HIGHER EDUCATION

Much like the way California is known for its agriculture, the Northeast is known for its institutions of higher learning. Rhode Island is part of that mix. We have a long and rich tradition in terms of higher education, both public and private.

As such, the state has a stronger value for higher education and has made great efforts to educate the people, giving them the opportunity to advance.

When speaking on the topic of higher education, there are several areas that deserve consideration. The first is the role of higher education within the state. The second is the system itself and its functions. A third is the manner in which it benefits the people of the state. And yet another is how all these roles fit together to create something of value instead of merely making the effort.

Broken down, this simply states that higher education has its political and legal functions, its business functions, and its education functions. Once these parameters are marked, the observer can judge how well or how poorly a state has cobbled together the varied functions.

In this statement I will leave to a future day the individual areas noted above. This piece will examine how Rhode Island puts together the pieces.

State institutions, and particularly the higher echelons of management of the public university system have always maintained a particularly closed political gene pool. Many of the people in Higher Education have come from politics, largely from legislative pay backs, gubernatorial pay backs, or buy offs from running and/or political payment for running and losing. This is not to say that these people are horrible, but it does have an impact as to operations. Many are not dopes, but it needs to be remembered they are also not there because of achievement in the education field.

This may or may not be all so bad, if it were not Rhode Island with its political inbreeding and if it were over some sort of safety net. It is good to have education leadership reflecting the community. After all, education achievement is only a reflection of the society itself. A society merely transfers its values to the future generation through education.

But, there are good and bad ways of operating a system, regardless of its make-up. From my perspective, it is best when there is a realization that there is a symbiotic relationship existing that needs to be nurtured. We need to have leadership that will look to the interaction of higher education and economic development within the state.

It does us limited good to train people at our institutions for jobs that do not exist in our state. It would behoove us to chart an economic development course, specifically target various industries, and educate our children to allow for employment in those jobs.

To do otherwise is to court disaster. By sending our educated children to other states to seek employment, we have armed our economic enemies at our own cost. If we could retain the talents we have paid to instill, we could be reaping the benefits instead of another state.

As I mildly alluded to earlier, in order to survive in the Northeast, an education institution must swim in deep higher education waters. The quality is brought up by the competition. History has clearly demonstrated that even political hacks can oversee such a system without fully running it into the ground or completely astray.

Thus, while we need to focus on what we can do. This is saying that we need to meld our system of higher education into our programs of economic development. We missed the boat on educating nurses as our state’s employment demanded more and more health care professionals. We have missed oppotunities by not educating people in the trades and found ourselves short during several recent building cycles. In a few words, we need to attempt to envision the future economic trends, possibly a task too great for political appointments or possibly a lack of vision and energy by primarily recent Governors, and to a smaller extent the Legislature. Vision, tempered by hindsight, is the best course of action.

Whatever the case, in the future I will try to better explore the linkage for which I am advocating. I will try to avoid my own fascination with the political in favor of the economic trends and the need to incorporate higher education into a long term growth plan that is designed to create jobs for Rhode Islanders.