There's actually some news about higher education that doesn't revolve around the beer diplomacy intended to cool tempers over the arrest of Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates. Apart from President Obama's hosting a reconciliation party at the White House, there's his decision to commit billions of dollars to support community colleges.
Obama has been rightly applauded for planning to open the federal coffers to the nation's community colleges, which he's dubbed the "stepchild" of higher education. But what the president overlooked in his multi-billion-dollar investment promise was another, no less important, sibling in the family of educational institutions: The state colleges, that misunderstood and under-appreciated middle child of public higher education.
I happen to have skin in this game, as they say. I'm a state college professor.
If state colleges had a logo, it would be a question mark. Few opinion leaders outside state college campuses have a clue as to what we're all about and how we differ from the UMass and community systems.
What's our mission? What do we contribute to the welfare of Massachusetts?
Many of the state's influential legislators and journalists would flub those questions, too. So here's my study guide.
College mission statements are typically wordy and platitudinous. I'll be concise: Our mission is the four-year transformation of lives.
In my 14 years at Salem State, I've seen it happen often enough. An 18-year-old kid struggles through her freshman year, uncertain about whether she can rise up to meet the big expectations of her future. Soon enough, she gets her diploma, and then I get the good news: She's a success story.
I know. I see a lot of Facebook updates.
The basic difference between the mission of state and community colleges boils down to the contrast between two-year vocational and trade preparation and four-year, bachelor's and master's-granting liberal arts and professional education. How state college missions differ from the UMass system is a little more nuanced. It boils down to expectations and resources.
The state colleges' mission is teaching, primarily. We publish research, write books and get grants. But by and large, our eyes are on a different prize than grants and authorship.
The commonwealth expects state college professors to teach more classes than our UMass colleagues. They are teachers, too. But the commonwealth judges them, in large measure, by the quantity and quality of the research they publish and the grants they secure. With those greater expectations come greater resources for UMass in terms of both capital budgets and salaries.
In higher-ed jargon, state college "outcomes" are our student success stories.
There's Shannon, who won a $1,000 prize from a trade association as New England's most promising communicator. There's Courtney, Alyssa, Marysa, Micaela and Valen, who made presentations at national conferences.
There's shy Joe, son of a working-class family, who burst out of college into grad school, ambitious to employ his communications mojo.
There's Beth who worked her way up to vice president of a big-time PR firm. There's Jeremy, who founded a successful trade publication. There's Rick, the senior editor of an online magazine.
And there's Liz, first in her family to go college, on a four-year, full scholarship to the University of Michigan's doctoral program in education research.
The state colleges may be small change to some opinion leaders, but they're big dollars to Massachusetts.
More often than not, state college students stay here, unlike many of their peers who graduate from the private Ivies and head for the exit ramp to elsewhere.
State schools graduate our small business owners and produce our public officials. North Shore Congressman John Tierney is a Salem State grad. The same with Kim Driscoll, Salem's mayor.
The state college system is critical not only to the North Shore's economic development, but to the commonwealth's political, cultural and creative viability.
College education at any level doesn't come cheap. But at around one-fifth of the sticker price for private colleges, state colleges are still a bargain.
Yet a misunderstanding of what we do has placed that bargain on the endangered species list.
Over the past decade, the legislature has put us on a near-starvation diet, reducing support to less than a quarter for every dollar of college budgets.
Unsurprisingly, state college tuition and fees have more than doubled over the last decade, rising faster than those of our better-known siblings, the UMass and community college systems. Our working-class student population, with their 40-hour jobs, are feeling the pinch.
My students' success stories make me feel like a million bucks. I only wish the policy-makers could feel the love.
¢¢¢
Robert E. Brown teaches public relations in the Communications Department at Salem State College. He has written previously for the opinion pages.
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