[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 159 (Tuesday, December 13, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13468-S13469]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HIGHER EDUCATION
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed
in the Record a statement I made to the Secretary of Education's
Commission on the Future of Higher Education on December 9, 2005, in
Nashville.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
A National Dialogue: The Secretary of Education's Commission on the
Future of Higher Education
Thank you for the time you are giving to this Commission's
work, and thank you for inviting me to testify.
I've seen higher education from many sides, so I'm
sometimes asked, ``What's harder: being governor of a state,
a member of a president's cabinet, or president of a
university?''
My answer is: ``Obviously, you've never been president of a
university, or you wouldn't ask such a question.''
I have six suggestions for recommendations you might make.
First, I hope you will urge the Administration that
appointed you to make the National Academies' ``Augustine
Report'' a focus of the President's State of the Union
address in January and of his remaining three years in
office.
This 20-point, $10 billion a year report is the National
Academies' answer to the following question that Senator Pete
Domenici, Senator Jeff Bingaman and I posed to them in May:
``What are the ten top actions, in priority order, that
federal policy makers could take to enhance the science and
technology enterprise so the United States can successfully
compete, prosper and be secure in the global community of the
21st century?'' The report was written by a distinguished
panel of business, government, and university leaders headed
by Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin.
As 2005 ends, we Americans--who constitute just five
percent of the world's population--will once again produce
nearly thirty percent of the world's wealth.
Most of this good fortune comes from the American advantage
in brainpower: an educated workforce, and our science and
technology. More Americans go to college than in any country.
Our universities are the world's best, attracting more than
500,000 of the brightest foreign students. No country has
national research laboratories to match ours. Americans have
won the most Nobel Prizes in science, and have registered the
most patents. We have invented the internet, the automobile
and the computer chip, television and electricity. From such
advances have come a steady flow of the world's best paying
jobs.
As one scientist has said, we don't have science and
technology because we're rich. We're rich because we have
science and technology.
Yet I am worried that America may be losing its brainpower
advantage. Most Americans who travel to China, India,
Finland, Singapore and Ireland come home saying, ``Watch
out.''
The Augustine panel found I am right to be worried:
Last year, China trained 500,000 engineers, India 200,000,
while the U.S. trained 70,000.
For the cost of one chemist or engineer in the U.S., a
company can hire five chemists in China or 11 engineers in
India.
China is spending billions to recruit the best Chinese
scientists from American universities to return home to build
up Chinese universities.
They also found signs that we are not keeping up:
U.S. 12th graders performed below the international average
of 21 leading countries on tests of general knowledge in
math.
In 2003, only three American companies ranked among the top
10 recipients of new U.S. patents.
Of 120 new chemical plants being built around the word with
price tags of $1 billion or more, one is in the U.S. and 50
are in China.
Among the Augustine Report's twenty recommendations were:
Recruit 10,000 new science and math teachers with four year
scholarships and train 250,000 current teachers in summer
institutes.
Triple the number of students who take Advanced Placement
math and science exams.
Increase federal funding for basic research in the physical
sciences by 10 percent a year for seven years.
Provide 30,000 scholarships and graduate fellowships for
scientists.
Give foreign students who earn a PhD in science,
engineering and computing a ``green card'' so they can live
and work here.
Give American companies a bigger research and development
tax credit so they will keep their good jobs here instead of
moving them offshore.
Some may wince at the $10 billion a year price tag. I
believe that the cost is low. America's brainpower advantage
has not come on the cheap. This year, one-third of state and
local budgets go to fund education. Over fifty percent of
American students have a federal grant or loan to help pay
for college. The Federal government spends nearly $30 billion
per year this year on research at universities, and another
$34 billion to fund 36 national research laboratories.
Just this year, Congress has authorized $75 billion to
fight the war in Iraq, $71 billion for hurricane recovery,
$13 billion in increased Medicaid spending and $352 billion
to finance the national debt. If we fail to invest the funds
necessary to keep our brainpower advantage, we'll not have an
economy capable of producing enough money to pay the bills
for war, Social Security, hurricanes, Medicaid, and debt.
Aside from the war on terror, there is no greater challenge
than maintaining our brainpower advantage so we can keep our
good paying jobs. That is the surest way to keep America on
top.
[[Page S13469]]
Second, I suggest that you recommend that Presidents of the
United States appoint a lead advisor to coordinate all of the
federal government responsibilities for higher education.
My greatest regret as U.S. Education Secretary was that I
did not volunteer to be that lead person. Secretary
Spellings, with the appointment of this commission, has
assumed at least some of that responsibility. But the
authority of the Secretary of Education over higher education
is somewhat like the authority of the U.S. Senate Majority
leader or a university president: overestimated. Almost every
agency of the federal government has something to do with
higher education, tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are
invested every year and someone should be looking at all of
this in a coordinated way.
Third, I urge you to join me on the bandwagon for
deregulation of higher education.
The greatest threat to the quality of American higher
education is not underfunding, it is overregulation. The key
to the quality of our higher education system is that it is
not a system. It is a marketplace of 6,000 autonomous
institutions. Yet, thanks largely to the last two rounds of
the federal Higher Education Act, each one of our 6,000
higher education institutions that accepts students with
federal grants and loans must wade through over 7,000
regulations and notices. The President of Stanford has
said that seven cents of every tuition dollar is spent on
compliance with governmental regulations.
Fourth, I urge the Congress to overhaul the Medicaid
program and free states from outdated federal court consent
decrees so that states may properly fund colleges and
universities.
You have two charts before you that tell the story.
Nationally, during the five year period from 2000 to 2004,
state spending for Medicaid was up 36 percent, while state
spending for higher education was up only 6.8 percent. As one
result, tuition was up 38 percent.
The story in Tennessee was worse. Medicaid spending was up
71 percent, while higher education was up only 10.5 percent,
and tuition was up 43 percent.
By the way, during this same four year period, federal
spending for higher education was up 71 percent.
When I left the governor's office in 1987, Tennessee was
spending 51 cents of each state tax dollar on education and
16 cents on health care, mainly Medicaid. Today it is 40
cents on education and 26 cents on health care, mainly
Medicaid.
To give governors and legislatures the proper authority to
allocate resources, Congress should give states more
authority over Medicaid standards and more ability to
terminate outdated federal court consent decrees that remove
decision-making authority from elected officials.
Fifth, I hope you will put a spotlight on the greatest
disappointment in higher education today: Colleges of
Education.
``At a time when America's schools face a critical demand
for effective principals and superintendents, the majority of
programs that prepare school leaders range in quality from
inadequate to poor.'' Those are not my words, but those of a
new report by Arthur Levine, the President of Teachers
College, Columbia University. Or ask Richard Light, the
Harvard professor, who is working with university presidents
trying to find and inspire a new generation of leaders for
our colleges of education. Sometimes colleges of education
are even roadblocks to the very reforms they ought to be
championing. In 1983, when I asked colleges of education to
help me find a fair way to pay teachers more for teaching
well (which not one state was doing at the time), they said
it couldn't be done. So we invented our own system for
thousands of teachers, with virtually no help from the very
people who are in business to figure out such things. And
still today, despite the good work of Governor Hunt and
others, the lack of differential pay is the major obstacle to
quality teaching.
Finally, I hope you will put a spotlight on the greatest
threat to broader public support and funding for higher
education: the growing political one-sidedness which has
infected most campuses, and an absence of true diversity of
opinion.
To describe this phenomenon, allow me to borrow some words
from the past which may sound familiar to your chairman,
Charles Miller, who was once Chairman of the Board of regents
of the University of Texas: ``systematic, persistent and
continuous attempts by a politically dominant group to impose
its social and educational views on the university.'' This
was what the American Association of University Professors
(AAUP) called it in its censure of Texas Governor Pappy
O'Daniel's Board of Regents when the Board fired University
of Texas President Homer Rainey in the 1940's. This is
reported in Willie Morris' book, North Toward Home. Then the
AAUP was talking about one-sidedness imposed by the right,
instead of by the left--but political one-sidedness is
political one-sidedness, no matter from what direction it
comes.
There is more to this charge of one-sidedness than the
academic community would like to admit. How many conservative
speakers are invited to deliver commencement addresses? How
many colleges require courses in U.S. history? How many even
teach Western Civilization? How many bright, young faculty
members are encouraged to earn dissertations in the failures
of bilingual education, or on the virtues of vouchers or
charter schools?
I am not surprised that most faculties express liberal
views, vote Democratic and that most faculty members resist
authority. That is the nature of most university communities.
But I am disappointed when true diversity of thought is
discouraged in the name of a preferred brand of diversity.
This one-sidedness is not good for students. It is not good
for the pursuit of truth. And it undermines broad public
support for higher education. The solution to this political
rigidity lies not in Washington, D.C., but in the hands of
trustees, deans and faculty members themselves.
Last year Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas invited
former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to join
a small group of U.S. Senators in the Majority Leader's
office for a discussion. Dr. Cardoso was completing a
residency at the Library of Congress.
``What memory of the United States will you take back to
your country?'' Senator Hutchison asked Dr. Cardoso.
``The American university,'' he replied immediately. ``The
uniqueness, strength and autonomy of the American university.
There is nothing like it in the world.''
I salute Secretary Spellings and this Commission for
undertaking to preserve and improve higher education,
America's secret weapon for its future success. In coming to
your conclusions, I hope that you will urge the President to
adopt the Augustine Report and to designate a lead advisor
for higher education, that you will jump on the bandwagon to
deregulate higher education and preserve its autonomy, that
you will urge Congress to overhaul Medicaid and federal court
consent decrees so states can properly fund higher education,
and that you will urge trustees to revamp Colleges of
Education and ensure a campus environment that honors true
diversity of opinion.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Secretary Spellings has appointed this
commission to look at the future of higher education. Other than the
war against terror, keeping our brain power advantage so we can create
new jobs here in the United States and keep our jobs from going to
China, India, Finland, and Ireland, is the biggest challenge we face as
a nation.
I made a statement before the Commission on the Future of Higher
Education that it adopt the recommendations of the National Academies'
``Augustine Report'' and urge the President to make it a focus of his
State of the Union Address. The report recommends 20 steps to keep that
brain power advantage, and was written by a distinguished panel of
business, government, and university leaders headed by Norm Augustine,
former CEO of Lockheed Martin.
I also urged the commission to make certain that we deregulate higher
education; to make certain that the President appoints an adviser to
coordinate all of the Federal Government's responsibilities for higher
education; to urge Congress to overhaul Medicaid so States may properly
fund higher education; to put a spotlight on the greatest
disappointment in higher education today, our colleges of education;
and, finally, to put a spotlight on the greatest threat to broader
public support for funding of higher education, the growing political
one-sidedness which has infected most campuses in an absence of true
diversity of opinion.
I salute Secretary Spellings and her distinguished commission. I look
forward to their recommendations. There could not be a more important
subject to our country's future for them to consider than how do we
take this remarkable system of higher education that we built in this
country--the best in the world--and strengthen it so it can play a
pivotal role in helping Americans keep good-paying jobs in the United
States.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
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