Letters from Academia

Here is a new article of mine for my weekly column “Letters from Academia” about what public opinion is on higher education in the U.S.

Higher Education Needs to Listen Better

I remember once talking to the head of a large engineering firm who told me that he preferred hiring engineers with a strong background in the liberal arts because they were capable of thinking “outside the box.” And I have often used that anecdote to support the notion of a liberal arts education – something that I have long championed.

Now it seems that such an anecdote, far from being an oddity, is becoming part of conventional wisdom. Because higher education in the United States has been living historically out of touch with society, we tend to be oblivious to what the general public thinks about us. But that has been changing lately, especially because of increased criticism by politicians and the skyrocketing level of debt among college students.

A little more than a year ago, Northeastern University, a private, not-for-profit institution located in Boston, conducted a public opinion survey of 1,000 American adults that included a significant number of people who make hiring decisions for their companies. The results were quite interesting in more than one way.

The outcomes of that survey, published under the title “Innovation Imperative: Enhancing Higher Education Outcomes,” showed that Americans believe in higher education but are concerned about the system’s ability to prepare graduates for success in today’s workforce.

One of the current fads in higher education –promoted by both politicians and university administrators with a superficial view of the world – is that all we need are more graduates with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) degrees. Yet those surveyed thought that what we really need are graduates with skills that are useful no matter a student’s major or career plan.

What Americans are demanding –and for good reason – are more people with skills in communication (verbal and written), problem solving abilities and creative and critical thinking. What they are saying is that we need to produce more well rounded individuals.

Americans think that experiential learning, meaning more hands-on education, is extremely important. After all, what you learn by memorizing you tend to forget, while what you learn by doing you tend to remember. That is why they show a declining confidence in online education, which delivers mostly content but not necessarily skills. They also have serious doubts about the MOOCs (massive open online courses) to solve the problems of higher education.

This is an important point given that study after study has shown that online education does not prepare students as well as face-to-face instruction. Even hybrid courses, where there is a combination of online content and personal experience with a professor, are better than pure online delivery alone.

The American public seems to intuitively “get it.”

Contrary to some claims that higher education is not worth the effort and money, the majority of Americans agree that college education is extremely important. Three in four Americans believe a college degree is more important today than it was for their parents’ generation. Almost seven in 10 believe a college degree will be even more important for the next generation. There is a strong conviction that educational level is the most important factor in determining a candidate’s success in today’s job market.

Yet that does not mean that people think that the current system is doing the job. Nearly half of all Americans say colleges are not in tune with today’s job market and are not preparing graduates accordingly. In fact, there is a widespread and growing agreement that the American system of higher education must change.

But what changes are needed? To begin with, we have to move away from the idea that degrees are just about memorized knowledge. There is no question that we all need more literacy about different subjects, but it is equally important to know what to do with that knowledge. That is where experiential learning comes in, with the more hands-on experiences the better. One way to increase that type of learning is by offering our students more internship opportunities. They are not only an extremely valuable teaching tool, but also provide unique opportunities for people to test their real call in the modern world. They also allow for a higher level of networking that can help students land a job.

But who should be making sure that these necessary changes take place? This public opinion poll shows that this must be a shared responsibility. Americans believe that postsecondary institutions, employers and students have equal responsibilities in this undertaking.

To that end, colleges and universities need to get out of their cocoons and have more widespread and in-depth conversations with local employers. That is particularly true for comprehensive universities. By the same token, they must make sure that skills in the areas of communication, critical thinking, problem solving and the like are reinforced. These skills are exactly what students get from disciplines in the liberal arts areas, such as communication, philosophy and the natural sciences.

If we want to be more in tune with societal needs while also enhancing support for higher education, we have to listen to our audience. Otherwise we will continue living in a bubble while lack of public support (financial and otherwise) for what we do keeps eroding.

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Higher Education Needs To Listen Better

Please find my newest article for my weekly column “Letters from Academia” that has to do with higher education and immigration policies

Higher Education Should Monitor Its Students

Immigration is not only a political issue for the United States, but also one that has a far-reaching impact on higher education. According to most estimates there are somewhere between 11 and 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country, people who either came to the country without proper authorization or who overstayed their visas.

What does that have to do with higher education? In the latest plan by the Obama administration, the federal government is set to provide a pathway for the legalization of about 5 million individuals. Of those, at least 250,000 will be people ready to enter college. And that is a significant number.

Yet, undocumented immigrants have been going to college in this country for a long time and that has prompted state legislatures to take legal action – in one direction or another.

According to a recent analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures, 18 states provide by law in-state tuition for those immigrants and five even provide financial aid. Three (Arizona, Georgia and Indiana), specifically deny that discounted tuition, while two (Alabama and South Carolina) prohibit their admission in any state institution of higher education. Other states have complicated legislation that place a number of conditions and exceptions to different policies.

In summary, there is a patchwork of laws and regulations.

In any case, these numbers show that the majority of states favor providing greater access to college to undocumented students, a trend that has been growing in recent years.

The reasons given by some state leaders for denying greater access to higher education to undocumented individuals include not wanting to reward breaking the law, fewer resources for those who are legally in this country and the inability for them to get a legal job even if they graduate.

Arguments used in support of helping these students include that the way they came to this country was not their decision, but that of their parents. And because they are usually graduates of the American high school system, these provisions provide incentives for them to complete college and contribute to the local economies. Them paying for college, some also argue, helps to make it more affordable for other students.

Equally important is that by giving students hope of attending college, the high school dropout rates decrease, which, in turn, reduces crime rates and the costs of running prisons.

Yet, one reason never stated by some supporters of making college more accessible to undocumented immigrants is the need of certain public higher education institutions to increase their enrollments. In many states, including Illinois, the number of high school graduates has either decreased or just flattened out in recent years.

While politicians of all stripes have had their say on this issue, those we rarely hear from are the undocumented individuals themselves.

Through a report released in January by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles and funded by the Ford Foundation, we have learned a number of things that were unknown to the vast majority of Americans.

The report, titled, “In the Shadows of the Ivory Tower,” is based on a survey of 909 undocumented students from 55 countries attending postsecondary institutions in 34 states.

According to this report these students have spent the majority of their lives (15 years on average) in the U.S., 61 percent come from households whose total annual income is less than $30,000, and 90 percent of them plan to become U.S. citizens. Twenty-eight percent of them are in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. That is not surprising since a significant number of first generation college students are particularly interested in pursuing careers in fields like the health sciences.

In addition to coming from very poor families, these students live in constant fear of deportation. More than half of them have personal knowledge of someone who has been deported. In fact, between 29 and 37 percent of them suffer from anxiety, which is much higher than that for the general population. Other issues are financial pressures and work/time management. Seventy-four percent of these students drop out of college because of financial concerns, which is the same proportion of those students who work while attending college.

Half of the students reported attending four-year public colleges or universities, and more than 40 percent attend community or technical colleges. Nearly 10 percent attend private colleges. Contrary to what one might expect, only two thirds of them are first-generation college students.

It is important to note that according to this study, these students feel isolated and feel that they are being treated unfairly because of their immigration status. Among the recommendations made in the report are to create safe spaces for them, just as has been the case for other traditionally discriminated against groups, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students.

Based on all these facts it seems that support for providing greater access to higher education to these individuals is a sensible alternative, not only because of humanitarian reasons but also because of practical ones.

Institutions of higher education should be taking the lead in these efforts by creating a welcoming atmosphere and by providing safe spaces for them. These efforts should include measures to train staff on how to deal with the special needs of these students. Legal clinics would also be of great help to them. A beneficial side effect of this would be that law and social work students could gain experience in immigration issues, a likely growing field of practice in the next few years.

Whatever policies are put in place, the final goal must be the full integration of these students into American society.

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Higher Education Should Monitor Its Students

In this article for my weekly column “Letters from Academia”, I debunk some of the myths about technological fishes for higher education.

Technology Fixes Won’t Solve Educational Issues

In December 2014, Student Monitor, a market research company, released a study showing that American college students say they would rather study with real books than with e-books.

Based on a survey of about 1,200 students in 100 American colleges conducted last October, they found that for almost every type of schoolwork students prefer to use a book rather than a computer. This is the latest of the bad news for those who keep advocating for technological fixes to all issues in higher education.

Less than two years ago, San Jose State University placed a moratorium on the use of MOOCs (massive open online courses) as offerings to their students after realizing that students taking those courses had much lower passing rates than those taking traditional classes. Most MOOCs are offered free of charge.

In February, the Babson Survey Research Group’s annual survey of more than 2,800 academic leaders showed that support for MOOCs is weak, with only 16 percent believing that they are sustainable.

After much hype about the value of offering courses online for free, the results are far from satisfactory for a number of reasons. In addition to poor performance by students taking on-line instruction, there are high dropout rates, high demands on time and effort, a lack of digital literacy among many students and the creation of a potentially chaotic learning environment.

Last January, Susan Pinker, a developmental psychologist, published an op-ed in “The New York Times” summarizing a number of studies that show, among other things, that students who gain access to a home computer between the fifth and eighth grades tend to experience a persistent decline in reading and math scores. Further, the weaker students – who were supposed to be helped most by providing them with this technology –actually showed the most dramatic decrease in reading scores.

One fact that every instructor knows is that students use electronic gadgets oftentimes for non-pedagogical purposes, even during class time.

I will never forget the day I was invited to attend a class at the law school of the University of Chicago, one of the most selective institutions in the country. I remember that while the lecturer, a distinguished law professor, was explaining the material and trying to engage the students in the discussion, I could see from my seat in the last row that most of the students were using their laptops to either play games or surf the Internet.

Pinker also reminds us of the 2006 project called One Laptop Per Child, which was aimed at providing cheap laptops for free to all needy students over 6 years old worldwide. The program did not live up to expectations for multiple reasons, including the fact that kids spent more time on the laptops playing games than doing actual schoolwork.

This does not mean that technology lacks a place in education in general and higher education in particular. On the contrary, technology can provide opportunities to play with simulations that can be quite instructive and attractive in areas like the experimental sciences. Technology can also do a very good job in delivering content. But this requires an approach that sees the use of technology as just one more pedagogical tool, not as a fad.

There are several reasons behind the hype for the use of technology in education. One is the pressure to reduce costs in higher education. Since education is a labor-intensive activity, the logical shortcut is to reduce the need for teachers by using computers. Another has to do with the impression (sometimes accurate) that professors in the classroom do little more than recite what is already in the textbook.

But the other reason, particularly in the United States, is the almost blind faith in the notion of the quick “technological fix,” that is, the idea that all problems can be solved using new technologies. Studies like the ones briefly mentioned above, as well as hundreds of others published in academic journals, show unequivocally that there is no substitution for face-to-face contact when it comes to delivering quality education.

To put it plainly, machines are great at helping us to wash clothes or dishes, as well as many other menial tasks, but a machine is not a substitute for a good teacher. After all, we are talking about humans learning from the experiences of other human beings.

When it comes to technological innovation in education, we should be weary of buzzwords substituting for in-depth analyses of the consequences of forcing new fads into our culture. Yes, innovation is important and many times necessary, but without a deliberate analysis of what we really need and what the consequences of the implementation of novelties will be, all we are doing is talking about gadgets that are visually appealing and make for good headlines.

Instead of relying on computers, professors need to use more experiential learning approaches in their classrooms. After all, what is memorized can easily be forgotten. What you actually experience is most likely to stay with you for the rest of your life. The problem for postsecondary education administrators is that such an approach requires smaller classes and a lower student-faculty ratio – which means a more expensive education. But should we sacrifice quality in education (or health care, or safety) because of cost?

As the old saying goes, “If you think that education is expensive, try ignorance.”

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Technology Fixes Won’t Solve Educational Issues

See my latest article of the series “Letters from Academia” about the issue of prejudice against women and minorities in academia.

Women, Minorities Face Prejudice in Academia

In January 2005, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University, gave a presentation at the Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Although he read out of notes and not from a prepared statement, according to some of the people attending his presentation he mentioned that one hypothesis that could explain the higher proportion of males in science and engineering fields was the “intrinsic aptitude” difference between genders.

Although some claim that Summers’ comments were taken out of context, many observers think that such statements cost him his job at Harvard the following year, and ultimately the job of treasury secretary in the Obama administration. But regardless of the accuracy of what Summers meant, his comments created a great deal of controversy. So let’s look at the facts.

It is well known that women are underrepresented in many academic disciplines, particularly in areas such as physics, computer science and engineering. Only 20 percent of Ph.D.s in engineering are women despite the fact that women represent nearly 60 percent of all doctoral students. Summers’ comments on the lack of women’s success in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) came on the heals of a study released the previous year that reported that out of the 32 tenure offers made by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, only four went to women.

The basic question still remains. Why this disparity?

In the January issue of the prestigious journal “Science,” a group of researchers published a paper that had as its first author Sarah-Jane Leslie of Princeton University on the gender imbalance in STEM fields. According to Leslie, the imbalance is due to the fact that the practitioners in certain fields “…believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success.” Women, she wrote, are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. She added that this hypothesis also extends to African Americans’ underrepresentation in STEM disciplines.

The authors based their conclusions on a nationwide survey of more than 1,800 faculty members, postdoctoral and graduate students. Essentially these researchers did not find any statistically significant difference in success between genders based on the number of hours worked, or any evidence that men were more “brilliant” than women in any field.

It all comes down to stereotypes that make women and African Americans seem less suited for certain disciplines than their male and white counterparts.

“Academics who wish to diversify their fields might want to downplay talk of innate intellectual giftedness and instead highlight the importance of sustained effort for top-level success in their field,” the study’s authors concluded. “We expect that such easily implementable changes would enhance the diversity of many academic fields.”

This is a very interesting recommendation given that academia has been consistently accused of overplaying political correctness when it comes to talk of diversity and equality. Yet, this study shows that despite such talk stereotypes and biases still play a major role in the hiring of women and African Americans in STEM fields.

Although not mentioned in the study, there is also a major issue of pay inequality. It is hard to understand why faculty members in the same institutions of higher education, who essentially do the same work when it comes to teaching, scholarship and service, and who have to pass the same high bar in order to attain tenure, are being paid differently based upon their gender.

A recent study by the American Association of University Professors surveyed the salaries of faculty members in 1,156 postsecondary institutions. Almost all of them reported paying females less than males by about a margin of 10 percent. This disparity is particularly evident for the upper echelon of academia – full professors. And among the ranks of full professor, only 23 percent are women.

As these data clearly show, there is no question that institutions of higher education need to be more proactive in promoting both opportunities and equity for both women and minorities in their ranks. To be successful, those undertakings must be initiated by the leadership of those institutions.

A 2012 report published by the American Council on Education not only showed that the percentage of college presidents who are women or minorities was well below the percentage of those groups in the general population, but also that those numbers are decreasing (even in minority serving institutions) despite the fact that there is no question that there are more and more females and members of ethnic groups who are prepared to take positions of leadership.

When those statistics were presented at a conference that I attended, an African-American woman colleague of mine who was a provost and wished to become a college president said to me with evident dismay, “I am doomed.”

Since the ultimate decision for hiring those leaders rests with the governing boards of those institutions, one wonders if they are aware or even care about all these inequalities in higher education.

I recently did an informal survey of ads for presidents/chancellors at American colleges and universities published in the last two years in “The Chronicle of Higher Education,” the trade publication for academics. I found that about 10 percent of those ads did not even mention the word “diversity” as part of their values in their prospectus. And, unfortunately, one has to wonder how many of those that mentioned the desire for diversity really meant it.

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Women And Minorities Face Prejudice In Academia

Here is my latest article for my weekly column “Letters from Academia” about higher education: it has to do with mental health issues among college students.

Campuses Struggling with Mental Health Issues

Mental health has become a major “elephant in the room” for administrators at colleges and universities nationwide.

According to some surveys, when college students are asked about the top impediments for good academic performance, they most often cite stress, sleep disorders, Internet and computer game addiction, depression and alcohol.

And these seem to be not only common, but also growing problems. Today, 24 percent of students seeking advice at college counseling centers are already on some form of mental health medication, compared with 9 percent 20 years ago.

Further, issues related to alcohol abuse are more frequent among college students than among the general population, while students are less likely to receive treatment. What is causing these problems?

In an excellent book titled “Mental Health Issues & the University Student,” its author Doris Iarovici, a psychiatrist at Duke University Counseling and University Services, writes that there is a combination of factors creating the mental health crisis in higher education. Although there is better ability to diagnose mental conditions, the main issue seems to be the great variation in resources available at different colleges and universities.

The demographics of today’s college students are also a factor. For one, there has been a surge in the number of students who are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Many of them suffer of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

There has also been an increase in the proportion of older students, students with disabilities, international students and members of the LGBT community – all of whom have different needs.

Changes in student demographics, along with disparities in services available, make it easy to understand the surge in the number of suicides and violent acts taking place among members of campus populations. Some of those incidents make big headlines in the national and international press. Many in the public, however, fail to see the connection to higher education.

Take the case of Jared Loughner. In January of 2011 he shot Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Gifford and 19 others, killing six after having been suspended from Pima Community College for psychological issues.

Yet, even with all of these statistics colleges and universities do not seem to be doing enough. For example, while the number of psychiatrists working in mental health centers on campuses has increased, that growth has been rather marginal. Only about two thirds of higher education institutions have that level of mental health professional on campus. And even when they do, there are not enough of them with expertise on different types of disorders.

The other problem is that even when a campus psychiatrist is available, many students refuse to take certain medications, such as antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, for a variety of reasons. Therefore we cannot assume that colleges and universities are solving, in general terms, the mental health predicament facing them.

Although current fiscal problems in higher education have led many administrators to try to save money in areas other than instruction, the consequences of doing so can be catastrophic in many ways.

In April 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, killed 32 people and wounded 17 more during an attack that lasted two hours and that ended with the attacker committing suicide.

Cho had had severe anxiety disorders during much of middle and high school. But because of federal privacy laws, Virginia Tech was unaware of those problems despite the fact that he had received treatment. Although his stalking of female students at Virginia Tech had been reported to the school authorities and he had been declared mentally ill by a Virginia special justice and ordered to undergo treatment, he was never institutionalized or prevented from buying guns.

Because Virginia Tech is a state institution, the state of Virginia paid $11 million in settlements to the victims and their relatives, thousands of dollars in fines and lost a lot of prestige given the manner in which the whole incident was handled.

Certainly many students and their families do not look favorably at schools that seem careless when it comes to campus security. In addition to providing appropriate counseling services, educational institutions need to offer better training to their faculty and staff on how to detect certain behaviors so they can prevent violent incidents.

Part of that training has to do with recognizing the diversity and fluidity of the generational characteristics of the students attending college. Different cohorts of students have different needs and expectations.

For example, the major concern for members of the Millennial Generation (born between 1981 and 2004) and who constitute the majority of the college population today is to get a good job. Members of Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) tend to be more cynical and pessimistic. Failure to recognize such characteristics by other members of higher education communities may lead to drawing wrong conclusions when behavior is questioned.

Another issue has to do with economic concerns. The increasing financial pressure on students and parents is among the factors behind problems, not only like stress, but also sleep disorders, loneliness, perfectionism, eating disorders, depression and impulsive behavior.

Dealing with all these issues and preventing major tragedies must be a top priority for higher education administration. In other words, if they think that appropriate counseling staffing and training of campus personnel is expensive, they should think about the alternative: loss of lives, massive lawsuits and damaged prestige that translate in less funding and enrollment.

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Campuses Struggling With Mental Health Issues

In this article I discuss how important is for college and universities to better police themselves giving the changing landscape created by U.S. Supreme Court decisions on higher education.

Universities Need to Police Themselves Better

Unknown to most people, major disputes on higher education frequently end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Further, many of the decisions made on those cases have shaped legal policies for the country as a whole.

After decades of a culture of social isolationism, we see how colleges and universities have gradually become the battleground of national issues such as race, exercise of religion, sexual assaults and gun control. Given the increasingly litigious society in which we live, we should not be surprised by this phenomenon.

In a recent book by Michael Olivas titled “Suing Alma Mater,” the author presented a number of facts that are unknown not only to the general public but also to most people in academia.

For example, in the last 50 years or so more than 120 cases related in one way or another to higher education have been heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of other cases have been filed with the Court only for the justices to deny hearing them.

Part of the reason for this rather high number of cases reaching the Supreme Court is the increasing number of activist groups that provide legal counsel (most of the time for free) to people who feel adversely affected by decisions made by colleges and universities.

Mimicking the pioneering work of organizations such as the NAACP and the ACLU in cases regarding race or free speech in academia, a growing number of conservative, not-for-profit organizations have become players arguing on behalf of individuals who feel that because of their religion, family values, or for the reason of being white, have been discriminated against by postsecondary institutions.

What all this means is that there is an increasing scrutiny of the operations of colleges and universities by society in general. Experience tells us that most of those institutions may not be well prepared to deal with that kind of exposure.

For one thing institutions of higher education have had for decades a culture of what I call “academic exceptionalism” in which they believe that they are governed by a different set of rules that allow them to do virtually anything they want.

One example of this hubris is how faculty members see themselves within their institutions.

Despite the fact that faculty can be (and in many cases are) unionized, the Supreme Court decided in 1980 in NLRB v. Yeshiva University that faculty members are supervisory personnel and, therefore, part of the management of the institution.

Sometimes this culture of exceptionalism extends to the upper administration.

For example, many times one hears from public university lawyers that their institutions are largely protected from legal action by “sovereign immunity,” a legal doctrine by which the sovereign or state cannot commit a legal wrong and is immune from civil suit or criminal prosecution. Without ignoring that doctrine, the Supreme Court has decided on more than one occasion that such protection is not absolute.

Another myth among faculty members is the unconditional belief in the concept of academic freedom. Again and again the Supreme Court has established that such a concept, far from absolute, is rather limited. Pretty much what the justices have said about it is that all that faculty members are vested with is in the establishment and the enforcement of standards of behavior that are reasonably and appropriately applied in evaluations of performance in and outside the classroom.

Another issue on which the justices have opined has been the very question of what is a college and what is not. And to the surprise of many, the distinction is not always clear.

Take Hacker v. Hacker, a 1987 case in which the Supreme Court decided that not all postsecondary educational institutions meet the definition of “college.” In fact, there have been many cases showing that many institutions not labeled as colleges were considered to be so, while others that very much functioned as colleges were not recognized as institutions of higher education by the Supreme Court.

Although we have heard of many cases where the plaintiffs are students, the fact of the matter is that they represent only 15 percent of the cases argued before the Supreme Court. Faculty members bring about a third of all the cases.

The reason so few legal complaints by students are heard by the Court is because the justices have again and again reaffirmed the fact that colleges and universities have a highly broad authority over students’ lives and affairs, keeping them under tight institutional control. This is an important point that counters a notion that in some circles has become a fad, and that is that students are “customers” and should be treated as such.

Further, despite the fact that we believe that all people have the same protection under the law, the Supreme Court has decided that rights for students in private institutions are fewer that those in public ones.

All of the above leads to a number of conclusions. One is that against popular belief, the law is highly contextual and cases dealing with a variety of other subject matters will oftentimes have bearing on higher education law.

Yet, the most important conclusion coming from recent years of Supreme Court decisions is that if colleges and universities do not police themselves – the government will.

Therefore, these institutions need to educate their members (both administrators and faculty) about the importance of being more proactive in designing their own compliance and implementation strategies by establishing clear rules of action. Most courts will not intervene in cases in which those institutions have followed their own procedures.

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Universities Need To Police Themselves Better

This is the first article of my new series of publications on higher education. They are published under the banner of “Letters from Academia” and the column will be nationally syndicated.

How To Make Higher Public Education Free

Before the Civil War, a politician and education reformer named Horace Mann implemented the idea of free elementary and secondary education in Massachusetts, an idea that was later mimicked by the rest of the country.

Recently, President Obama proposed a plan to make community and technical college education free for all. The plan, called “America’s College Promise,” would deliver free tuition to students who go to school at least half time and maintain a 2.5 grade point average while making progress toward a degree.

Under the plan, states would have to provide about a quarter of the costs of the program, maintain existing education spending and work to reduce the need for remedial classes and repeated courses. Colleges with participating students would have to offer academic programs that fully transfer to four-year colleges or job training programs with high graduation rates.

Is this program feasible?

The United States is sliding in its performance worldwide when it comes to higher education. Ten nations now fare better than us in the percentage of the adult population with a college degree. This statistic, along with the crippling debt that students now bear because of the escalating cost of college, has made the situation untenable. To make things even worse, several studies show that the sectors of our population most affected by this situation are low-income students and minorities, many of which are from first-generation immigrant families.

Because of this there is a growing movement for making higher education free, led by organizations such as The Campaign for Free College Tuition and Complete College America. Even books published recently have been devoted to specific proposals on how to achieve that goal, such as Robert Samuels’s “Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free.”

Some have already put in practice several of these proposals. Last year, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam successfully pushed through legislation that allows for students in his state to apply for the Tennessee Promise scholarship. Beginning with the class of 2015, this program will offer two-year tuition-free education at a community college or technical school.

The way the program works is by providing full tuition and fees coverage after a student has applied to federal programs such as Pell Grants. The money comes from the lottery reserves that are used to create an endowment. Haslam, a Republican, has made clear that no tax dollars are used for this initiative.

The White House proposal contains many of the elements of the Tennessee program and Obama chose to unveil his program in the Volunteer State.

Oregon will be discussing similar legislation this year and analogous programs such as Michigan Education Trust (MET), the Missouri A+ Schools Program and another in Chicago are already in place.

Even some private institutions have been providing free higher education. At least eight U.S. private colleges, such as Berea College in Kentucky, have moved ahead with this idea in a structure similar to Tennessee’s.

There are even examples of public-private partnerships, such as the Kalamazoo Promise, a pledge by a group of anonymous donors to pay for up to 100 percent of tuition at any of Michigan’s state institutions of higher education for graduates of the public high schools of the city of Kalamazoo.

Several European countries, such as Germany, and even developing nations like Chile, already offer tuition-free higher education. As innovative and daring as the president’s proposal seems, it is neither revolutionary nor entirely new. Yet, there is no question that the proposal by the Obama administration will be controversial.

Obama’s plan is projected to cost $60 billion over 10 years. It sounds like a lot, but really isn’t. The average yearly price tag is $6 billion, which is less than 1 percent of the U.S. military budget. More importantly, the plan does not call for new taxes to pay for it.

To begin with, community and technical colleges that serve about 45 percent of the undergraduates of this country already receive about $9.1 billion annually from the federal government. Although we don’t have all of the administration’s financial details, we do know that by reallocating federal money that now funds other educational programs (such as tuition tax breaks) further revenue could be generated.

Like in any other major societal program there will be winners and losers. Among the winners, in addition to the students themselves, will be community colleges, as long as they keep their physical and human infrastructure ready to receive the influx of new students.

Among the losers will be the private, for-profit institutions of higher education. These institutions enroll about 10 percent of post-secondary students, but use about 25 percent of federal student aid. And they are the main responsible party for student debt. While they serve mostly low-income students, they depend on those students taking out more loans than anybody. The median debt for students at the for-profits is $33,000 versus $22,000 at public institutions and $18,000 at private, non-profit ones.

Public, four-years institutions could also lose given that they will not have as high of enrollments for the first two years and that some states may divert their resources to fund community colleges. Further, they do not have the support of a powerful lobby behind them as do the for-profit institutions.

It is time for the leadership of higher education institutions to stop passing down budget cuts to students in the form of higher tuition and fees, to faculty by reducing their numbers and support for their academic activities and to staff in the form of layoffs. They need to start working with their boards for creative solutions. That is what is needed for the United States to keep its position of leadership in the world.

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How To Make Higher Public Education Free