Higher Education: An Important Equation in Denton’s Success

Denton Chamber of Commerce Membership Luncheon
Featured Speaker: Dr. Ann Stuart
Friday, February 5, 2010, 11:30 a.m.
UNT Gateway Center

Thank you for this opportunity to address the Chamber. TWU considers this organization friends in that we both are committed to an economically strong and personally satisfying community in which to live.

Denton is so fortunate to be a destination for higher education and health services — two economic engines that make any community desirable and stable.

We are here at UNT and recognize and applaud the aggressive path they are pursuing toward a Tier One research university. Their future football stadium along with their other Division One sports teams bring Denton’s own out for events and brings others to Denton who add to dining out, lodging, gas fill-ups and other spending.

TWU is just across town. This past fall our enrollment was over 13,000 students — 10,000 are at the Denton campus. Many of you know our profile:

• Founded in 1901 (Denton), 1960 (Houston — The Texas Medical Center), 1965 (Dallas Parkland), and 1974 (Dallas Presbyterian).

Of the 13,000 students:

• 91% female
• 68% enrollment growth since 2001
• 42% minority
• 43% in Health Sciences…

This last point is important to Denton as it grows its “medical destination identity” — approximately half of TWU’s graduates are in areas important to Denton’s success in their strategic plan.

It is also important to Denton that TWU employs at its Denton campus over 1,000 faculty and staff. Salary impact alone is approximately $4,600,000. Many of these funds are invested in area housing, cars, groceries, fuel, clothing and other everyday expenditures.

Because higher education is so critical to Denton’s success — to our state’s well-being — and to the well-being of its citizens as it relates to employment success and satisfaction, let’s look a moment at our challenges and future trends in this industry.

Every year, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board collects and publishes enrollment data from all state institutions that results in ‘A Snapshot of Higher Education in Texas’.

According to that snapshot, college and university preliminary headcount enrollment numbers for fall 2009 showed an increase of 9% from fall 2008 enrollments in Texas. Hispanic student enrollments rose 36%; white student enrollments grew by 31%; African American numbers increased by 19%. A total of 1.3 million students are now enrolled in Texas public and independent institutions of higher education. This is a good thing; and you immediately sense the scale -- 1.3 million is a lot of students.

Because of continued demographic shifts, the Hispanic population in higher education will be much higher in 2015 — a date that is significant because the Texas Legislature and the Coordinating Board have endorsed a state higher education plan entitled Closing the Gaps by 2015. The plan has as a goal to add 630,000 new students from the number enrolled in 2000.

Although the state’s fastest-growing population group (Hispanics) has the largest numeric and percentage increases in higher education enrollment since 2000 (remember 36% growth this past fall), the Hispanic participation or enrollment rate in 2008 was still only 4% compared to 5.6% for African Americans and 5.5% for whites. Therefore, Hispanic Texans continue to trail the rest of the state in higher education degrees. But none of these percentages are comforting — 5.6% African American and 5.5% whites. The percentages are all discouraging, particularly if we wish for Texas to have an educated workforce and be an informed citizenry. So, one trend is that too few students are enrolling in and completing higher education — a dire trend if people wish to have any work other than service jobs.

Another significant trend is community college enrollment. Seventy-five percent of the reported growth this past fall was attributed to public two-year college enrollment. This trend is predicted to continue with as much as 70% of the state’s higher education enrollment growth expected at two-year colleges by the year 2015. How fortunate we are to have NCTC in our community.

I attended recently a signing ceremony among the Collin County 2-year College at McKinney and five metroplex 4-year universities — including both UNT and TWU.

Together we will offer a variety of levels of education — a variety of programs — all at one site — not competing — but collaborating for the ease and access of students. This model promises to be replicated.

Despite progress and dedication to enrollment, Texas continues to trail the nation as a whole in overall educational attainment. Texas has one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the country, an issue that will need to be addressed in order to continue to expand higher education enrollment — and meet that goal of 630,000 more students enrolled by 2015 than were enrolled in 2000.

A barrier to this goal may be the cost of a college education, particularly at 4-year institutions. Most of my remarks on the financial relation of cost to enrollments come from The Perryman Report, September 2009 (Chronicle Research Services).

The average cost per semester, not including living expenses, has risen nationally nearly 90% in six years, obviously far above the inflation rate over the same time period.

While the percentage of income needed to pay for college in Texas is lower than the national average, it is still far above that of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education’s designation of “best performing” states. Additionally, the rate of increase has been far greater in Texas than elsewhere, largely the result of a 2003 legislative decision to provide lower levels of state support and to offset that by deregulating board designated tuition.

At TWU we have raised board designated tuition and will continue to do so in order to offer quality education and stay competitive. What funds the state provides higher education are simply not enough to do what must be done, even though the percentage of the state’s funds to higher education are significant. I in no way mean to impugn the Legislature’s support of Higher Education. They are supportive and their consensus to support the Tier 1 legislative initiative is visionary. But I am saying the cost of higher education is more than the state provides.

The economic challenges promise to be steep. Many in this audience know that the Governor, Lt. Governor and Speaker of the House together have sent a letter to all state agencies telling us to prepare for a 5% biennial reduction to our 2010-2011 General Revenue appropriations.

Furthermore, the Texas Legislature appropriated during last session $323 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds (ARRA) for all of the higher education institutions (including health related institutions). We may not see these funds restored. Moreover, the Comptroller’s projection for the first quarter of the current budget is for a 12.9 % reduction in sales tax. So the future is going to take skillful, strategic and tough-minded leadership as it applies to University budgeting. I have confidence we will do so in a disciplined, transparent manner at TWU, but it is not easy and not always well received. The same challenges exist for UNT and NCTC. Increased Board Authorized Tuition will surely be a part of the plan.

It is important that universities communicate the return on investment of higher education. The economic gains from obtaining a college degree continue to demonstrate the pay-off in terms of greater earnings.

The national average earnings for those with a high school degree are approximately $27,000 according to the 2007 American Community Survey from the US Census. This increases to $47,000 for a bachelor’s degree and $61,000 for a graduate or professional degree. The increase in Texas is even greater.

All Texans benefit from increased higher education enrollment and degrees conferred as graduates enhance their own opportunities and the economic potential for the state. Texas’ capacity for economic development and competitiveness is directly tied to an educated workforce. This simply means that ample educational funding is needed to ensure that Texas remains a competitive state in which to do business.

Before closing, I want to give you a glimpse at the future student in higher education. Much is being written, but most of what I say today comes from a 2009 article published by the Chronicle Research Services titled, The College of 2020. The article begins with a question —

What is college and why should I go?

This may be the defining question for colleges to address over the next decade.

More than an expression of teenage angst, the question reflects a fundamental transformation in the way students see higher education, and how they want to go about getting it.

We know the traditional model of college is changing, as demonstrated by the proliferation of colleges (particularly the for-profit institutions), hybrid class schedules with night and weekend meetings, and, most significantly, online learning.

The idyll of four years away from home — spent living and learning and growing into adulthood — will continue to wane. It will still have a place in higher education, but it will be a smaller piece of the overall picture.

Students’ convenience is the future. Students will demand more options for taking courses to make it easier for them to do what they want --when they want to do it.

These changes, and the pressure they will put on colleges to adapt, are coming at a particularly acute time. While many jobs still do not require a college degree, nor will they in the future, most of the higher-paying, career-oriented jobs increasingly require a college degree as a means of entry or advancement.

In other words, the product colleges are offering is in greater demand than ever. But impatience over how slowly colleges are changing is perhaps higher than ever, also. That is reflected in significantly higher enrollment levels at community colleges and for-profit colleges.

The conversion to more convenience for students will multiply over the next decade. To some degree, those situations are already happening, and they will be amplified as time goes on:

• Students will increasingly expect access to classes from cellular phones and other portable computing devices.
• They may sign up to take a course in person, and then opt to monitor class meetings online and attend whenever they want.
• As a predictor, 47% of TWU students are currently enrolled in distance education courses, and a number of those students live on campus and take an online course from their room in the residence halls.
• Classroom discussions, office hours with a professor, lectures, study groups, will all be online.

Colleges must be ready to offer all of these options and others we do not yet know about. The challenge will be to provide them simultaneously and be flexible enough to change the methods as the market changes.

One thing is certain — technology will govern teaching and learning. Let me share with you some predictors from a website titled, "Did you know?"

Did you Know?

• Americans have access to 1 trillion web pages compared to 10,500 radio stations, 5,500 magazines and 200+ cable TV networks.

Did you Know?

• Newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the last 25 years, but in the last 5 years unique readers of online newspapers are up 30 million.

Did you Know?

• The number of unique visitors to ABC and NBC collectively each month is 10 million…
• The number of unique visitors to MySpace, YouTube and Facebook collectively each month is 250 million. (None of these sites existed 6 years ago)

You Probably Do Know…

• Text messaging is an obsession of the American teen — one teenager in Los Angeles sent 217,541 text messages in March 2009
• At TWU, our resident hall advisers tell us that some roommates text each other across the space of their room — so much for the art of conversation or nuanced conversation.
• The mobile device will be the world’s primary connection tool to the Internet by 2020, and colleges and universities need to get ready. Think what this means to recruiting, for example.

Faculty members must be ready too. The Internet has made most information available to everyone, and faculty members must take that into consideration when teaching.

There is very little that students cannot find on their own if they are inspired to do so. And many of them will be surfing the net in class.

The faculty member, therefore, will become less an oracle and more an organizer and guide — someone who adds perspective and context, finds the best articles and research, and sweeps away misconceptions and bad information. As a CEO, imagine leading or implementing this sea-change with a faculty workforce that is graying — and within an organization where tenure must be factored into any change.

The next generation of collegegoers — at least traditional-age college students  — are restless with the traditional forms of learning and eager to incorporate into their educations the electronic tools that have become omnipresent in their lives: their smartphones, laptops, iPods, and MP3 players, much less the new Apple iPad.

Their visions for what they want from their education are concepts educators might question but cannot afford to ignore. Colleges that attempt to force their styles upon students on the basis that it is “good for them” may quickly find themselves uncompetitive in the new higher-education universe.

Conclusion

Huge challenges are ahead. We are facing a transitional moment in higher education. At stake are workforce excellence and effective leadership for Denton County, our state, the nation and the world. We are at risk of changing too much in order to compete in the forecasted market place, of becoming egocentric in higher education, of becoming too narrow  — a place for "Just tell me what I need to know to get the job I want." If we go too far in this way, we stand to lose:

• The Educated Citizen with a sense of history and place;
• The Renaissance Person with a love of learning;
• The Complex Mind with which to question, to logically analyze, to assimilate and to communicate in order to be rich in learning;
• The higher education graduate of depth and vision that America has come to expect — the graduates who will continue America’s leadership in the world.

Education is experiencing a change in culture, which is  always difficult. It will be interesting and important for us all to care and participate in its future.

Thank you.