We Have Goals. Now What?Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, v44 n6 p14-25 2012. 12 pp.
The nation is in an era of policy reform aimed at improving the productivity and effectiveness of higher education. Major philanthropies and policy groups have converged around variations of the ambitious college completion goals announced by President Obama at the beginning of his administration. But at the same time, many state governments, while recognizing the pressing need to prepare a next-generation workforce, have had to reevaluate their spending priorities because of sustained budget crises. Given changing student demographics, reaching these big goals requires that states and institutions make deliberate efforts to shrink the inequities that persist between racial and ethnic groups in postsecondary access and completion. Equity is no longer just a moral imperative but an economic one as well. This article describes a collaborative project of the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE), the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), and the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California in which the authors tackled these challenges. With support from the Ford Foundation, the authors developed a model of policy-to-practice alignment aimed at translating the state's ambitious completion goals--to produce 70,224 more college completers than current numbers by the year 2020--into concrete, equity-focused goals and actions at the campus level. Their goal in writing this article is to demonstrate how policymakers, institutional leaders, and researchers can collaborate to help public higher education emerge from the current fiscal crises stronger and more equitable. (Contains 6 figures and 18 resources.)