Charles L. Welch has been president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities officially for only a few weeks, but he’s already had several reporters ask him how the four-year public universities the organization represents can refute the narrative that college isn’t worth it. Perhaps the first encouraging sign is that reporters were contacting him to ask in the first place.
The institutions that make up AASCU are perennially underappreciated and often misunderstood. The nearly 350 AASCU universities and state systems span the country, often serving less populous regions that might otherwise not have a four-year college. They award nearly half of the 1.3 million bachelor’s degrees given annually by all public four-year institutions, and they typically charge a few thousand dollars in tuition per semester, not tens of thousands. But they rarely garner much attention.
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Charles L. Welch has been president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities officially for only a few weeks, but he’s already had several reporters ask him how the four-year public universities the organization represents can refute the narrative that college isn’t worth it. Perhaps the first encouraging sign is that reporters were contacting him to ask in the first place.
We’ve got to reframe the conversation about higher education from cost to investment.
The institutions that make up AASCU are perennially underappreciated and often misunderstood. The nearly 350 AASCU universities and state systems span the country, often serving less populous regions that might otherwise not have a four-year college. They award nearly half of the 1.3 million bachelor’s degrees given annually by all public four-year institutions, and they typically charge a few thousand dollars in tuition per semester, not tens of thousands. But they rarely garner much attention.
Welch, former head of the Arkansas State University system, started his new job during a flood of national media coverage — including by The Chronicle — of congressional testimony on campus antisemitism by three elite-university presidents, two of whom ultimately lost their jobs.
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Welch is concerned that the teaching-focused, broad-access institutions he represents are being unfairly tarnished by the growing public narrative that all colleges are costly and ideology-obsessed. But making the case for regional public universities is part of his new job. “It’s not going to be easy, but it has to be done,” he said in an interview with The Chronicle. “I am encouraged by the fact that we’re talking about it.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the biggest challenge for you coming into this job?
The biggest challenge right now is this increasing question of the value of higher education. When you see reports that Americans are concerned about whether the benefit outweighs the cost, obviously, that creates concern from an enrollment standpoint. It creates concern from a governmental-funding standpoint. It creates concern from a campus-morale standpoint. It’s one of those things that impacts every other issue. The challenge is, how do we reverse that narrative? How do we get that message out? And how do we ensure that that conversation doesn’t negatively impact our campuses well into the future?
You face the challenge of working from a national level on something that is often quite local.
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No question. When issues come forward, they don’t uniformly impact our campuses. But study after study after study has shown that attending college and ultimately receiving a degree is a positive for an individual, for their family, and for the community, and that really is uniform across all of our campuses. And so we’ve got to talk about that.
AASCU institutions do so much of the hard work of higher education in this country, but there’s been so much attention recently in the media, including The Chronicle, on elite institutions and their challenges and the things that they’re up to. How can the colleges you represent draw more attention to themselves and the work that they’re doing?
This has been an issue that has existed forever — attention on Ivy League institutions, attention on institutions that are at the highest level of NCAA competition, that they get the lion’s share of attention both from policymakers as well as from the media and, quite frankly, from the general public. So let me preface everything by saying that when I point out distinctions about AASCU institutions, that’s not to condemn or criticize other sectors, but rather to point out that we are different, and we bring some unique opportunities.
We continue to hear so much negativity about cost, about some of the culture-war issues, about things like student-debt defaults. And the truth of the matter is that in every one of those negative issues, with very few exceptions, it is not AASCU institutions where those issues are occurring. And so I think if we can effectively talk about that, if we can effectively get that message out to policymakers and to prospective students and their families and the general public, I think we can identify ourselves.
That’s going to be a tricky message to convey: “We’re not the ones you’re grumpy about.”
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There’s no doubt about it. And I’m not naïve about it. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. We’re going to have to do it at the grass-roots level. We’re going to have to talk to our policymakers, whether it be on the state level or the federal level, about the things that we’re doing, and really highlight the fact that we are the institutions that are focused on local economic development, that are educating the students from historically underrepresented populations and students that are Pell eligible, that are increasing social and economic mobility. The whole point of higher education is to help uplift those individuals. And we are the institutions that are doing it.
We’ve got to be strategic. We’re not going to be able to do it through a bunch of national press releases. We’re going to have to help our campuses convey those messages and really try to begin to break that down at the local level, and hopefully, over time, begin to spark a different conversation.
You mentioned the culture wars. Assuming things are not likely to get a lot less polarized anytime soon, is there a risk of AASCU institutions becoming more susceptible to these polarizing political forces?
That’s hard to say. And obviously things happen on AASCU campuses as well, but they’re certainly not to the scope and size and frequency as they are on the others.
I think one reason is because of the types of students that are being served. Our students, by and large, are students who are first generation, students of color, historically underserved populations. They’re looking for opportunities to change their life trajectory, and they’re coming to college to get that degree in education, or in business, or in engineering, or whatever the case may be. And so it’s a little different environment that’s not as inherently political as perhaps you might find at a larger institution or an institution that has historically had that.
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The general nature of our institutions themselves doesn’t lend itself to those political disruptions as much as others, but certainly we have to be sensitive to the broader political environment and ensure that we don’t get to that point.
You’re a first-generation college graduate yourself. Are there ways in which that perspective has been beneficial to you as a leader?
One hundred percent. I realized how difficult it was to attend an institution without that family knowledge and understanding of what that entailed. I had a very supportive family, but they didn’t have that experience themselves. It’s also helped me to understand and remember that accessibility and affordability have to be at the forefront of all of our thoughts and conversations. And not only does it impact the individual, but it also has impacted my entire family. I mean, I’ve had younger members of my family who have gone on to college. Obviously, my children are much more likely to be college graduates. From an income situation, I’ve been able to outperform my ancestors. And it’s had great consequences for the communities where I’ve lived and for the state as a whole.
We’ve got to reframe the conversation about higher education from cost to investment. We always talk about the cost to the individual, the cost to the state. Rarely do we hear about in the investment that the individual is making in themselves, the investment that they’re making into their family long term, nor do we talk about it from the standpoint of an investment in improving the state. Whether it’s unemployment rates, incarceration rates, public-health factors, reliance on public-support services — regardless of the factor, college graduates have an improved standing in each of those, which obviously greatly benefits the states that are making the investment.