Speeches

Equitable Access to Educational Opportunity: Building a Strong PreK-16 Educational Pipeline

Keynote Address
John Barclay Simpson, PhD
14th President of the University at Buffalo
Thursday, January 19, 2006

Public access to the public university is without question one of the most pressing issues facing public higher education today.  Major public universities like UB are uniquely positioned to address critical social issues like this one, and this opportunity carries with it the responsibility to lead the way in fostering a strong educational system from kindergarten through post-graduate instruction.

“Public access to the public university is without question one of the most pressing issues facing public higher education today.  Major public universities like UB are uniquely positioned to address critical social issues like this one, and this opportunity carries with it the responsibility to lead the way in fostering a strong educational system from kindergarten through post-graduate instruction.” John B. Simpson President

I speak in part from personal experience.  I am a product of public higher education, as are my forefathers and my children.  My grandfather from Ireland attended the University of California, an experience that transformed his life as a citizen of this country.  My daughter also graduated from UC; my son from the University of Washington.  Having spent many years as a university educator and administrator, I have also witnessed the profound and crucial impact of public higher education on local communities as well as on a national and international scale.  In terms of the university’s centrality to our culture, as well as the scope of its social and economic impact, never has the public university been as vitally important to society as it is in the 21st century.

The very best of the colleges and universities in the country, and in the world, are the American research universities, public as well as private.  It is the publics, though, who have the special responsibly of offering the very best education to all, of offering the opportunity for anyone with the qualifications to study, to learn, and to contribute to knowledge. 

At stake is our ability to ensure equitable access to the opportunities and benefits that higher education offers, a goal that is not only central to our own mission as a public university but that is also essential to democracy in our society.  This is because “access” in this context refers not only to affordability, but also to the whole range of factors that determine a student’s ability to engage successfully with higher education.  A truly effective PreK-16 system therefore enables students across racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and cultural lines not only to have access to our colleges and universities, but also to contribute fully to these intellectual environments.  By the same token, students must be prepared intellectually, socially, culturally for advanced study, and teachers must be prepared to respond to these needs in the rapidly changing 21st century educational environment.

In providing educational opportunities, in advancing intellectual discovery and the creation of new technologies, in serving as a locus for the best in the creative arts, and in serving our many diverse constituencies, the public research university fulfills an important public trust.  In the process, it upholds an essential principle of democratic societies: namely, that a first-class education is not a privilege but a right.  Yet it is the case—here in New York State and throughout the nation—that increasing numbers of students are cut off from this right.  Simply put, they do not have access to what we offer.

Thus, UB has a vital responsibility—both within our Western New York community and beyond it—to play a leadership role in developing effective linkages among primary, secondary, and tertiary education.  The university must be committed to creating and maintaining a strong and healthy education pipeline from kindergarten through post-graduate programs. 
 
To return to my earlier definition: access is ultimately the sum of all factors that impact a student’s ability to benefit from and contribute to higher education. We’ve done a good job in New York State of providing need-based financial aid.  We have not done a good job in preparing students for higher education.  To address this critical problem, higher education institutions must work hand in hand with preK-12 educators to receive this preparation.

Access is not just critical to maintaining democracy, as I suggested earlier, but also to ensuring the health and vitality of the nation’s educational system.  It is essential that U.S. colleges and universities reflect the diversity and breadth of backgrounds, perspectives, and points of view that characterize the nation as a whole.  It is equally critical to the intellectual quality of life, and to building and sustaining personal happiness.  At the same time, access is vital to maintaining the fabric of our society, to fostering an educated, highly trained workforce, and to securing the further development of our intellectual capital.  Indeed, as Thomas Friedman argues so compellingly in The World is Flat, educational access is critical to maintaining our nation’s competitiveness and its security, not just nationally but globally. 

Among higher education, government and business leaders alike, there is a consensus that the U.S. is steadily losing its longstanding position of global leadership in science and engineering research and technological development.  In the past 100 years, U.S. importance in a global context has been largely fueled by our leadership in generating intellectual capital and a superbly trained workforce.  This is no longer the case.  

To an increasingly large degree, the U.S. is failing to produce its own native educated populace, especially in science and engineering—fields that have traditionally been pivotal to U.S. intellectual, economic, and military power.  The U.S. faces growing international competition in these fields, in particular from Asian and European nations, where increasing numbers of science and engineering students are trained and work.

If these key factors are not enough in themselves, here’s an equally compelling if less orthodox rationale—investing in public education from the earliest stages onward is critical to the nation’s economy.  In January 2000, for example, an op-ed piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal by James Heckman, 2000 Nobel laureate in economics and University of Chicago professor of economics. Heckman argued that investing in the nation’s disadvantaged youth is not only imperative as a social justice mandate—it also makes sound economic sense, providing a foundation for higher quality of work, more productive schools, less crime, and higher earnings, with a rate of returns to invested dollars as high as 15-17%. 

At the same time, Heckman’s study reveals numbers that are even more galvanizing.  In particular, the number of U.S. children born into disadvantaged circumstances in 1968 was less than 5%.  By 2000, this number had escalated to more than 22%, a statistic that brings into sharp relief one especially key point—namely, that investing in early education and family support is far cheaper than the costs of not educating our populace, and it is far more effective to intervene with very young students than with those later in education. 

Yet the access issue is not only relevant to students from what Heckman terms disadvantaged backgrounds; it increasingly affects students from middle-class families as well.  The top 20% income bracket can afford to finance higher education; students from lowest 20% income bracket, however, are increasingly receiving public financial assistance. 

In part, this disparity stems from unpredictable rises in tuition, which develop from the difficulty of individual campuses within a state system to control their own tuition costs.  But more broadly speaking, this problem derives from dwindling public support for public higher education.  Like our fellow public higher education institutions across the nation, UB must confront significantly decreased spending at both the federal and state levels. In New York State, this trend is reflected in the disparity between government support for K-12 education and higher education.  Whereas New York State ranks #2 nationally in K-12 support per capita of state/local government expenditures, it ranks #47 in terms of higher education support per capita.  Similarly, while New York State ranks 1st nationwide in per-capita public welfare expenditures and 4th in the nation in corrections spending, the state’s public higher education system has witnessed a 4% decrease in state support in our all-funds budget in the past 4 years.  To offer a more comprehensive figure: in 1991, 74% of all public university revenue came from state and local taxes.  By 2004 this figure had fallen to 64%. 

Flagship institutions like UB and our peers fall significantly below this national average.  At the University of Michigan, the taxpayer share of public university revenues is only 18%.  At the University of Illinois it is 25%, and at the University of Virginia, it is a mere 8%.  UB fares somewhat better than those institutions, although we still fall significantly under the national average, which is itself decreasing steadily.  At UB, only 31% of our budget is funded through taxpayer support—less than half the national average. 

This statewide and national trend, in effect, is leading to the de facto privatization of public higher education systems across the country.  Moreover, there is an ever-widening gulf between the overall academic quality of the major privates vs. publics, which simply did not exist when I was an undergraduate some 30 years ago. 

If education is a key to our world thriving, we as a society are starving it.  Seemingly, students are increasingly unprepared by their elementary and secondary education to succeed in meeting the demands of higher education, and teachers may be unprepared to help students meet these demands. 

Thus, many of these challenges revolve around a single issue: they suggest an ineffective linkage between higher education institutions and primary and secondary institutions.  Likewise, the disparity of federal and state funding for K-12 public education and public higher education reflects the social misperception that they have different agendas when in fact their missions are part and parcel of the larger public education mission.

Higher education institutions therefore need to play a more active role bridging this gap, and particularly in ensuring that elementary and secondary teachers are prepared to prepare their students.  And in Western New York, and Buffalo in particular, the case for such action is terribly stark.  87% of students in Buffalo Public Schools are minority students.  86% of Buffalo students qualify for “free or reduced lunch,” which translates essentially to living at or below the poverty level as defined by federal government.

Clearly, these students are not receiving the academic preparation they need.  As a case in point: 46 of the 76 Buffalo School District schools are designated as failing or in need of improvement by the state/federal government, which translates to 25,000 students each year in Buffalo attend a failing school.  In 2004, one of Buffalo’s 16 high schools had only a 5% graduation rate (Seneca Vocational). Currently, New York State has lowest graduation rates for African American (35%) and Hispanic (32%) students in the nation.  Compare these rates with the average U.S high school graduation rate for all students—86.5%.  In 2004, the average combined SAT score for Buffalo public school students was 793.

Thus, while New York State students in general are making progress in meeting the stepped up Academic Standards established by the Board of Regents in 1996, Buffalo’s public schools still do not reflect this upward trend.  In 2002-03, for example, only 39% of Buffalo City school districts graduated with a NYS Regents diploma (as compared to 73% graduation rate in public schools across Erie County).

At UB, these trends are equally evident in the persistently low numbers of underrepresented minority students enrolled at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels.  To be blunt, our enrollment does not reflect the larger community we serve, as it should and needs to do.  Our African American and Hispanic enrollments still account only for approximately 9% of our student population, and the majority of these—94%—come from outside the Buffalo Public School system. 

While these numbers are on the rise because of the university’s commitment to increasing minority recruitment and retention, they remain disproportionately low, reflecting in part the failure of elementary and secondary urban schools in the region and state to prepare these students to access and succeed within a competitive public higher education setting.

What these trends suggest is that traditional modes of public education—the traditional separation of primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education—are not working; not adequately preparing students to succeed within or contribute to higher education.  A new, seamless education system must therefore be created, a system which directly channels students’ progress from pre-school through post-graduate instruction.  I believe this is what UB should be doing; by creating partnerships with Buffalo schools and our peers in higher education, we must work together to meet this challenge head-on.

And again, it is not just a regional challenge that we face, or a statewide challenge alone.  We need to look at this as a national issue as well, and we need to consider its impact on our role in the global community.   This was precisely the point iterated in Governor Pataki’s recent State of the State address, in which the Governor echoed the call issued in Friedman’s The World is Flat and stressed the need for a fundamental shift in how New York operates, noting specifically: “Today is clearly the dawn of a new economic paradigm—where brains rather than brawn, research rather than resources, will be the determining factors in the increasingly global competition for growth, investment, and jobs.”

Our need to adopt an essentially different operational and therefore educational model is not hard to see. On a comparative basis, we are failing miserably at the regional, state, and global level. Yet while I’ve painted a grim picture, I don’t view it as a hopeless one.  Far from it.  I wouldn’t be here today if I didn’t fully expect that solutions are possible—for that matter, the Graduate School of Education wouldn’t be hosting this forum, and UB wouldn’t be addressing these issues on an institutional basis if that were the case.

Conversations like the one we’re having today are a critical first step in addressing these issues. And while I don’t have all the answers to these questions, or all the solutions to the problems I’ve addressed this morning, I do want to share with you some of the concrete steps UB is taking and will take in partnership with our fellow educators in the region and state.

We already have several vehicles in place.  To create a healthy educational pipeline, we must be able to address student needs from the earliest point and on a foundational level.  UB’s Center for Applied Technologies in Education (CATE), for example, works with school districts and non-profit educational organizations in region to provide information and technological support for teaching and learning. 

  • Technology-assisted Early Literacy Intervention Program within the Buffalo Public Schools
  • Early Childhood Research Center (partnership with Fisher Price since 1932)
  • Center for Children and Families (ADHD clinical and research center—summer treatment program has been named a Model Service Delivery Program by the American Psychological Association)

But we also need to think outside existing paradigms, and we are beginning to do just that—as an institution, as well as in partnership with the broader pre K-16 educational community in Western New York and New York State.

I’ve met with Robert Bennett, the Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents—the system that comprises New York State education at every level—from preK through post-graduate—and have been deeply impressed with his vision for addressing these issues in a comprehensive, holistic fashion.
Under Chancellor Bennett’s leadership, the University of the State of New York is looking, at a systemic level, at many of the issues we are confronting here in Buffalo.  Statewide, we are seeing public higher education institutions whose enrollments don’t reflect the diverse communities they serve, as well as public schools that are not adequately preparing their students with the tools they need to thrive in the higher education community.  These phenomena point to our collective failure to create the educated, highly trained populace that will enable the U.S. to compete successfully in the global marketplace

While it’s critically important to understand the global relevance of the issues of educational access and opportunity, it’s also vitally necessary to look closely and carefully at how these issues play out in our immediate community, and how we can address them actively.  As an institution, UB can and must do even more to support and collaborate with our region’s schools.  Toward this end, some of the measures UB is exploring include:

    • More outreach programs to under-represented minority students at all levels—including undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools
    • The development of K-12 policy and practices in partnership with public school educators, with special attention to urban school systems
    • Interdisciplinary research initiatives across the disciplines to develop innovative models of pedagogy and administration, responsive to PreK-16 needs
    • Interdisciplinary academic programs at the graduate level to train policy makers and educational leaders of the future attuned to the importance of preK-16 approach to ensuring educational access and opportunity

We’re committed to pursuing these initiatives—and to developing future strategies—in conversation with the larger communities of which we are part.  I welcome your thoughts and ideas for how these issues affect our university and our region, and how UB can do more in addressing these issues.