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From: Goldie Blumenstyk
Subject: The Edge: How Regional Publics Could Be Key to Economic Recovery — and Get the Respect They Deserve
I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.
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I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.
Economists frequently describe big research universities as economic engines. But regional public universities? They’re sort of the Rodney Dangerfields of higher ed. And lately, several regional institutions have been threatened by low enrollments and possible mergers, not just disrespect.
Those are some of the reasons I took notice of a new proposal from two Brookings researchers to deploy some 140-plus regional publics across the country to stimulate improvements in education, culture, and business in their economically distressed regions. The researchers argue that establishing special status for the institutions serving those communities — and giving each of them a five-year federal grant of $25 million to $50 million to lead public initiatives — could lead to a more-equitable economic recovery nationwide than the uneven one we experienced after the Great Recession.
I have no idea if this $7.5-billion proposal stands a chance. The two researchers, Robert Maxim and Mark Muro of the Metropolitan Policy Program, think it does, since economic development tends to be more bipartisan than plenty of other issues (like, sadly, wearing masks). The universities they’ve identified as “distressed-community serving” — in 34 states and Puerto Rico — are about evenly divided between Republican and Democratic districts. Regional publics offer “a foothold for a lot of Americans,” Maxim told me, and “have largely been left out of the national discussions around federal support for higher education.”
What really intrigues me about their idea, however, is the notion of capitalizing on the intrinsic and unique strengths of regional public universities: their academic know-how, their mission, and, especially, their community connections.
Too often when people think about higher ed and economic development, the focus is on research that leads to inventions, patents, and spinoff companies. That’s all vital work — and a topic I loved covering for about a decade.
But many of those spinoff companies don’t end up helping or even staying in the communities where they were founded. And the last thing higher ed needs right now is more underresourced, wannabe-big-time research universities. That’s why the goal of the Brookings proposal is “to be about more than tech transfer” or building new “innovation” hubs, Maxim told me. With the grants, he said, regional publics could be “supporting the communities that are already there.”
The report includes a sampling of the kinds of projects Maxim and Muro envision for the grants: things like improving local transit options, as Cleveland State University did; supporting at-risk elementary-school students, as Western Washington University did; and developing low-cost broadband capability, as Northern Michigan University did in the state’s Upper Peninsula. (I’ve been a fan of that Educational Access Network broadband project for a while now.)
That such projects already exist may be an argument that the new grants aren’t needed, but many regional public institutions struggle to afford this kind of work, especially when faced with state-funding cuts, Maxim said. In fact, in developing the proposal for federal support, he and Muro were also hoping to grab the attention of state and local policy makers — to remind them, too, of the value that regional publics bring to communities.
Of course, private colleges in distressed regions are also valuable resources. Why not make them eligible for such grants, too? Mainly, that was about the math. Including them, Maxim said, would have quadrupled the estimated cost.
With or without new grant money, it’s invigorating to imagine how much more thoughtful community-revitalization projects could be if they were informed by the expertise of sociologists, ecologists, educators, and others who work at regional public universities, and private colleges, too. That kind of interdisciplinary approach may well prove utterly vital to an economic recovery that ensures communities aren’t left behind.
The barriers to transfer I highlighted last week hit a nerve with several readers. One response that really struck me came from a retired college instructor with more than 40 years of teaching under her belt, Jacquelyn King, who commented that the biggest roadblocks typically come from the “transferring to” institution — even though students often have had “the benefit of a full-time instructor who has some expertise in the subject being taught.” In such cases, King said, transfer students may, in fact, be better prepared than are their classmates whose intro courses were taught by “a brand new grad assistant” whose training didn’t include much teaching.
Too many students miss out on the growing opportunities in cutting-edge fields. Sometimes that’s because they lack the necessary academic prep, or they’re unaware of the options, or the culture of the disciplines isn’t welcoming. So what does it take to get students — older and traditional age — to pursue these programs and careers? And what are the particular challenges of reaching historically underrepresented students?
Join me as I explore those questions and others with this expert panel: Gilda Barbarino, president of Olin College of Engineering (and president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science); Sunita V. Cooke, president of MiraCosta Community College District; Sue Harnett, founder and president of Rewriting the Code; and Robbyn Wacker, president of St. Cloud State University. Sign up here to pose questions and watch live on Thursday, August 12, at 2 p.m. Eastern time, or later on demand.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.
