College for ME -- and all New England?

By Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson

Why does Maine have an imaginative new Compact for Higher Education, also known as College for ME? Why has the New England Board of Higher Education recently launched a College Ready New England initiative? And why has the Boston region, since the 1970s, had a Higher Education Partnership, aimed at connecting colleges and universities with young people before they make that fateful decision about going to college -- or not?

The answers, in each case, are pretty clear: to save people from lives of drift and frustration, and to strengthen their states, regions and cities.

There are other promising examples, too. A Higher Education Alliance sprung into being in Bridgeport, made of up eight colleges and universities, bent on penetrating the high schools. Business and civic leaders set up a Berkshire Compact for Higher Education, 40 members from healthcare to manufacturing to schools and colleges trying to remove the big barrier so many kids (and adults) see.

Maine’s College for ME effort takes a different approach -- direct aim at the inadequate preparation of people already at work in New England’s lowest-income state. Henry Bourgeois, the highly respected public affairs executive who runs the program, points out that 80 percent of the people who’ll be working in Maine a decade from now are already on the job. But only 37 percent of them have a college degree.

“I run into skeptics,” says Bourgeois, “who say we should just focus on generating jobs. I tell them that without the trained workers you can forget about attracting the knowledge industries here.” College for Me has a goal of getting Maine’s college-educated adult population up to at least New England average (currently 45 percent) within the next 10-15 years. The program’s start-up costs have been funded by a number of Maine’s 1,000 companies with 10 or more employees, firms with a big stake in having a supply of better- and better-prepared workers.

Maine’s effort extends also to improving college-going rates among high schoolers. There are fewer students, year after year, in Maine’s high schools. John Fitzsimmons, president of the community college system, says money is the main reason why so many who graduate don’t go on to college. So Maine’s community colleges are reaching down into the schools, offering students a chance to try a couple of college courses, using the bait of a starter scholarship for any student that completes two courses. “Tasting how different college is beats wasting that last year in high school,” says Fitzsimmons.

The big first goal is to make sure youth and mid-career workers aim for at least an Associate degree. And not just in cities. Today the word’s going out that even in rural areas, 60 percent of jobs will require higher skills. And that at least a third of all the jobs in today’s management, business, financial, science, engineering, computer and healthcare fields are open to people with the Associate degree.

Rhode Island, with the fresh enthusiasm of CEO-turned-governor Donald Carcieri, points to its Career Academies, specializing in guiding immigrants through the process. Vermont’s into its third decade of personally tracking intentions and follow-through of every high schooler.

What of the historic New England tug to complacency, citizens and legislators wondering if all the folderol surrounding these new efforts is worth the candle? Well, it’s a different world. Take China. It has set a goal of literally doubling its rate of college-going every six years. And so far, it’s meeting it.

WHY COLLEGE?

Anyone who doubts the payoff of college degrees should check out the economic evidence. Researchers Christopher Berry of Harvard University and Robert Weissbourd of RL Associates did a national study showing that of all measures, the percentage of bachelor’s degree holders in a region was the only consistent predictor of prosperity. Ed Glaeser of Harvard’s Rappaport Institute found just about the same thing -- that from 1980 to 2000, the economies in regions with fewer than 10 percent college-degree holders grew only 13 percent. But where over 25 percent had degrees, the growth rate was a startling 45 percent.

[Originally published December 2005]