Monthly Archives: February 2014

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“It’s the Economy, Stupid!”

Addressing today's employment and economic development challenges will require careful and complex solutions

During the presidential election campaign of 1992, and on the heels of a short, sharp national recession, James Carville, a political advisor to the Clinton campaign, famously characterized what the election was all about by coining the phrase that I’m using as the title of this blog post.

Now here we are, 22 years later, and in every political campaign since the Great Recession of 2008, this same phrase—although now tellingly focused specifically on jobs—is the basis of the platform of almost every candidate for office.

The problem is that the focus on jobs—understandable, given that in almost six years the economy has not fully restored the jobs lost in 2008 and 2009—goes well beyond mere political sloganeering.  It permeates every conceivable facet of society:

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Colleges Must Fix All of Society’s Ills – Or Else! (Part 5)

Time for higher education to begin a conversation on our role in America – before others decide for us.

In my four previous posts to this blog, I discussed a series of expectations, concerns and remedies that politicians, parents and the media have for higher education (“Now Everyone Has a Solution for Higher Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 29, 2013). Taken collectively, this list contains items that are often unrealistic and, at times, contradictory.

Well, that’s easy for me to say. As a university president, I might be expected to be an apologist for the status quo in higher education. But this is an important issue to get right: what aspects of our current economic dilemma properly belong at the feet of higher education, and what components are someone else’s responsibility? It does no one any good for society to create expectations of higher education that higher education has neither the capacity nor the intention to resolve.

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Colleges Must Fix All of Society’s Ills – Or Else! (Part 4)

Too much debt and too little learning? A federal ratings system is on the horizon…

Three weeks ago I presented a list of expectations, complaints or remedies for all that ails higher education that have received media attention in recent months. In two subsequent blog posts, I discussed subsets of this list at some length. In this post I will review the remaining items. They are:

  • Too much student debt – and it’s rising;
  • Too many students learn too little in college;
  • We need more technical education; and
  • Higher education needs a scorecard on affordability, access and outcomes (including salary of graduates).

These four items represent three criticisms and a proposed remedy. Allow me to examine each of them independently.