The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2008

Innovate now, or else

What You Need to Know About Solutions for Higher Education
by Dan Huff

The message is clear: The more you learn, the more you earn, but can Arizonans learn their way to a prosperous future in time?

If Arizona is to compete in the 21st-century global economy, citizens better start paying a lot more attention to higher education, warns Fred DuVal, a member of the Arizona Board of Regents.

University of Arizona President Robert Shelton agrees. Although he’s been at the UA only two years, Shelton already has moved to deal with some of the dire challenges DuVal has been pointing out to anyone who’ll listen.

DuVal estimates he’s brought the urgent news to roughly 150 groups throughout the state through his Solutions through Higher Education program. It boils down to this:

“I recognized from polling data that people in Arizona and throughout the nation understand that competitiveness is important,” DuVal says. “But they don’t understand the connection between higher education and research and the resulting innovation and knowledge-based economy. They’re simply not making the connection between their realization that we’ve got to make America more competitive and the need to support higher education to do that.”

Last year the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine jointly issued a dismal report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, noting that in a world “where advanced knowledge is widespread and low-cost labor is readily available, U.S. advantages in the marketplace have begun to erode.”

Evidence of that erosion, according to the National Academies, includes:

The list goes on and on, and the report also describes the rise of a prosperous, well-educated middle class now occurring by the hundreds of millions in India, China, and other parts of Asia.

DuVal points out in his presentation that “innovation is the only way the United States can compete with high-skill, lower-wage economies … without reducing wages. We cannot compete on size and cost.” He adds that “an innovative economy demands a highly educated population and substantial investments in education, research, and development and entrepreneurship.”

But the U.S. is not keeping up, he adds, noting that America ranks 21st among nations in high-school completion rates, and 15th in college completion. Closer to home, while Arizona ranked 26th in the nation in the percentage of citizens 25 years and older with a bachelor’s degree in 2006, it fell to 39th in the younger populations who could be expected to have college degrees. The trend is not good for Arizona’s prosperity among the states, much less the world.

“We have three challenges,” DuVal says. “The first is that we start from behind — Arizona is in the bottom 10th in comparable states in terms of our degree production. Our dropout rate is very high. Two, is that an ever-larger percentage of our students are going to be Hispanic and other minorities, including Native Americans, who come from cultures where education has been considered more or less a challenge. And third, our growth rate is so robust … that we’re always playing catch-up … We start 21 new elementary schools every year, but we’re not building higher education at anywhere near comparable levels to facilitate that rate of growth.”

What does all this mean for Arizona and America’s economic future?

“We are on a precipice of being the first generation in our history to handoff less opportunity to the next generation,” DuVal warns, adding that already median earnings, in terms of wages paid to U.S. workers, have been flat for an entire generation. The other part of DuVal’s message is equally stark, but it offers hope: “The more you learn, the more you earn,” he says, citing the nation of Ireland as a prime example.

“Ireland has gone from being the poorest economy in Europe to the fastest-growing economy in Europe through a combination of tax policy and higher education investment,” he says, noting that Ireland and Arizona have roughly the same population.

“But really it has a lot to do with aspirations. And that’s what the Solutions campaign is all about. It’s about both explaining the connection between competitiveness and higher education on the one hand; but, two, it’s about raising everybody’s aspirations from kindergarten through college graduation. We need to have more output (of educated workers), and human development must be the principal goal of our culture.”

The UA’s Shelton has long understood the connection between higher education and regional prosperity — he’s held administrative posts in California and North Carolina, both noted for their relative prosperity and their high per-capita spending on education.

Shelton recalls that 50 years ago North Carolina created its Research Triangle Park, a melting pot of university talent and corporate know-how. Recent studies indicate this one move alone has made a tremendous difference in North Carolina’s economy over the years, giving it a big boost over neighboring states.

“It’s a no-brainer,” Shelton says. “The states that have great research universities that are connected to the state, whose professors aren’t sitting in ivory towers off somewhere … those states are going to win and have higher standards of living for their citizens. The role of its universities is central to the success of Arizona.”

Shelton believes passionately in higher education — he and his wife, Adrian, are both first-generation degree-earners in their families. It’s understandable, then, why the UA president is quick to echo DuVal’s “learn-more-earn-more” mantra. And despite being in charge for only two years, Shelton has moved aggressively to boost the likelihood that an Arizona kid, even from a poor family, will be able to get a UA degree.

Shelton explains that his Arizona Assurance Plan, which he began implementing this year, offers an outright scholarship to academically qualified Arizona residents willing to work hard and graduate in four years. The other qualifier for the program is that the recipient’s family income must be at 200 percent of the poverty level or below — about $42,000 for a family of four — although the program offers adjustments for other income levels. Also, the participant must be willing to take a 10- or 12-hour-a-week work-study job on campus. By participating in the Arizona Assurance Plan, a student can graduate from the UA debt free.

“Now that’s a very clear message,” Shelton says. “And I predict it will have an impact beyond The University of Arizona in the years to come, because it means that a 6th-grader can go to her parents and say, ‘Look, if I get good grades, if I qualify, and I’m willing to work, if I’m willing to contribute in my own way, we can afford for me to go to the UA.’ In other words, students will be thinking about higher education at an early age, and they won’t be using the financial barrier as an excuse.”

There will be roughly 600 students enrolled in the Assurance Plan this fall, at a cost to the university of about $1 million, Shelton estimates.

“We are now moving aggressively to attract donors for the program,” he adds.

Shelton praises the UA faculty’s willingness to provide extra mentoring for Assurance Plan students who may need it because they come from underserved backgrounds. He also says the universities’ partnerships with Arizona’s community colleges will play an increasing role in channeling the state’s high-school students toward the advanced degrees necessary to build a prosperous state.

To be nationally competitive in 2020, DuVal predicts, Arizona will need to churn out 30,000 additional college degrees each year, over and above the 26,000-plus it issued in 2007. That’s just 12 years from now.

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