New England Board of Higher Education » higher education

DC Shuttle: President Obama’s 2014 Budget Proposal for Education

wlindsay — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:39:14 +0000

On April 10, President Obama released his delayed 2014 budget proposal, completing the initial phase of the federal budget process. In recent weeks, both House and Senate have passed vastly different budget resolutions, with each chamber heavily influenced by the respective majority. These varying budget resolutions set broad parameters for the more detailed appropriations processes occurring in both House and Senate over coming months. The White House budget proposal describes the President’s priorities and ideas for the spending and revenue targets in 2014. While largely symbolic, the President’s budget does signal areas of budget emphasis early in the negotiating process with Congress.

Education. In the proposal, education was an area of investment, with the President recommending $71.2 billion in discretionary funding for the U.S. Department of Education, a 4.6 percent increase over 2012 spending. The budget proposal focused on three major areas –expanded preschool education programs, consolidation and enhancement of STEM programs and additional hiring of STEM teachers, and addressing the problem of aging school infrastructure.

Higher education. In the area of higher education, the President’s budget includes $1 billion for a college affordability competitive grant program, styled on the Race to the Top initiatives used in recent years to encourage improvement and innovation in K12 schools. The most significant policy element in the area of student financial aid is his proposal to peg student loan interest rates to the market, rather than having them set by Congress. This echoes a Republican proposal issued earlier this week that would tie student loan interest rates to three points above the ten-year Treasury yield. Obama’s version provides less detail. While this would provide near-term relief on student loan interest rates, including the pending Stafford loan jump slated for July 1, some commentators are concerned about the implications when market rates begin to rise again. In the president’s budget, Pell grants would remain funded at the current maximum, $5,645.

Obama’s budget includes a new $300 million High School Redesign competitive grant program for districts that partner with colleges, businesses, and nonprofits to develop the work skills needed for emerging jobs. An increase of $150 million for the Federal WorkStudy Program is also included, which could double the number of participants over five years. Under the President’s budget, funding would be directed toward institutions' demonstrated success in helping students from low-income families complete college. The budget would also expand programs to help students struggling with burdensome student loan debt.

R & D Funding. On the R & D funding side, the President also signaled a commitment to investment, proposing an overall 9 percent increase for non-defense R & D spending. The Department of Energy saw significant increases, as well as the National Science Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey and National Institute of Standards and Technology. For the National Institutes of Health, the President proposed $31 billion in finding for medical research, generally maintaining current spending levels.

As a member of New England Council, we publish the DC Shuttle each week featuring higher ed news from Washington. This edition is drawn from the Council's Weekly Washington Report Higher Education Update, of April 15, 2013.

Founded in 1925, the New England Council is a nonpartisan alliance of businesses, academic and health institutions, and public and private organizations throughout New England formed to promote economic growth and a high quality of life in the New England region. The Council's mission is to identify and support federal public policies and articulate the voice of its membership regionally and nationally on important issues facing New England. For more information, please visit: www.newenglandcouncil.com.

New England Works: NEBHE to Convene Leadership Summit on Bridging Higher Ed, Workforce

John O. Harney — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:49:20 +0000

NEBHE will bring together hundreds of New England higher education, government and business leaders on Monday, Nov. 7, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to discuss the role of higher education in preparing the highly skilled workers that will drive innovation in the region.

Presenters and panelists at the New England Works conference will explore:

What projections say about the gap between supply and demand in the New England labor market.
The varied roles of different kinds of higher education institutions in preparing learners for a fast-changing 21st-century economy.
Types of degrees the region's colleges and universities producing.
How employers regard higher education in addressing labor force skills gaps.

Featured speakers include:

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy (D-Conn.)
Jane Oates, Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Labor
Carol Geary Schneider, President, Association of American Colleges and Universities
Marlene B. Seltzer, President and CEO, Jobs for the Future
Nicholas C. Donohue, President and CEO, Nellie Mae Education Foundation
Eric Rosengren, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Early registration is now available.

New England Guvs on Future of Higher Ed

John O. Harney — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:23:19 +0000

We invited each of the six New England governors to write articles on future challenges facing higher education in their respective states. ...

The Future of Higher Education in Connecticut
by Dannel P. Malloy, Governor of Connecticut

Outwardly, the results appear impressive—growth in enrollments and degrees granted, expanded campuses and program offerings, and a well-known reputation for maintaining high academic standards. Yet at some point along this path, we lost our national ranking as first in educational attainment, outpaced by other states acting more aggressively and with greater foresight in anticipating future economic and demographic challenges. It is imperative that we turn this around now, or else we forever play catch-up.

In Maine, Postsecondary Success Starts Before College
by Paul R. LePage, Governor of Maine

If we’re not engaging students, but still promoting them from grade level to grade level, they’re graduating from high school unprepared for the rigors of college coursework. If they even enroll in college, it’s those students who are most likely to need remediation, and most likely to drop out before they earn a degree. What we need in Maine is an education system that holds students to rigorous standards, encourages students to take charge of their own learning and has flexibility and relevance at its core. In other words, our education system needs to offer all students—especially those at-risk of falling behind—more opportunities to be successful in school.

In Mass., Public Higher Education Is Engine for Opportunity
by Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts

Thanks to our dedicated teachers and committed students, Massachusetts leads the nation in student achievement and classroom innovation. We’ve made education our top priority because it’s the path to a more fulfilling life, a more rewarding career and a richer society. I have personally experienced the transformative power of education and have a deep understanding of what a good teacher and a good school can mean to a young person.

For more on the series, see Here Come the Guvs.

In Mass., Public Higher Education Is Engine for Opportunity

Shoshana Akins — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:00:35 +0000

NEJHE presents exclusive articles by New England's governors on higher education in their states ...

We’ve supported public education by investing in our schools at the highest levels in the history of our state, even when the bottom was falling out of the rest of the budget. And we’ve added new reforms that raise teacher accountability and encourage more innovation in the classroom to reach the children stuck in the achievement gap. These investments in money and time are working; our students rank first in the nation in student achievement and have for each of the past five years. We rank in the top five internationally in math and science. And we were the top scorer in the national Race to the Top competition.

The targeted investments we’ve made and the results we’ve seen don’t stop at K-12. We are mirroring these gains at the level of higher education. Before I was elected governor, I spent most of my professional life in the private sector and did business all over the world. I can tell you from experience that education is our international calling card. We are known the world-over for our highly skilled workforce and world-class education system. Massachusetts is blessed with an unusually high concentration of great public and private universities that have spawned a vast array of research institutions, teaching hospitals and tech hubs.

Our 29 outstanding public higher education institutions are at the heart of this mix and essential to the health of our workforce. They host the skilled innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders that will graduate prepared to compete in the global economy and choose to enrich our Commonwealth by residing here. Continuing to support this excellence is and will remain a challenge in the budget environment we are facing. But by prioritizing education as part of an overall growth strategy, we will continue our investments in educational innovation and promote Massachusetts public higher education on the national and world stages.

That starts by finally building up our campuses again. We’re delivering on a $2 billion higher education capital improvement plan to modernize our campuses and provide students and faculty with access to cutting-edge facilities and technology. That means new buildings, more access to the technology they’ll need to use in their future workplaces and more support for students at every stage of their educational career.

We are sharpening and refocusing the resources we already have in place. Under the leadership of Commissioner of Higher Education Richard Freeland, we have launched the Vision Project, which consists of a series of strategies to unite the public higher education system and promote efficiency, benchmark and track progress, increase transparency and accountability and raise the profile and recognition of the campuses.

We’re doing some exciting work connecting the dots between different areas of public education that didn’t necessarily collaborate before. Pathways Early College Innovation School located at Mount Wachusett Community College is a great example. Parents and teachers in the school district there came together and created an Innovation School, an in-district charter school we enabled through last year’s Education Reform Bill. In partnership with Mount Wachusett Community College, they created a program for 11^th grade students at risk of dropping out to take advantage of the resources offered by the community college in an environment that supported their ambitions and focused their studies.

We’re working to ensure a smoother transition from high school to college and between our community colleges and state universities. I have prioritized dual-enrollment programs, which allow high school students to take courses on college campuses for credit that counts toward their diploma and toward a college degree. The program provides access to advanced subject matter and also exposes high school students to life on campus to build their confidence so they are better prepared when they transition to higher education. We instituted the MassTransfer program, which allows students to fluidly transfer across our 29 public campuses. And the University of Massachusetts Amherst just launched the Community College Connection Program, which gives preference to admissions, housing and financial aid to talented community college students seeking to continue their studies at our flagship public campus.

Finally, we’re scaling up efforts to match higher education with local employers to ensure students are fully prepared to enter the workforce upon graduation. I have tasked a group of economic development and education officials to work on improving our system’s ability to respond to industry and employer needs, especially through our community colleges. Members of my team are taking a close look at how we can better orient our higher education programs to meet the needs of a dynamic, evolving workforce, and I look forward to implementing their recommendations.

These targeted investments along with our reforms and the focus we’ve placed on connecting our students with opportunities for success, are working. A world-class, accessible system of public higher education is an important component of our growth strategy and our commitment to competing in the global economy. Massachusetts already hosts the brightest graduates and strongest institutions in the country. But best in the world is where we’re heading.

Deval Patrick is serving his second term as Massachusetts governor.

Here Come the Guvs …

John O. Harney — Fri, 27 May 2011 14:45:46 +0000

New England's governors on strategies for higher education

We've invited each of the six New England governors to write short articles for The New England Journal of Higher Education on future challenges facing higher education in their respective states. In June, we'll begin posting each piece by the chief executives in alphabetical order by state, starting with Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

A decade ago, in a more playful way, we asked prominent New Englanders to imagine they were campaigning to be "Governor of New England." It being a fictional position, the "candidates" had nothing to gain and nothing to lose. The exercise brought forth candid thoughts about the ideals and complexities of regionalism and interstate cooperation. See Governor of New England? Issues Revealed, Tongues in Cheek, the Campaign Begins.

Keep an eye out for the ideas and strategies of real, sitting New England governors on the very non-fictional business of improving higher education through tough times.

Biting the Hand: A Commentary on Academe’s Books About Itself

John O. Harney — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:50:32 +0000

A new literary genre seems to be booming—book-length critiques on the state of American higher education. While a few celebrate American exceptionalism, most lament the decline of higher learning. Whether exuberant or depressed, their tone is rarely tempered. The authors’ demographics suggest why—they are generally at the twilight of their own academic careers, taking one last shot at the state of things as they see it, harkening back to times past, turning to (or, in many cases, turning on) the environment they think they know best, and tempted to generalize from their own context, values, and times to higher learning broadly. As with the Buddhist parable of the elephant and the blind men, they focus on what they know and willingly extrapolate.

These authors often overlook the rich diversity of what higher education encompasses in our society. They fail to get their heads around that variety to appreciate the complexities, contradictions and overarching trends that make American academe truly unique. Their approach is often self-referential and anecdotal, settling old scores and getting in the last word on what it means to be truly educated. Writing as much as a memoir as methodical analysis, these authors make sweeping generalizations with words that convey hopelessness and despair as universities sink further into their graves. We are in “crisis,” “decline,” at a “tipping point” and so on. The flipside of the muscular idealism of American higher education is the cynical self-bashing that has such a large audience in academe.

Given the range of institutions, models, and missions, and with so many of our universities too intricate in themselves to be neatly characterized, these authors have a Rorschach test of an opportunity to free associate, exaggerate and pontificate on what they think they see and what they believe should predominate.

Offspring of previous major thinkers, many of these authors write in either the tradition of the University of Chicago’s long-serving president, Robert Hutchins—with an emphasis on purifying undergraduate liberal education—or writer, reformer and administrator, Abraham Flexner—celebrating advanced graduate teaching and basic research (and blasting the intrusion of “make-believe professions” and disciplines)—or, having it both ways, Clark Kerr, the transformative president of the University of California, whose multiversity miraculously encompasses all of the above, as it serves society in ever broader ways.

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s recent polemic focuses on making undergraduate education more open, affordable and focused on the liberal arts. Like muckraker Upton Sinclair did almost a century ago, they trekked across the country in search of examples of the best and the worst. They would purge the vocational, and eliminate tenure. Higher education is too deferential to senior faculty, too exploitative of contingent faculty, too solicitous of students through materialistic and extraneous frills (especially athletics), too padded with superfluous administrators, too accommodating of social fads and vocational training, too willing to mimic corporations by appointing executives with expansionist dreams and lavish lifestyles, and too willing to abandon core academic principles and compromise rigorous undergraduate education.

For Hacker and Driefus, the descent into decadence commenced when Clark Kerr created the University of California system in the early sixties which took the university off in many different directions at the same time and place: “He coined a new idiom, multiversity: an institution willing to take on any assignment related to knowledge, no matter how remote the association.” They, instead, would focus on quality teaching, de-emphasize irrelevant faculty research, spin off medical schools and research centers, explore “techno-teaching” and demand that America’s elite schools deliver on their promise.

Peter Smith, author of Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent, founding president of Community College of Vermont and former Vermont congressman now with Kaplan, focuses on the opportunity costs of poorly serving much of the nation’s people. America’s universities are not equipped to respond to the workforce education needs of the population. He embraces the catalytic role that universities play in preparing students for vocations—the very element that Hacker and Driefus find so corrupting.

Harvard’s former undergraduate dean, Harry R. Lewis, laments the soullessness of his elite university, and blasts his colleagues for just going through the motions rather than reaching new heights of holistic undergraduate intellectual and leadership development. Ellen Schrecker doesn’t mince words where she apocalyptically proclaims the “end” of the American university in her book title. Her “lost soul,” in sharp contrast to Lewis’s, results from the pressures to invest in materialistic campus amenities rather than core academic faculty and facilities. In her view, full-time, research-oriented faculty need to restore their hegemony.

Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University’s religion chair, draws much from his own unique experience and perspective to lament what he sees as declining educational quality. But Columbia’s former provost, Jonathan R. Cole, takes a more triumphant, nuanced, and systematic approach in his epic story of the American research university.

The litmus test for America’s academic greatness, for Cole, is the production of fundamental knowledge and relevant research—as measured by international academic rankings, Nobel Prize winners and academic journal articles. The top one hundred or so research universities are the envy of the world and worthy of their reputation, autonomy, and investment. With the founding of institutions like Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago, and codified in the hybrid model created and celebrated by Clark Kerr, Cole enthusiastically embraces the multipurpose, highly resourced Gessellschaft—that succeeds despite its many functions, and as a far better place because of this breadth. The quest for a singular unity of purpose—so cherished, even in diametrically opposite ways, by Hutchins, Flexner and their intellectual descendants—conflicts with the internally contradictory and externally diverse nature of our non-system of higher learning.

Imagine you were from another country unfamiliar with American higher education and dependent on these books to comprehend how academe functions—or dysfunctions. Each presents a few tiles in the otherwise rich, intricate, and elusive mosaic we fondly embrace (or, more commonly, harshly berate) as our colleges and universities.

Jay A. Halfond is dean of Metropolitan College and Extended Education at Boston University.

LGBTQ College Presidents Organize to be Heard

Shoshana Akins — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:23:53 +0000

In August 2010, nine openly gay college leaders met to form a first-of-its-kind collegiate organization, the LGBTQ Presidents in Higher Education. Among their ranks were three officials from New England: Ralph Hexter, past Hampshire College president and among the first openly gay presidents; Katherine Ragsdale, president of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge; and Theo Kalikow, president of the University of Maine Farmington. The group's intention was to create a proper caucus for non-heternormative officials in the realm of higher education and bring issues concerning this population to a larger audience.

Four months later, the group put out an introductory video on YouTube in which the presidents expound on their purpose and hopes for the future of the LGBTQ community in higher education. Now including 25 openly gay college presidents in the U.S., the LGBTQ Presidents in Higher Education will make its official debut with a panel presentation at the March 2011 meeting of the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C.

DREAM Act: What It Could Mean for Waking New England?

John O. Harney — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 20:00:10 +0000

According to a June poll by First Focus, an advocacy organization dedicated to making children and families a priority in federal policy, 70% of Americans support the DREAM Act. Rallies are occurring all across the country. There is even a hunger strike in Texas to help get the bill passed. In addition, legislators from the six New England states seem to be highly in favor of it. Eight of the region’s 12 U.S. senators and 19 of its 22 members of the House are likely to vote yes on the DREAM Act, according to www.dreamact.info.

The DREAM Act would grant undocumented youth eligible for a six-year-long conditional path to citizenship that requires completion of a college degree or two years of military service.

How might the act affect New England?

Based on data from the U.S. Census, Department of Homeland Security, and StateMaster, my rough and conservative estimates indicate that approximately 206,000 illegal immigrants live in New England. About 121,000 of them would be under age 35 (so potentially eligible for DREAM Act benefits).

NEBHE’s New England 2025 initiative states that New England will need 665,000 additional college degrees by the year 2025. While not all of those eligible under the DREAM Act would become college graduates, if only 20% of those eligible earned a college degree that would be an additional 24,280 college degrees.

A lot is said about the potential cost of the DREAM Act, but this is a country built on the belief that education is a strong investment. The real concern should not be what the cost of the act is, but what benefit an investment in 25,000 college degrees would bring New England. Or even more so, what is the cost if we lose students? America needs to support all talented individuals within its borders if we are to maintain our status as the top economy in the world.

Coming Into Focus: A New Vision for Public Higher Education in Massachusetts

NEBHE Admin — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:55:38 +0000

This past September as thousands of college students moved into their dorms, the Boston Globe ran a front-page story about UMass Amherst. The theme of that story was familiar to anyone who has worked in public higher education in Massachusetts: The university community has high aspirations, but those hopes and plans have been consistently thwarted by public apathy and governmental neglect. Quoting a former Bay State governor, the Globe evoked a deeply rooted doubt in the body politic as to whether Massachusetts needs excellence in public higher education. After all, we have Harvard and MIT, not to mention a distinguished additional array of private colleges and universities. Who needs a first-class public research university? Our teaching-oriented state universities and community colleges didn’t even rate a mention.

A second Globe story written by veteran higher education reporter Jon Marcus echoed some of these same themes in a piece that ran Oct. 31. It too focused attention on the “second-class treatment” Massachusetts’ 29 public universities and colleges have been getting from the state.

Some in our public higher education community were understandably outraged that the Globe, in both instances, neglected our many outstanding achievements. But frustration should not blind anyone to the painful truths these stories contain about public perception. Many in Massachusetts do doubt the importance as well as the quality of public higher education in our state. Many do believe, deep down, that Massachusetts has done well enough for many years based on the excellence of its private institutions and that those institutions will enable us to flourish in the future.

A reality check is in order, so here’s a memo to Massachusetts.

The world has changed. What may have been true historically is no longer true. In our state’s quintessential knowledge economy, new jobs are in fields that require a college education. Population growth is stagnant; domestic in-migration is non-existent. Bright young professionals trained in our private universities often leave the state after graduation. The college-educated workers, executives and entrepreneurs of the future will come from the public-sector institutions that now educate two-thirds of the high school graduates who attend college within the state. These institutions do a terrific job, but they can’t sustain quality and affordability forever while enrollments grow and support stagnates.

So wake up, Massachusetts. This is the 21st century.

Sincerely, Richard M. Freeland, Commissioner of Higher Education.

Anyone who works on economic development will tell you that Massachusetts can’t compete with other states on housing costs or labor costs or health care costs, or on the quality of transportation systems, efficiency of permitting processes, or the level of taxation. In all these comparisons, the Commonwealth can’t hope to be much better than average. Where we can and must compete is in the education of our citizenry, the quality of our workforce and the strength of our research enterprise. Our job is to connect the dots: If you want the nation’s best-educated citizenry and workforce, you need to invest in public higher education. You can’t have one without the other.

Yet Massachusetts has never supported a system of public higher education at levels consistent with the goal of national leadership. Although Gov. Deval Patrick attempted to restore years of cuts to higher education budgets, state support is currently no better than average among the states. In FY09, the Commonwealth ranks 26^th in the nation in funding per FTE.

The Vision thing

In the end, Massachusetts will have the system of public higher education that the people of the Commonwealth demand. My goal as commissioner is to make sure that as demand for access increases, demand for quality increases along with it. In pursuit of this goal, I have invested much of my time in an initiative called the Vision Project, a call for aspiration, accountability and unity in public higher education. The message of the Vision Project to the faculty and staff of our public colleges and universities is that, to borrow the current cliché, we need to be the change we want to see.

This effort has been a long time in the making. Throughout last year, discussions involving the Board of Higher Education, the presidents of the state universities and community colleges, and the leadership of UMass examined how we can most effectively respond to limited support at a time when our importance to the state is greater than ever. The Vision Project arose from the perception that we need a new approach to advancing our cause, that years of complaints by many in the system have not produced significant increases in state investment. We began with a brief Vision Statement that was produced, vetted, critiqued and tweaked during months of discussion:

We will produce the best-educated citizenry and workforce in the nation.
We will lead the nation in research that drives economic development.

This statement expresses something that thoughtful civic leaders truly believe, that the primary assets of Massachusetts in the fierce competition among states for talent, investment and jobs are the educational levels of our workforce and our capacity for innovation rooted in university-based research.

The Vision Statement has provided us with the basis for a “public agenda” for public higher education in Massachusetts. We asked ourselves the question: If the Vision statement defines what the state most needs us to accomplish, what must be true for us to claim that we are doing that job? This question led us to formulate the key outcomes that constitute the functional heart of the Vision Project: seven explicit, measurable goals to which we will aspire as a system.

Five of the goals focus on our educational programs: We will send more of our high school graduates on to college than any other state. We will graduate students from our public campuses at higher rates than our peer institutions in other states. We will develop authentic assessments of learning to demonstrate that our students are achieving high levels of intellectual competence in comparison with students elsewhere. We will align our programs with the workforce needs of the state. And we will eliminate disparities among ethnic, racial and economic subpopulations with respect to all these educational outcomes. The two research goals, reflecting the work of UMass, are also very straightforward: We will be a national leader in research related to economic development and in economic activity derived from that research.

With the seven key outcomes defined, we turned to measurement and agreed upon a set of metrics that will be used to compare Massachusetts with other states in the areas where we seek national leadership. We will continue to refine these metrics as the Vision Project develops.

The Vision Project was endorsed by the Board of Higher Education last May. With that vote the focus shifted from designing the project to implementing it. In the coming months, we will learn whether broad agreement on overall objectives translates into rock-hard support for a focused effort, for transparency and for accountability. We have promised the public that we will share not only our good news and best scores but also our challenges and areas in need of improvement. I attach a sense of urgency to this work. As several speakers at a recent Vision Project launch conference made clear, the days when public institutions can say to government, “Give us your money and leave us alone” are long gone. We must be willing to be accountable.

Our immediate focus is on organizing the work of the Department of Higher Education, in collaboration with our 29 public campuses, to work toward national leadership in each of the seven key outcomes identified by the Vision Project. In two of these areas—student learning outcomes assessment and graduation rates—task forces are already at work developing systemwide strategies and policies. In the other areas, efforts are still taking shape. Our goal, by the end of the current academic year, is to have clear strategies at the system level to advance our work on each of the key outcomes.

A final element of the Vision Project is the annual report, a compilation of data on our standing in comparison with other states and our progress toward national leadership. Data will be reported by segment, not by individual institution, to keep the focus on the overall achievements of the system. This is where we have an opportunity to demonstrate our commitment to accountability. The message of the annual report to the public will be: You know you need public higher education to achieve certain objectives. We are focused on this mission. In some areas we are already national leaders. In other areas we have work to do. But we are doing that work and on the whole, we are a much stronger educational enterprise than many of you think we are. We are about aspiration and excellence. We deserve your support, and we need it to accomplish what we must on behalf of the Commonwealth.

The ultimate goal of the Vision Project is to change public perceptions and attitudes. Many of my colleagues in higher education, however, have reason to be skeptical about change. This state has seen multiple attempts to restructure the system and embark on reforms. Often those who set the goals provide little support for reaching them. Campuses are urged to achieve more, with more students and with less money. It is tempting to be resigned in the face of entrenched patterns.

I view such cynicism as a luxury we cannot afford. I define my work as an education leader in a political context. Max Weber once observed that “Politics is the slow boring of hard boards.” To make change, one needs to identify goals that are important to the body politic even if most people don’t yet understand them, and then to pursue those goals relentlessly, doing one’s job well in the present while working toward a breakthrough moment when the public consciousness is altered, when the political dynamics shift, and when real change becomes possible.

I believe that such a breakthrough moment is on the horizon for Massachusetts. For years education policy discussions have focused on K-12 reform. The result of the Commonwealth’s substantial investment in elementary, middle and high schools is that we can now boast of the highest NAEP scores in the nation. But what is this reform effort for, if not to prepare students for college? Our students need us to do that slow boring; the state needs our institutions to be first-rate. The goal of the Vision Project is to pursue excellence now with the resources available to us while advancing an enhanced appreciation of the importance of our work and positioning ourselves to take advantage of the possibility of change when the moment comes.

Show Me the Money! Why Higher Ed Should Help K-12 Do Economic Impact Studies

John O. Harney — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 17:17:46 +0000

At no point in recent history has the need for educational institutions to justify their investment value been greater than today. Despite news of a “slow recovery,” budget cuts continue with drastic consequences for schools serving all levels of education. During these economically insecure times, when government-supported industries are competing for scarce public funds, evidence of education’s positive economic impact is more important than ever.

Organizations and industries in all sectors increasingly conduct economic impact studies to draw attention to the positive direct and spillover effects they have on employment creation, state revenue, the tax base, inter-industry business generation, consumer spending and so on. Impact assessments have become hugely popular marketing tools. Just Google “economic impact study” and you will get 9,820,000 hits in 0.48 seconds.

In education, economic impact studies have been largely the product of higher education institutions. Colleges and universities have recognized that they can cultivate public, political and financial support by effectively demonstrating their high return-on-investment value. For more than a decade, all types of higher education institutions (two-year, four-year, public, private, rural, urban, large, small) have been conducting these studies. Some of these studies are large-scale, incorporating sophisticated econometric modeling and the use of a multiplier to identify the full-scale impact of an institution(s) in a given city, metropolitan area or region. Others are less extensive, using straightforward indicators such as institutional spending, capital outlay and salaries and wages disbursed to demonstrate a direct economic impact.

Business and nonprofit leaders across a diverse array of industries, including higher education, understand that an economic impact statement serves as a valuable public relations and political tool. However, in education, the K-12 sector has yet to catch on to the trend. Given that the recession is wreaking havoc on elementary, middle and secondary school budgets, it would benefit K-12 schools to follow higher education’s example and draw greater public attention to their significant economic worth.

K-12 officials can benefit by engaging higher education leaders in discussions about how to administer economic impact studies. In fact, I would argue that it is in the interest of higher education to assist K-12 schools in carrying out economic impact assessments; after all, supporting earlier educational levels translates into a direct investment in tomorrow’s college students. In other words, the adequacy of educational services and inputs provided for present-day elementary, middle and secondary schools has a clear effect on the college readiness, 21^st century skill set and subsequent workforce preparedness of students entering college in the years to come. Regional conferences, online forums and workshops are an excellent place to initiate conversations and hold forums that can lead to important collaborations between higher education and K-12 institutions.

Tough budget times

In New England, elementary, middle and secondary school districts are encountering budget shortfalls in the millions. Many New England school officials report that their district budgets have been reduced so drastically that they have no choice but to cut personnel and programs despite every effort to avoid doing so.

According to a study of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), schools nationwide have been responding to cutbacks by decreasing educational programming, increasing class sizes, laying off employees, under-heating classrooms, shortening the school week, doing away with intervention programs, eliminating co-curricular programs and activities, charging rising user fees for after-school athletics and arts and freezing spending on technology and instructional materials. The AASA surveyed 836 school administrators and found that among schools in the survey:

44% increased class sizes in 2009-10, up from 13% in 2008-09
44% laid off personnel in 2009-10, up from 13% in 2008-09
22% cut academic offerings in 2009-10, up from 7% in 2008-09
27% stopped providing electives in 2009-10, up from 7% in 2008-09
28% eliminated extra-curricular activities in 2009-10, up from 10% in 2008-09
32% stopped technology purchases, up from 16% in 2008-09
24% cut down on instructional materials in 2009-10, up from 19% in 2008-09.

The school budget crisis has worsened year after year since the recession began. Although stimulus funds provided through the ARRA have prevented more harmful cuts from occurring, they have not brought school funding to an adequate level. Many people believe this fiscal crisis is a passing phase, and normalcy will return when the “Great Recession” is over. However, the financial downturn is taking a human capital toll that compounds each day that kids are in school. The phenomenon of cuts is not limited to a few schools, but is widespread, and hurting the most vulnerable learners, many of whom are seeing targeted programs such as enrichment activities, after-school tutoring, technology support and remedial services obliterated completely.

NEASC’s exploration

As a research associate for the New England Association of Schools & Colleges (NEASC), I have worked on a New England-wide economic impact assessment of NEASC-accredited schools for the past six years. Through this time, I have learned a great deal about the political benefits of carrying out these studies and the demand for economic impact information both within and outside of the education sector. Certainly NEASC, one of six regional accrediting associations in the nation with a membership consisting of 2,000 schools and higher education institutions, has been uniquely positioned to assess the impact of the region’s schools given its access to member data and a dedicated research office, which serves as an informational clearinghouse to educators, elected leaders and the public.

NEASC conducted its first economic impact study in 2004 to illustrate that educational institutions are more than mere economic contributors—they are vital to New England’s economic development. To effectively convey this message to politicians, NEASC needed to deliver data in concise and crystal clear terms. A colleague once said to me that, as educators, we would benefit from gaining greater proficiency in “Washingtonian,” (i.e. politician-speak), a language that does not have nouns, adjectives or verbs but rather numbers, statistics and bullet points. So, in 2004, NEASC issued its first Economic Impact Report to showcase a crystal-clear figure of $78,862,645,323 representing the direct impact of accredited PK-16 schools in the New England region.[1]

Few people—educators, public officials, members of the business community—had any idea that education had such an enormous impact on the New England economy until NEASC shared its initial findings. Thereafter, we garnered considerable attention from regional and local officials who sought to share this information with constituents or present it at regional meetings, conferences or in speeches. Some organizations approached NEASC requesting town-level or other sub-regional data.

NEASC continues to publish an annual Economic Impact Report that is shared with educators as well as the New England Congressional delegation and their aides each year. Each subsequent study has shown an increased impact: $78 billion in FY03, $93 billion in FY04, $114 billion in FY06 and $135 billion in FY07. Through sharing this information, it is our intent to prompt a change in the discourse surrounding school finance so that regular citizens and elected leaders will view schools as more than a social good consuming public funds, but as a vital economic stimulus with huge investment gains for everyone.

The average citizen may find it surprising that officials do not already have access to or an understanding of economic impact figures for all publicly funded sectors. Often, people assume that some bureaucrat or Congressional aide is collecting this sort of information. In practice, politicians tend to rely on industry to gather this data and share findings with stakeholders. The burden of identifying the investment value of educational institutions—whether in a town, county, metro-area, state or region—is largely on the education sector itself.

While there are education and market research firms that conduct impact studies, so far only higher education institutions have seemed to contract these firms to do studies. For instance, Appleseed, a New York-based economic development, market and social research organization, has conducted dozens of impact studies for higher education institutions. In 2003, it published Engines of Economic Growth: The Economic Impact of Boston’s Eight Research Universities on the Metropolitan Boston Area, which today remains widely referenced for its valuable data on higher education’s financial impact in Boston.

Economic impact studies are not always large-scale and can, indeed, be undertaken by an individual K-12 school. Choate Rosemary Hall, an independent secondary school in Wallingford, Conn., has a link on its website with economic impact information. Highlighting its local impact, Choate states that it is the seventh largest employer in Wallingford and spends $16.8 million on faculty and staff salaries. School purchases total more than $28 million while tax and utility expenditures amount to over $1 million. Choate’s expenditures on capital projects have totaled $110 million from 1994-2008. The Choate study could easily be used as a model for other public and independent schools looking to share some uncomplicated economic impact data.

NEASC’s latest Economic Impact Report, issued in February of 2010, shows that NEASC member schools and higher education institutions in New England have a summative economic impact amounting to $135,209,540,664 as of FY07 (the latest year for which audited school financial data are available). Today, when NEASC informs public officials that the region’s schools and higher education institutions have an impact on the regional economy that exceeds most other industries, they are very attentive.

Job engines

Policymakers are especially interested in job-related impact data. While much of the industry’s impact is carried by higher education, the K-12 sector in New England still represents an impact of more than $17 billion. The estimated revenue base of NEASC-accredited K-12 public schools is $9.6 billion as of FY07, exceeding the same-year revenues of several top-grossing regionally based Fortune 500 companies, including BJs Wholesale Club, Praxair, Northeast Utilities, Pitney Bowes, Genzyme and United Natural Foods.

In addition, NEASC’s analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data finds that about 10% of the workforce in New England has a job connected with education. A leading employment sector in New England, education provides jobs to more than 490,000 people. Moreover, the number of New Englanders with a job in education[2] is greater than the number of people employed in healthcare occupations (411,250), computer and math sciences occupations (204,710) and business and financial services (334,720), according to U.S. Department of Labor data. Schools have an enormous impact on other industries in the region. Accredited public schools at the K-12 level alone spent more than $883 million on capital investments, $6 billion on instruction, over $389 million on student transportation and $252 million on food services in FY07.

At this point you may be wondering why, if NEASC already evaluates the economic impact of K-12 schools in New England, there is a need for more regional studies. As it turns out, our study is not without limitations. For one, NEASC’s study assesses only accredited school and higher education institutions. That means that while most public and private higher education institutions and secondary schools are incorporated in the study, the majority of public elementary and middle schools, which constitute a relatively new membership category at NEASC, are not. Thus, education’s impact in New England is higher than our estimate since our figure does not include all K-12 schools in the region. Additionally, the NEASC study uses New England as the primary geographic unit of analysis and then disaggregates data by state, so that the broad regional impacts are determined but the sub-regional and local impacts are not (a study of sub-regional impacts would require, in fact, an altogether different methodology).

Votes for school budget overrides across New England towns and heightened controversy over public education spending render a need for public schools to demonstrate to taxpayers the local economic impact of their school. NEASC does not have local-level impact information, which would necessitate the collection of many different data that only schools themselves can track.

The demand for local and sub-regional level economic impact information is increasing. In the past six months, NEASC has received more requests from regional development councils, college consortia, reporters and education committees requesting town or county data. While we are able to share New England, state and some sub-regional data, we do not have local economic impact information to meet the requests we receive. Despite the growing demand for economic impact data at the sub-regional level, there is currently an industry dearth of collected, organized and deliverable information.

One way to launch studies in the K-12 sector is to actively foster collaborations. An initial approach for K-12 officials would be to find higher education experts, perhaps at a college or university located in the same town or county. K-12 schools can benefit immensely from partnering with higher education institutions that can help them demystify the how-to’s of conducting an impact study.

This year, NEASC, will celebrate its 125^th anniversary at its Annual Meeting and Conference at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston from Dec. 1 to 3, 2010. We will present a session at that meeting titled “Education: New England’s Greatest Economic Asset” and we hope to engage K-12 and higher education leaders in a forum on this issue, in order to spearhead partnerships between K-12 schools and higher education institutions. We invite readers to attend. Registration details are available at the NEASC website: www.neasc.org. [In addition, we will be reading your comments posted for this article and hope to spearhead some productive online discussion on this subject through NEJHE’s interactive website.

To view the accompanying tables and graphs for this article, see pdf.

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Nadia Alam is a research associate at the New England Association of Schools & Colleges .

Endnotes

[1] The NEASC study does not use a multiplier to capture residual economic impacts. NEASC aims to keep the findings straightforward, precise and avoids theoretical measures determined by a multiplier. Multiplier effects represent economic impacts generated by indirect or offshoot spending. For instance, while an institution’s expenditure on personnel, salaries and wages and every day materials constitute a direct impact, the next-round spending of those salaries and wages by institutional personnel represent an offshoot (multiplier) impact.

[2] includes teachers, postsecondary professors, instructional coordinators, teacher assistants, administrators and other school staff