It is so difficult to know what the future holds for any organization. This past week the Oregon Business Council gathered the leaders of Oregon universities, private and public, to think together about the future of higher education in the state. America has understood, perhaps better than other cultures, that advances in education are also inexorably linked to significant improvements in the economy at both a personal and broad-based cultural level. Perhaps that is why so many are concerned about the future; for the first time in American history it appears that the current generation will not exceed the educational attainment levels of their parents.
Governor Kitzhaber has challenged state educational leaders to push Oregon in a different direction. His call to action he has been labeled, “40-40-20.” He wants 40 percent of Oregonians to have bachelor’s degrees and at least another 40 percent to have some community college preparation by 2025! As most of us in higher education know, this would require a significant expansion of our capacity and to use new innovative methods to enhance student achievement. This challenge is, of course, coming at a time when student debt is at an all-time high and parents are having a difficult time paying for an undergraduate education.
Can such a challenge be met? The easy task is, of course, to poke holes in the governor’s challenge: 1.) It is too expensive and do we have the resources?; 2.) The K-12 system is not preparing the students we get now; 3) What good will it do to expand a broken system? You might be surprised, but the presidents gathered found it easy to talk about the problems first, but the solutions conversation proved to be far too short. The speakers of the day encouraged us to think what might be possible rather than to focus on why the governor’s challenge could not be met.
Just after lunch Patrick M. Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute and author of Financing American Higher Education in the Era of Globalization, provided insight into the history of higher education and what we might learn from the past as we prepare for the future. Callan began the talk by boldly asserting that “we are vastly underestimating the magnitude of change that faces us.” Most of us living in the midst of change wondered how we could be “underestimating” the challenges we are facing. Callan argued that there have been two great paradigm shifts in American higher education and we are in the midst of a third.
