Illinois Community College Trustees Conference

Remarks by Chancellor Richard Herman
September 14, 2007

Good afternoon. I'm pleased to be here today, to swing wide the doors between the flagship university campus in Illinois and the exemplary community college campuses you oversee.

Thank you for inviting me.  I am here today because I care about you and what you do.  The success of students at your colleges is critical to our state and our future.

It is incumbent on me and the institution I lead to work with you to expand that success by building new pathways linking our campuses, our students and our faculty, in order to serve the people of Illinois better. 

We have much to discuss in the hour ahead.  First I'd like to offer my perspective on the issues confronting our institutions, then I anticipate having a probing and illuminating give-and-take with you.

In his book The World is Flat, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman profiles the emerging global community and its impact on nations and people.

Friedman jokes that as a child, before outsourcing and 24/7 and the Internet, his parents told him, "Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving."

Today, he admonishes his own daughters, "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving - for your job."

Jobs are at the heart of the community college mission, a mission your institutions fulfill with distinction by addressing local needs for training and educational opportunities across a wide range of subjects.  A mission made ever more vital by the impact of globalization on our economic and commercial interests.

Your graduates form the backbone of the staff at many dental offices, hospitals and medical laboratories.  At automotive shops, where today's mechanics must know as much about computers as spark plugs.  And at hotels and restaurants, where employees must combine customer service, resource management, and the ability to adjust instantly to the natural ebb and flow of business.

While presenting a smiling face.

In scores of occupations, be they semi-professional, a skilled craft, or a technical field, the most up-to-date training is likely to be found at the local community college.  That is the legacy of the old junior college system, which I am proud to say began here in Illinois.

The first campus was Joliet Junior College, which was formed in 1901 by Stanley Brown, the superintendent of Joliet Township High School.  He recognized that graduates wanted to get a college degree while remaining close to home in Joliet.

Brown set out to provide an academic environment that would parallel the first two years of college, preparing students to advance to another campus.  Initial programs in teacher education grew in the twenties and thirties to include coursework in business and industrial training.

Two-year occupational programs were born in the postwar era of the forties, when veterans flooded America's campuses in search of the training and knowledge they would need to succeed.

Today, Joliet Junior College - which has retained the designation "junior college" in honor of its origins - serves more than 400,000 people in northeast Illinois.  True to its heritage of responding to local economic needs, today the college's Institute of Economic Technology assists local businesses in applying new technologies directly to the workplace.

At Parkland Community College here in Champaign, Interim President Tom Ramage makes very clear the role his campus plays in developing courses to meet the needs of local businesses.  "If we're not providing the kind of graduate they're interested in hiring or retaining," he says, "we're not doing our job."

As Ramage notes, serving existing businesses has long been the province of community colleges.  Now, you and your colleagues have responded to the burgeoning need of entrepreneurs intent on being their own bosses, a sweeping change in our economy as traditional jobs - especially in manufacturing - decline in number.

Shawnee Community College, for example, offers aquaculture programs to teach the ins-and-outs of farm-raising prawns and fish.  As the second-fastest growing category of agricultural industry, fish farming offers new economic opportunity to entrepreneurs and experienced farmers alike in water-rich southern Illinois.

The College of DuPage in suburban Chicago recently responded to the growing need for heating and air conditioning technicians who need business skills by offering two new degrees.  The Contractors Degree provides a mix of technical training in heating and refrigeration with preparation for managing a business.  Equipping budding entrepreneurs with the knowledge to start an enterprise, then sustain it.

The Building Environmental Managers degree combines technical training with instruction in management skills such as planning, staffing and project management.  One stated goal of this program is to promote upward mobility in the field among those who are experienced but need proper preparation to advance.

These transfers of knowledge, to entrepreneurs and aspiring experienced practitioners, are essential to improving the Illinois work force, and expanding economic opportunity for people at all levels of employment.

For those getting on the first step up the educational ladder, Parkland is working to increase access to higher education through its Center for Academic Success.  There, students who need remedial help in order to advance get personal attention that focuses on their individual abilities and learning styles, then assists them to overcome the barriers separating them from acquiring a college education.

This personal attention to specific individual needs is increasingly essential because too many students leave high school unprepared to advance.  More than ever, remedial education is key to elevating the attainment of willing and able students held back by their own learning differences, and the community colleges of Illinois are in the forefront of bridging the gap between a student's academic track record and his or her innate ability to learn.

As with so many community college initiatives, these programs not only are attuned to local economic needs, they recognize the changing aspirations of people in their community.  That is why community colleges excel at delivering these activities and services to their communities.

These and other initiatives are fundamental building blocks for our state, economically and academically. Enhancing life for the many members of the community college constituency, from adults engaged in lifelong learning to students seeking two-year degrees, and those working toward a baccalaureate by attending community college, then transferring to a four-year college.

In some ways, these students constitute the only interface between your colleges and the universities - and it is a critical one.  For example, each year about fifteen percent of the one-thousand full-time students transferring into Illinois come from Parkland. At the same time, about twenty-five-hundred students currently enrolled at Illinois brought with them credits earned at Parkland at some point in their academic careers.

That indicates the impact Parkland has on the Urbana campus.  The next largest feeder school is the College of DuPage, but after that, the numbers fall sharply for other community colleges in Illinois.  I hope that you can help me to understand how to increase access to Illinois for students from other community colleges.

This sharp division in transfer rates is a cause for concern in these years of limited resources, sharp competition for students among universities, and the statewide need for better educated citizens.  How can the public universities in Illinois collaborate with your institutions in order to receive the best students seeking four-year degrees?  This is one of the pathways that we need to open up, to the benefit of all our students and our state. 

We live in an interconnected global community, where actions taken one place can have a ripple effect, if not a distinct impact, around the world.  You and I share an ever-broadening responsibility to our students to deliver an education poised to address pressing societal needs by preparing them to be the leaders of tomorrow.

Equipping people to apply their knowledge and experience and commitment to advance the human condition through their careers and their contributions to the greater good, wherever they live.

People who are prepared to live in this diverse world, because they have benefited from meeting students who grew up in other cultures, with different backgrounds and dreams.  People who have reaped one of the best advantages of a postsecondary education, which is ongoing exposure to different ideas, new expectations and fresh perspectives.

Simply put, universities need to attract minority students in greater numbers.  The reality is, community colleges have a far larger proportion of minorities, and we should encourage them to complete four years of college.  Nationwide, nearly one-half of all incoming students begin in a community college.  And minorities constitute 34 percent of that population.

Our society needs the benefit of the cultural richness and variety of perspectives minorities offer.  As leaders of public institutions of higher education, we have the obligation to respond to the changing composition and divergent needs of our student body.  This has become an increasingly complex task for both universities and community colleges because the students we serve now are unlike any before in history.

Consider the findings of the Beloit College Mindset List. According to this annual exploration of attitudes and life experiences of 18-year-olds, the class of 2011 grew up without the Berlin Wall.  For them, U2 is a band, not a spy plane.  They never "rolled down" a car window, and have no idea what it means to leave a phone "off the hook." 

The events familiar to you and me are absent from their lives.  Their perspectives on the world have been shaped by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, not the CBS Evening News or the local newspaper.  They are coming to college as eagerly as their predecessors, but they're leaving with a greater debt load and more incentives to go for the gold in choosing their careers.

Are we doing the right things for them, given their expectations, experience and academic preparation? How can we help them?  And in so doing, help our world?

Here's an unlikely visage: A biologist and a mathematician are on death row, awaiting execution for crimes not imaginable. The executioner asks for their last requests.

The mathematician speaks first. "I've been delving into mathematical biology, and I'd like to give a seminar about it before I die."

Can do, says the executioner, turning to the biologist for his last request.  "Please," said the scholar of biology, "execute me before the seminar."

I'm pleased to say, I'm a mathematician not awaiting execution.  Maybe it's because I never delved into mathematical biology!

But I am deeply concerned about the future of biology and other STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and math.  I chair a national initiative called the Science and Mathematics Teacher Imperative.  It is sponsored by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.

The goal is to increase the number of middle and high school science and math teachers.  Thousands are urgently needed, according to a recent study by the National Academies.  The study found sixty-eight percent of eighth grade math students were taught by someone without a degree or certification in mathematics.

The study also reports that in the last two decades, U.S. colleges conferred twenty percent fewer bachelor degrees in engineering, math, and geosciences than in the years before.  In the last decade, the number of engineering doctorates awarded in the U.S. declined by thirty-four percent.

Today, only six percent of American high school students say they might go into careers in engineering or science.

Another disturbing statistic, more than half of public school teachers quit the profession within five years.  And the numbers are higher for math and science teachers.

I'm a mathematician, but those are numbers I do not like.  They speak to twin symptoms of dysfunction in our educational system - underperforming students and a shortage of properly prepared teachers in the disciplines our nation urgently needs.  Increased attention must be paid to the STEM subjects, from grade school through college.

Your campuses can be the proving grounds where new techniques in teaching STEM subjects are developed.  And where teachers in training can get familiar with new approaches to teaching, and apply them quickly in grade schools and high schools.

I'm heartened by the statewide effort to expand educational opportunities for teachers through the Associate of Arts in Teaching, or AAT degree.  This program, like so many at community colleges, primes students for the rigors of four-year school so they are academically ready to transfer, but provides access at lower cost than university tuition, and offers the convenience of attending classes close to home.

Through programs like the AAT degree, community colleges can serve their students better while broadening access to baccalaureate programs from the moment someone enrolls at community college.  Expanding the partnerships between community colleges and the public universities in Illinois that lead to a wider variety of similar two-plus-two approaches must be a priority.

Improving higher education in Illinois relies on marshalling all our resources in a coordinated and collaborative effort.  We can look to California for a model of higher education that has proved durable and effective.  One whose structure encourages ongoing relationships among institutions at different levels.

California implemented its three-tier system in 1960, placing the University of California campuses at the top, followed by the California State University campuses and the community college system.  Each system has specific missions written into the California Education Code, helping to prevent overlapping endeavors at more than one campus. 

Devised by UC President Clark Kerr, the system was designed to guarantee access to an excellent higher education. Kerr's plan reduced competition among California campuses, expanded educational resources and led to the establishment of the knowledge-driven economy in California, such as pharmaceuticals and the high-tech companies of Silicon Valley.

The Illinois system of higher education is less stratified, with fewer established contacts among its campuses as compared to California. The political fortunes for higher education ebb and flow in Illinois, with the current era marked by legislators who "get it" when it comes to addressing the long-term needs of our colleges and universities, but who must work with a strong leadership and strong governor to achieve hard-fought gains for our campuses.

The legislators who feel strongly about supporting higher education need our help in preparing for a change in the political winds.  That is one area where collaboration between our systems would benefit all our colleges in years to come.

Last March, the California Postsecondary Education Commission reported that over the last five years, only seventeen percent of community college students earned a two-year degree or certificate.

The study found that while twenty-two percent of these students transferred to one of California's public universities, about half left college without earning a degree or transferring to a university.  That is a deeply troubling report, for it speaks to loss - loss of human potential before graduation, loss of interest in higher education, perhaps even loss of faith in achieving personal gains through higher education.

In Illinois, a legislative task force reported last year that 16,000 students transferred from the state's community colleges to four-year schools, both private and public.  The University at Urbana is determined to increase the number of transfer students, then strive to increase their retention and graduation rates.

To that end, I'm pleased to announce a new program designed to enhance opportunities and improve guidance specifically for transfer students.  Financed under a grant from the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Transfer Experience and Advising Mentor, or TEAM, Project will work with targeted community college districts in rural areas, near St. Louis and in and around Chicago.

Students from underrepresented and economically disadvantaged backgrounds will be especially well served by this program.

Over the next five years the TEAM Project will seek to increase the number of transfer students, improve academic success of students in the project, and reduce institutional barriers for community college students who transfer to Illinois.  It also will promote adoption of the TEAM model to partners and peer institutions nationwide.

Through the TEAM Project, we will provide the individual counseling and hands-on assistance with the transfer process that will exceed our current efforts to welcome and inform transfer students.

On campus, twenty-two TEAM mentors will work with prospective transfer students to smooth their transfer to a four-year campus, assisting with admissions and financial aid applications, and offering their insights into the campus.

We will reduce barriers to access to transfers by working toward reducing the 60-hour requirement, and developing new two-plus-two articulation agreements.  We will also lower a critical financial barrier by extending to transfer students eligibility for Illinois Promise, a scholarship program for students with severe financial need.

Within five years, the TEAM Project expects to double transfer enrollments from the target districts, from 400 to about 800 students.  It also anticipates bringing up graduation rates among transfer students to equal those of students who entered Illinois as freshmen, at about eight-two percent.

I want to work with you to achieve greater success for all our students.  I want to put down many pathways between our institutions, as we are doing now with the TEAM Project and will do in the years ahead as we reach out to one another on behalf of the citizens of Illinois.

Articulation should not be the only major topic we discuss - we are all in this together. We all must maximize use of our resources.  We all want to provide the best educational opportunity for every student.  We all seek to serve the people of Illinois by responding to changing economic conditions, burgeoning personal expectations, and the opportunities posed by a global community in which we are neighbors with the people in India and China who are starving for our jobs.

Your colleges, your campuses, are on the ground floor of higher education.  Through your doors enter promising students who need guidance and opportunity and support.  I hope that through tight collaboration, we can work together to enhance opportunities for all students while advancing our institutional missions.

I want to praise you for the work you do.  I'm humbled to be here.

The time is now.  Let us work together.