As published in The Lowell Sun, April 2, 2005
Coming Home
by Evan S. Dobelle
You can’t go home again.
Or so they say. I have the rare opportunity to come home to New England. Moreover, I have the high honor of leading an organization that I believe will have quite a bit to say about whether the future of New England will be marked by worsening social and economic polarization or by true commonwealth.
The polar route is too familiar. Punish school districts because they are poor. Allow privilege to dominate college admissions. Build a wall between the college campus and the surrounding community. View the world beyond our national borders as little more than a source of cheap labor. Go it alone.
The route to shared regional prosperity, in contrast, is marked by partnership: innovative pre-K-20 educational partnerships, seamless pathways between two-year and four-year colleges, and a shared international savvy that seeks to understand and engage the world’s vibrant cultures and emerging markets.
I come to NEBHE knowing something about this business of partnership. As president of Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts, I had the experience of building new collaborations in the very different Bay State communities of Bedford and of Lowell. At Trinity College, I had the privilege of facilitating a remarkable partnership that bound together a private liberal arts college and a complicated Hartford community. In San Francisco and Hawaii, we energized huge urban institutions with initiatives that revived neighborhoods as we forged vital partnerships with business and labor.
Unfortunately, however, I return to a New England whose commitment to educational excellence is under siege in Washington and under strain here at home.
Our region’s knowledge-driven economy depends upon successful, accessible higher education systems. Yet the recent higher education budget proposals from the administration in Washington, and its recent revision of Pell Grant eligibility formulas, represent an extraordinary assault on higher education access and affordability.
From the Morrill Act that created land-grant universities in the 1860s through the post-World War II GI Bill and the Pell Grant legislation of the 1970s, our nation’s leaders have recognized that educational opportunity is the ticket to the American Dream— and the hallmark of an upwardly mobile society. Now, some in Washington would stand squarely in the door of our colleges and universities and tell middle-class working people, single parents, poor, minorities and recent immigrants that they need not apply. We need to resist these efforts to privatize opportunity.
In addition, we need to be more innovative here in New England. That begins with meaningful early childhood education programs for all our children. Kids who had effective pre-K experiences whether at Boys Clubs, YMCAs, CYOs or Head Start centers, tend to thrive. Kids who didn’t may be already left behind when they enter first grade, destined for a life of remediation at every successive level. Yet the Head Start program for lower-income families is always underfunded.
We also need to find new ways to keep students on track to college and the educated workforce. The youngster who is about to drop out of high school is usually bored and lacking not intelligence, but direction. These kids can and must be engaged and excited by “early college high schools” combining high school and college or skills training programs modeled after European apprenticeship systems. We need to nurture interactive, real-time distance learning programs, always keeping an eye on quality, which means, among other things, limiting class sizes and paying faculty the same for distance learning courses as for classroom instruction.
Most importantly, it has been said that the regions that will succeed in tomorrow’s economy will be those that most effectively turn immigrants into knowledge workers. This is particularly true for slow-growing New England. Our immigrant populations are exploding, but these new New Englanders are not participating in higher education in large numbers. We must reach out to them.
We also need to welcome, indeed recruit, more people to New England. Our higher education institutions have the “brand” to do that. People everywhere exploit the name “New England” to convey an image of superior higher education. But we don’t use it to our own advantage.
Students are permanent tourists with disposable income. The Chinese government alone has announced a plan to educate 300 million new bachelor’s degree-holders over the next decade—30 million a year—who will be fluent in English. Many New England institutions, meanwhile, are looking at falling enrollments and the grim demography of diminishing numbers of 18-year olds. We should be using our New England brand to make sure many of those Chinese students and their counterparts around the world come to our campuses, and not just to the world-famous ones but to all our institutions. Instead, we’re losing students to English-speaking countries with more welcoming visa policies and more aggressive recruitment efforts, including Canada, as well as Australia and New Zealand, which also offer the advantage of proximity.
Where will those students go for business deals and other relationships when they start forming companies? Just as Asian business people once partnered with their MIT and Harvard classmates to form high-tech companies, this new generation of talent will revisit their school ties … but they will be in Sydney and Auckland. Not here.
I come home to New England with some ambitious goals that we may not achieve—among them, free tuition for all community college students, if not all non-occupational students, and a 50 percent pay increase for teachers.
But we can accomplish some more modest goals if we work at it: for starters, that every New England state will mandate and fully fund preschool for all kids, that the administration in Washington will stop the unfunded mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act, that every New England high school will offer students courses in Asian history, and that the New England Board of Higher Education will grow as a passionate, well-informed advocate for excellence in New England, in Washington and around the globe.
Evan S. Dobelle is president and CEO of NEBHE.
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