This year, like most, it appears that families will be asked to dig deeper to pay for school, and there will be a new round of lamentation that college is increasingly out of reach for many prospective students. This concern is well founded. Accessibility is the basic point of public higher education. But there is more at stake in this debate than the cost of attendance. What gets lost is the issue of quality. The reality of today’s world is that we need our public colleges and universities to be first rate as well as affordable. Indeed, so essential has public higher education become to our economic future that Massachusetts needs one of the nation’s best systems with regard to both performance and state funding.
Historically, state leaders have said that we don’t need to invest in public higher education at the same level as other states because our world-class collection of private intuitions will be able to provide all the college-educated talent we need. State policy has reflected this perspective. Appropriations for public higher education usually rank in the middle of the pack among the states. Today, even after two comparatively strong budget years, Massachusetts ranks 26th in per pupil funding.
This attitude may have made sense 40 years ago when the numbers of college-educated workers needed to sustain our economy was limited and the public system was the junior player in the state’s education enterprise. But not today. Our public campuses educate 52 percent of all undergraduates in Massachusetts — up from 30 percent in 1967 — and two-thirds of the high school graduates who attend college in state do so at a public college or university. The five campuses of the University of Massachusetts, nine state universities, and 15 community colleges have become the primary source of our futureworkforce.
Massachusetts has the most knowledge-dependent economy in the country; by 2020, approximately 70 percent of our jobs will require post-secondary credentials. The industries that drive economic growth — information technology, health care, finance, advanced manufacturing, life science—are knowledge-intensive fields, requiring large numbers of highly educated employees in order to flourish. Increasingly, as our private colleges and universities become national and international in their orientation, our public institutions will need to fill the state’s talent pipeline.
Already, employers in technology-driven fields report difficulty finding qualified employees. A 2014 survey of employers by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education found 69 percent reported difficulty filling positions requiring college-level skills. The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education predicts a shortfall of 55,000 to 65,000 public college and university degree holders within the next decade. Improved performance from our public institutions, especially higher graduation rates, is essential to offset this looming deficit of college-educated workers.
Meeting these expectations will not be easy for our public campuses. At the same time that they must deliver more graduates, they must also deal with a growing percentage of students needing additional academic support to complete college-level work. We should expect campuses to be innovative in addressing this challenge. But no one should think they can achieve the educational results we need on the cheap.
Building excellence in public higher education while improving student success rates and maintaining affordability would be an aggressive triple threat that would score home runs for Massachusetts. But make no mistake about what it will take to put ourselves in the same league with the nation’s top performing systems of public higher education: long-term, predictable, public investment at competitive levels, a committed effort by the campuses, and a greater public willingness to support a system on which we depend for our future prosperity.
Richard M. Freeland served as Massachusetts commissioner of higher education from 2009 until last month. He was president of Northeastern University from 1996 to 2006.
Related:
• Paul Reville: The next steps in education reform
• Michael Crow and William Dabars: Public universities must operate at a higher level
• Tara Holm: The real reason why the US is falling behind in math