in getting students into
the pipeline out of K-12, particularly in areas where students
have been underserved by their high schools to begin with, is
that there really is no program that really focuses
specifically on this. NSF does a great job at the upper
division levels, or for highly talented high school students.
But the highly talented high school students are few in number
in the math and science fields. There needs to be a different
kind of program for the students who need to, at age 16, 17, 18
learn what algebra is, for example.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Hoff.
Mr. Hoff. Thank you, Senator. I just wanted to add a couple
thoughts.
I completely agree with Mr. Mullen and Mr. Craves that most
businesses would be delighted to participate actively in
thinking about how to pull the pipeline of people through,
especially in areas such as math and science, and how to be
able to identify the opportunity that would actually excite
kids to do so. I might suggest, and we can submit things for
the record, that you look at some of the recommendations that
are coming out of something called the Business Higher
Education Forum. This is a number of different businesses. We
are just one of them participating in it.
The basic idea is to organize by State a business with
universities, taking a look at--with the State government
sponsor, not the Federal Government, the whole pipeline from K-
16, all the way through. What do we need to do? How do we
identify the jobs? How do we look at some of the curricula that
needs to be shaped? What role could business play in this? How
do we look at what faculty we need? What curricula needs to be
set up? What kind of assessments and so forth? So we will
submit for the record what the Business Higher Education Forum
is recommending, and I would encourage you to take a look at
it.
Then the other thought I had that you might want to look at
is the question of how you might be able to take advantage of
some emerging technologies--I am sure Dr. Palmer-Noone would
agree with this--about how to make learning more exciting, and
how to also make it something where not only people who are in
school, but also people who are out in the workforce can
actually learn on an active basis. I think a lot of experience
that we all have is that the way in which math and science is
taught is the same way it has been taught for a long time. It
is boring for an awful lot of kids. It does not allow kids to
get over the psychological hurdle of having confidence that
they can actually participate in this kind of learning.
I think there are opportunities to take advantage of where
kids are. They are playing all these games. You could turn that
into education. If there is a way in which the Federal
Government can sponsor a means of advancing the way that we
enable kids to learn, I think that that would be something else
that you might want to look at.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Craves.
Mr. Craves. Thank you. I just wanted to tell you something
that we are shopping around at the moment. Recently I brought a
fellow named Dr. Warren Buck on staff of the foundation who
happens to be an African-American Ph.D. nuclear physicist and
was the chancellor of the University of Washington, Bothell,
one of the branch campuses. His function will be to go into the
middle schools, along with a team of recently graduated
African-American and Hispanic men, to promote kids going into
the sciences.
Our idea is to actually give a scholarship to a 7th grader
for college. We have a guaranteed tuition program in the State
of Washington and for $35,000 right now you can buy 5 years at
the University of Washington. So our idea is we would buy one
of those for these kids and get them motivated to do well in
math and science in the high schools.
We think the high schools are too late. If you try to play
catch-up in math and science and you are a junior in high
school, forget it. So you have to get down into the 7th grade.
So maybe this is a GEAR UP attached to the carrot, which is the
scholarship, and we are looking at maybe doing a thousand kids
a year. If they make it into college, and if they can declare,
or at least through curriculum are in math and science, then
they would get this scholarship.
So we think there is something here to--I know everybody
wants everything fixed tomorrow morning, but perhaps we have to
begin to invest deeper down into the system.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Sweeney.
Mr. Sweeney. Thank you, Senator. I guess as an entrepreneur
I probably tend to look at things, the glass is not half full,
it is overflowing. So when you bring up an issue of, there is
concern over the declining participation in math and sciences,
I would not necessarily be worried about that as much as I
would be worried about what we are trying to do in response to
that decline. We talked a little bit when I had spoken about
Ireland earlier, we talked a little bit about the outsourcing
and some of the initiatives. I think students are not excited
about math and sciences because it is very routine, and as Mr.
Hoff pointed out, it is something that we are not teaching well
and we are not teaching any differently than when most of us
went to school.
What I think is probably the bigger issue is we need a
curriculum, at least from a hire perspective, that is not
necessarily focused on the technology age, which is now
arguably in its maturity, but it is rather focused on the
innovation age that we are starting to get into now that I
alluded to earlier in terms of what we are doing over at
Trinity College in Dublin. Things like the right brain thinking
ideas, art, design, sciences. It works very well in high
school. There is a private high school here in Washington that
is almost all African-American that has a 90 percent graduation
rate. It is unheard of. And it is a feeder high school for an
architectural program, so it is very design focused.
I grew up in an unusual environment. My dad never went to
university but he was one of the first people that Ross Perot
hired in Electronic Data Systems up in Boston. I used to crawl
around the data center as a kid. My mom was a bank teller so we
would go in on Saturdays, and I had a chance to understand this
really interesting technology of computers. What my dad taught
me was how to communicate that technology. I think Dr. Palmer-
Noone said one of the things businesses are needing now more
than anything else is the ability to have people who can
communicate. We are not asking for math and science folks. We
are not asking for code writers.
If you look at how we do things now, if you look at why
things are outsourced to India and China, it is because there
is no innovation left in those skills. They have become
routine. In fact we have a program now that can write 300 lines
of code a second. Code writing is no longer a competitive
advantage for anyone. It is a commodity. It is no different
than sewing buttons on a jacket.
So what we have to look at is, how are we going to set an
innovation age? How are we going to create a curriculum that is
going to exploit the coming innovation age?
I am blessed to be in an industry now that arguably is
going to be as large or have as big an impact as the Internet.
It is a technology called radio frequency identification. It is
really the art of putting little computer chips on everything
from supply-chain management to asset to passports. It started
out--it is a nice proxy for the evolution in technology. What
happened was, 30 years ago a guy would walk around a
distribution center with a clipboard and a pen and he would
count boxes and he would write down what he counted. So he
would count and then he would capture the data.
Someone created a technology called a bar code. That
automated the data capture part, but he still had to count. He
still had to go and wand each box and read the bar code. Now
RFID has come along and made that task go away through
innovation. So someone came through an innovation and created
it.
So I would say that the curriculum--and the concern should
not necessarily be math and science enrollment. Rather the
concern should be, what is the curriculum and how is it going
to exploit where things are clearly going within industry and
within the globalization of technology.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Nolte.
Mr. Nolte. If I could respond to Mr. Sweeney I guess I
might suggest that maybe we already have the basis of that
curriculum. It is called our general education curriculum,
where we really try to--and we do not do a good job of
explaining at any level of education why these things are
important. I do not think we do a good job explaining to our
student why it is important for a general education curriculum.
But it is designed to address some of the kinds of things that
we have been talking about here today: communication skills,
quantification skills, math, science skills, critical thinking
skills, the ability to work in groups, the ability to think
outside of the box.
I guess I might suggest that that curriculum needs to be
constantly updated to reflect the kinds of innovations that you
are talking about. We as institutions of higher education, I
believe, need to do a better job of explaining why it is
important to our students, particularly why math and science
are important to our students, because they do not really
understand that and it is boring to them because that is what
they had in their early ages.
Thank you.
The Chairman. A final word, Dr. Jackson.
Mr. Jackson. If you are looking for a model that works, I
invite you to come to Brooklyn, NY, and to see what we have
created with a high school and a college. Every year we have
200 seats available and 2,000 students apply for this high
school admission, and it is a science and math high school.
Most of the students who enroll in this high school are low
income.
But what we have done is to create a teaching workforce who
have a passion for their discipline. Yes, the 11th and 12th
grade we say is a waste, and Medgar Evers College provides the
calculus, the upper science courses, the enriched courses that
rarely would a high school be able to provide, except the very
specialized ones. We have made a commitment to making a
difference with the young people.
So we start out with parents signing a contract, parental
participation. We have gotten so good now, next year we are
starting at the 6th grade, because it is almost too late when
they get into high school. So at the end of this model,
students graduating from our high school will have an associate
degree and will be able to go on and get their baccalaureate
degree. One of the nice things is we offer both the associate
and the baccalaureate degrees, and it is seamless from the
associate to the baccalaureate degree.
It is a model that does work, it is working, and I invite
you to come and to check us out.
The Chairman. I appreciate that. I appreciate all the
comments from the panelists today. A lot of good ideas there,
and of course, we are looking forward to any expansion on the
remarks that you want to make. I would just ask you to keep
those ideas coming. My staff said that we had a lot of great
idea people, and I really have to concur with that. This has
been tremendous, some of the thoughts that are jarred loose.
The games that kids play--there was a shortage of frogs 1
year in the United States for dissection, so a computer
programmer wrote a program for dissecting frogs. I bought one
of those programs. I was well out of college by that time but I
do not think I got to dissect a frog when I was in high school.
Fascinating game. You could take this frog apart, put it in the
right places in the tray. You could call up all kinds of
information about each of the pieces that were there. When you
finished you could put the thing back together and if you got
it back together right, it stood up and danced. So there are
some very exciting things that can happen out there.
Trinity College has a great program with a limited research
budget where they have a double peer review. They have a peer
review by the true peers, and then they have the business peer
review on grants, and the business peer review is to see if the
research will actually result in anything that could be
marketed. As a result there are things being spun off before
they ever get started on the research. I think that is a model
that some of the colleges in the United States could follow.
The Chairman. Parade magazine puts out an article once a
year that has the jobs in the United States and what people
make at them. Since we usually do not vote on Friday I go back
to Wyoming and visit classrooms, and when I am in 9th grade
classrooms or earlier I like to ask them what they think they
will make if they go to work right out of high school. Most of
them think that they will make about $45,000 a year. So that
magazine is very helpful. I distribute a lot of copies of that
so they can find out what people in different occupations are
making. Just a few of the ideas that have been jarred loose.
Any final comments?
Senator Kennedy. Just again I thank all of you so much for
being here. I think we have to think about where our
responsibilities lie. What is the Federal responsibility, what
is the States responsibility? Are we really trying to be
serious in dealing with some of these issues? We have many
companies that do a terrific job. They do a terrific job in
outlay, and I can imagine you are the people that go on to the
board and say, look, we want to create or continue an
innovative program, to improve the skills of their workers and
to impropve the pipeline.
I think ultimately we have to try to more closely examine--
these are terrific suggestions. We will be having our staffs
back in touch with you, but hopefully you can think about what
we ought to be doing to try to help us prioritize--we cannot do
everything but we have to try to figure out ways that we can do
more. Then I think we have to probably share our ideas. States
have done some things, local communities have done some things.
We need to share ideas of what works.
Since Senator Enzi gave his favorite story, I have to share
mine. I was up at the Museum of Science in Boston just a few
years ago when we had strong support for this very small
program called STAR schools. The education program is funded at
$26 million. The Museum of Science had a small program using
distance learning. They brought 450 inner-city kids into their
big auditorium and they satellited in Robert Ballard who found
the Lusitania and the Bismarck and the Titanic. He was in the
Galapagos, and he was in his little machine that they call a
Jason. He was asking the students, or the teacher was, for a
volunteer that could steer the machine down there. You could
have heard a pin drop in there for over an hour. Then he was
talking not only about the oceran life, but he was talking
about the density of the water, and pollution.
These kids all left there enormously interested in what
science and this other whole world were about. We have to
figure out how we make that a common occurrence, how we
interest and fascinate young inquisitive minds every day in
school. We need to get teachers, we have got to get the
schools, the school boards, all the rest of it engaged in
learning science. But all of you can be very helpful to us if
you help give some guidelines to do it.
I thank the chair very much. This has been very
interesting, very helpful. We are going to keep after you so we
hope you will keep after us.
The Chairman. We will be sending some questions in writing
that we hope that you will answer based on what you have
stimulated here today. Thank you so much for your testimony.
Unfortunately, our time has run out, so thank you. We are
adjourned.
[Additional material follows:]
Additional Material
Prepared Statement of Rev. Michael Sheeran, S.J., President, Regis
University, Colorado
Since I was unable to attend the Roundtable discussion on the
relationship between higher education institutions and corporations to
strengthen the American workforce, I am especially grateful to the
Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee for affording
this opportunity to share my views. I would like to make three points:
First, only through careful collaboration between business and higher
education can current developments in technology, science, and business
practices be promptly translated into course content that truly
prepares students for the workplace. Second, it is in the long-range
interest of the corporate world and of the Nation that higher education
include serious elements in the liberal arts because such background
prepares employees who are creative and ethically attuned. Third, the
Federal Government should seek to encourage distance education in ways
that complement the natural good effect of the marketplace.
Some background: I am president of Regis University, a Denver-based
school of 16,000 offering bachelor's and master's degrees in business,
health care, and the liberal arts, 14,000 of our students are adults.
About 40 percent of our students are wholly online. Regis is one of 28
American Jesuit colleges located in 19 States. The oldest, Georgetown
University, was founded in 1789. Regis, founded in 1877, has the
largest percentage of adult students of the 28.
Six years ago, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities
(AJCU) formed JesuitNET, a distance education consortium facilitating
online course work in our 28 schools. There are currently 350 courses
offered by JesuitNET, including 50 online certificates and degree
programs. The Federal program that made our efforts effective was the
Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnership Program (LAAP).
Under the JesuitNET LAAP grant, IBM collaborated with our Jesuit
school consortium to develop a Competency Based Distance Education
course model over a period of 3 years. This model is now used as a
basis for new online degree programs at our University of San
Francisco, Gonzaga University, and Loyola University New Orleans.
Without the LAAP grant, all 28 schools would still be taking the baby
steps in program development that their very constricted internal
resources would have allowed.
The LAAP model illustrates that Federal initiatives can be well run
and can make a significant impact for the good of the economy. The LAAP
model had (1) a specific focus, with a specific outcome; (2) the
requirement of corporate partnership and financial support; (3) a
sufficient level of government funding. A typical grant was at $1
million for a 3-year period.
Something very similar in impact could be achieved by offering
grants to develop programs that attract and prepare students for
technical areas needed by industry. May I suggest that the committee
should not be surprised if it turns out that efforts to tailor programs
in the sciences, business, accounting, etc. to the needs of corporate
America often work best when independent colleges and universities
collaborate with individual corporations. Independents tend to be
smaller and less bureaucratic. That means they can flexibly adapt their
curricula. In Regis U's collaboration over the past 30 years with Coors
Brewery, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun, and a number of other employers, it
has been normal to change our curriculum in 6 months or less to be sure
employees are learning the right computer languages and the right
accounting software for their firms' systems. I recall one case where
the Regis faculty tailored a computer science program to one firm's
needs in less than 6 months. At one of our public competitors, the same
review and approval process takes 3 to 5 years.
American business will need more and more employees who love math,
science, and technology. I believe that love typically germinates in
middle and high school classrooms. But there is a major gap between
available teaching technology in mathematics and the natural sciences
and the preparation of teachers to use this technology. Perhaps grants
for training future middle and high school math and science teachers
and upgrading the skills of present teachers could be awarded to
education departments/schools at universities around the country under
Title II Teacher Quality in HEA.
Let me move to my second point: Jesuit schools have always put
priority on balancing practical competencies with a strong liberal arts
education, often achieved through an extensive core curriculum. Until
the late nineties, we at Regis found resistance from some of our
corporate partners to this priority. After Enron and similar scandals,
corporations have come to a new realization of the value to the firm of
having employees who are not just technically competent but also
steeped in a broad, thoughtful approach to life and therefore to
business. They realize we are preparing people not just for entry-level
jobs but for senior management and the boardroom. They understand that
literature, history, philosophy, languages, and religious studies
provide the breadth and ethical sensitivity that America and its
corporations need for the long haul. It strikes me that Federal grant
programs encouraging integration of these liberal arts areas with
technical and scientific areas would be an effective witness that our
national leaders realize the importance to the Nation of turning out
citizens not just of competence but of virtue focused on the common
good.
Finally, a note on Distance Education. For about 25 years, Regis U.
has experimented with various forms of distance education. We have our
own testing unit to determine comparative outcomes between our younger
and older students, our classroom and online students, etc. We have
done some studies comparing outcomes of our adult students to adult
students at other institutions. We have been quick about changing what
seems not to work well. We do this both because we believe in quality
and because constant fine tuning gives us a competitive advantage.
Like classroom education, distance education can be extremely
effective and it can also be a dismal experience. Similarly, the
``hybrid'' courses that mix classroom and electronic learning have a
significant potential, but can be done badly.
I would suggest that one way for the Federal Government to
encourage quality in educational innovation is to make sure the
marketplace is protected from deceptive practices. For example, we need
updated Federal protection of educational brands. Regis University has
been fighting for years against an organization of similar name that
sells diplomas through servers outside the country. A recent applicant
wrote along the following lines, ``After looking at your online course
offerings, I concluded your degree fit my interests perfectly. However,
I am not going to sign up because I don't want to have to convince
every new employer for the next 30 years that my diploma is from the
real Regis University and not a degree mill of similar name.''
I was pleased to see that a new Federal database of available
accredited programs is now available. It will be a real service to
potential students and their employers.
I would also suggest that the marketplace itself is an important
force for quality. Adult students and their employers with tuition
reimbursement programs are wonderfully vigilant when it comes to making
sure they get value for their money. For a university serious about
distance education, every tuition-paying corporation is also a quality
control agency. Federal tax laws that favor corporate investment in
employee education are a far more reliable way to guarantee quality
than any new Federal bureaucracy attempting to exercise direct
regulation of already accredited programs.
My thanks to the committee for inviting my testimony. More basic,
thanks for being serious about guaranteeing the future of our Nation by
promoting collaboration between business and higher education.
[Whereupon, at 11:32 a.m., the committee was adjourned.]