Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy at NYU
“U.S. Public Policy for Higher Education:
Increasing Access, Quality and Completion by 2020”
Remarks of Dr. Martha Kanter, Under Secretary
NYU Silver Center – New York, New York
Monday, November 7, 2011 – 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Good evening. It is an honor to join you for this important conversation about education, innovation, and the vital role of America’s colleges and universities in preparing students for the opportunities and challenges of the 21st century.
A historic task has fallen to all of us – but especially to the masters’ and doctoral degree candidates in the audience, who are our next generation of educational leaders. The time has come to rethink higher education in this country, even as we work to extend its great legacy as an engine of our economy and a bulwark of democracy.
You asked me here to speak about the Administration’s higher education policy, but you also asked how my views evolved as a teacher, a professor, a dean, a college president and a policymaker. Here first are some brief reflections.
Teaching is in my DNA. Growing up, I was a natural-born organizer, especially when it came to corralling my three younger brothers. I was the one who set the fairness ground rules for our enormously elaborate clay fights, and the strategic military upheavals in our living room. I learned to referee fights, solve problems, pose big challenges for us to conquer and influenced their trajectories – all qualities I think a leader should have in our fast-changing global knowledge economy.
In the 1960s, I took my siblings to the World’s Fair in Montreal and to many civil rights protests. We couldn’t help being aware, growing up in Boston, of the fight for civil rights – and experiencing the struggle for justice up close left a lasting impression on me.
I can't ever remember not working – when I was in high school, I taught reading in an after school program at the South End House in Roxbury, Massachusetts. In college, I worked for Dr. Abraham Maslow at Cumbres, his East Coast center for human potential and was a teaching assistant apprenticed to Rosabeth Moss Kanter, now at the Harvard Business School. While pursuing my master's degree, I worked as a secretary for six doctors and I kept on working as my career evolved.
Throughout all of this, I learned that the more I expected of others, the more they accomplished. And I learned to speak up and speak out, especially when the undiscussables needed to be discussed.
And, I’ve always had vision. Walking around my campuses for sixteen years before I came to Washington, I envisioned buildings that hadn’t been built. I saw a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic community of professors, deans, staff and students, even though we weren’t diverse in those early years. I worked hard to understand which decisions would most affect the future, and treasured each opportunity to open doors for the new majority to come to college.
When I accepted my current position in Washington, I wasn’t looking for a new job. Education had been my career for some 40 years. For the 16 years before I received “the call” from Secretary Arne Duncan, I’d been a college president, and most recently, chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in California, one of the largest community college districts in the nation, educating 45,000 students a year.
Still, from an early age, I had been taught that when that call to service comes, you go … but you make sure you know who’s calling. So, when Secretary Duncan called, I went to meet him – eager to know more about the Obama Administration’s vision for education.
We talked candidly about the impact of early learning, K-12 and higher education on our nation’s students and families, and I shared my deep concerns about the gathering storms coming at us:
• the thousands who can’t access or are shut out of higher education,
• whether our democratic society in the larger sense would survive the threats, and
• the urgency for America’s families, policymakers and Congress itself to understand the fundamental purpose and value of higher education.
Secretary Duncan shared President Obama’s robust vision for education, and his own plans to increase student access and achievement in our K-12 schools, his belief in the importance of higher education and workforce training, his conviction that lifelong education starts with early learning, his recognition that a high school diploma must signify college readiness, his commitment to high academic standards and quality assessments , and his strong record as superintendent of Chicago’s public schools.
I unequivocally accepted his offer to join Obama’s education team — because education is a top priority for President Obama, Secretary Duncan and our entire administration. And – simply – because we owe it to our students and to future generations.
We all know that most of our students enter higher education with enormous challenges, often having overcome great adversity in their lives. I came to this position to focus increasing academic achievement and success for all students.
The trends in postsecondary access and completion won’t improve unless quality is the driving force of our work. Students must be able to depend on higher education to ensure their success in the digital age, the global economy, and our knowledge-based society.
So now, let me tell you about this Administration’s agenda to help accomplish exactly that. I’ll open with the touchstone for all our work: the bold goal President Obama set shortly after taking office. I’ll describe the challenging climate that makes this goal both so difficult, and so necessary, to achieve. And, I’ll highlight the specific milestones that will be required of all of us, in order to reach the goal.
I’ll also offer some details of our federal access, quality and completion agenda, and highlight some initiatives we’ve launched to meet the 2020 goal by dramatically increasing innovation, efficiency, and productivity – and by investing in and scaling up what truly works to improve student learning and success. I’ll also note some efforts that promise to help move us forward at the institutional, state and national levels.
But, let me first take a moment to thank NYU and the wonderful team at the Steinhardt Institute. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that my niece attends the medical school here at NYU! As one of the largest private universities in this country, with a diverse student body, it is natural for America to look to NYU to help set the pace of change, and this institution is delivering excellence and innovation on so many fronts.
You have a retention rate of 92% for full-time – and 62% for part-time – degree-seeking students. And, your graduation rate of 86% within six years far exceeds the U.S. average of 57%.
You have a distinguished record in the fields of Science, Technology, Math and Engineering along with your affiliate, Brooklyn’s Polytechnic Institute of NYU – the second oldest school of engineering and technology in the country – and you contribute to cutting-edge research through facilities like the Nelson Institute of Environmental Medicine.
You’ve established yourself as the first global network university, with a comprehensive liberal arts campus in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, as well as study and research sites in China, Ghana, Germany, Argentina, England, Israel, and a host of other countries.
Right now, you administer over $20 million in federal education grants and fellowships. The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development is also partnering with our federal Institute for Education Statistics to sponsor a pre-doctoral interdisciplinary training program.
And, our Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, Dr. Jack Buckley, is on leave from the NYU faculty and is already bringing tremendous thought leadership to our Agency and the nation.
So, I applaud your dedication and vision, and thank you for your many contributions to our field. Your leadership has never mattered more.
In fact, at no time has education mattered more to the future of our nation, the prosperity of our states, and the ability of individual Americans to succeed. In higher education, we need bold and decisive action to increase equity and excellence – and to expand and accelerate pathways to degrees, certificates and lifelong learning. We need graduates who can think critically, who can innovate and who can work in diverse teams across borders to analyze and solve the most pressing problems facing our nation and our world. We need graduates prepared to engage actively in civic life at home, to help better our global society, abroad and to spread the shared values of our democracy wherever we can.
At the same time, we need to preserve our leadership on the world stage. In a global economy, nations that out-educate us will out-compete us. As soon as he took office, the President issued an ambitious challenge: by 2020, for America once again to have the world’s best educated, most competitive workforce, and the highest proportion of college graduates of any nation.
The President’s bold vision is the driving force behind our national completion agenda. And, the challenge to help our postsecondary institutions realize the promise of the 21st century for our nation’s growing and diverse students demands all our urgency, energy, and ingenuity.
In the years ahead, more than 60% of jobs will require a postsecondary education as noted in the Help Wanted report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Of the 30 fastest growing occupations in America, half require a Bachelor's degree or more in fields such as healthcare, STEM, and teaching, to name a few.
University degrees and certificates matter! But we need assurance that they represent quality. The challenge for the United States is to get more of our students into and across the finish line of higher education and this goal has never been more urgent.
And, as data from College Board indicates, students with more education make more and put more back into the economy. But today, twenty-five percent of our students drop out of high school. In STEM, American 15 year-olds recently scored 25th out of 29 developed nations on international math exams, and 17th out of 30 in science. Sixty percent of college students need remediation and only half of college students obtain their degrees in six years. And half of that earn a community college degree in three years.
Right now, employers in many sectors struggle to find applicants with the right knowledge, skills and credentials. The result is more than 2 million unfilled jobs, at a time when the U.S. faces the highest unemployment rate in generations. And as McKinsey shows in this slide, over the next decade demand for workers will outpace supply if we don’t address the mismatch.
Given the ever-evolving face of America, our completion agenda must embrace every one of America’s students. Yet right now, a significant completion gap persists for most students of color.
It is morally unacceptable and economically unsustainable – in short, it is contrary to our nation’s founding values – when some Americans, due to background, race, or income level, must struggle harder than others for a chance at the American Dream. We have to close the achievement gap. Generations hang in the balance, and we all know it.
Similarly, study after study has shown that low-income students graduate at lower rates. These achievement gaps have persisted far too long and, when we look across the states, we see tremendous variability and inconsistency in the rate at which students from our nation’s poorest families earn their degrees and certificates.
With increased accountability and transparency, institutions are required to display how low-income students are progressing on the road to completion. But as you can see, there is tremendous variability and inconsistency in the outcomes of low-income students at our nation’s institutions of higher education across our states.
Clearly graduation, and not just enrollment, is our ultimate goal. But access is a necessary step on the path to completion. So here, let me speak briefly about our efforts to open the door to higher education to more Americans.
This administration's commitment to higher education access and affordability is unprecedented.
We’re proud of the fact that, since the President took office, we’ve more than doubled Pell Grant funding, and seen a 50% increase in the number of Pell Grant recipients. In 2008, 6 million college students received Pell Grants; today, more than 9 million are enrolled in college, made affordable with Pell grant support.
The maximum grant is almost a thousand dollars higher today. Today, three million more college students received a Pell Grant than before Barack Obama was elected President. You could fill every seat of every professional football stadium, and every major league baseball stadium, with students - poor and working class students - and that would be just over three million.
We’ve tripled the size of higher education tax benefits. The HOPE credit used to be available for two years. The American Opportunity Tax Credit is 75 percent larger, available for four years, and almost half of it is refundable for low-income families. The American Opportunity Tax Credit makes college more affordable, and the transfer to further postsecondary education more seamless.
Net college costs are still too high almost everywhere, but if we hadn’t dedicated one in every seven Recovery Act dollars – or over $100 billion – to education, those costs would be a lot higher. Those Recovery Act funds have been a lifeline for states.
And, while we're not happy about the rise in student debt, we are making it more affordable. Income-based repayment – and you’ll be hearing a lot more about that over the next few years - is one of the most important for the middle class. Under new rules the President announced two weeks ago, new graduates’ loan payments will be capped at 10 percent of discretionary income. That’s an important development for this year’s graduates, who are entering a tough job market with historically high student loan debt.
Finally, we stabilized the federal student loan program, cut the middlemen out of the loan business, and saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Most of that money was plowed right back into college access in the form of Pell Grant funding.
And, through the American Jobs Act, the President has once again shown his commitment to investing in education, for our nation’s long-term economic prosperity. His proposal includes $30 billion for teacher jobs and another $30 billion for school repair and modernization – including $5 billion to help community colleges, which have seen record enrollment increases, and are essential to meeting the 2020 goal. We hope Congress will show leadership by enacting key pieces of this crucial bill.
Overall, today, 41% of Americans aged 25-to-34 earn a 2- or 4-year degree. The latest comparisons from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that young adults in the U.S. now rank 16th worldwide in college attainment. By comparison, 63% of young South Koreans and 56% of young Canadians have a degree.
By every measure our students are being outpaced by other countries, and that means they face higher prospects of unemployment because, in the information age, there are no good jobs for high-school dropouts … and fewer for those with only high school diplomas. In fact, the unemployment rate for college grads is around 4% compared with 10% or more for the nation as a whole.
Americans everywhere need to shed our complacency about the performance of our students and work harder to raise our standards and expectations for what students are able to learn and accomplish.
We know these challenges come at a time when too many of our universities are straining to meet skyrocketing demand with plummeting resources, as displayed in this slide from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
We’ve seen similar findings in the recently-released report from Dr. Jane Wellman and her colleagues from the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity, and Accountability. They found that, though tuition increases at Public Master’s universities were historically high in fiscal year 2009, they still fell far short of covering decreases in state funding – making up just 38% of the difference in state cuts, as measured on a per-student basis. Today, we have an increasing number of public state university systems receiving less than 50% of their funding from the state.
All these student statistics and fiscal data tell us that the President’s goal is even more ambitious than we realized.
Nonetheless, I’m confident that together we can create and deliver the environment for education reform that will dramatically improve student achievement and – at the same time - level the playing field for our nation’s youth and adults across the country.