Power in higher ed

Texas colleges and universities need to sell themselves to a wider, broader audience.

For those who don’t watch HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” the motto of House Stark — “Winter is coming” — means that a dark challenge is looming and that people need to be vigilant and to prepare.

Winter is coming for Texas colleges and universities. They barely escaped a budget bloodbath in the 85th legislative session and are likely to face the long knives again in 2019. The Legislature’s hostility to higher ed stems from its voter base. Most Republicans and rightleaning independents believe that colleges and universities have a negative effect on how things are going in this country, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

To stave off winter, the leaders of colleges and universities in this state need to broaden their mission beyond educating students who are enrolled in their programs. They should adopt a goal to teach residents of our state what higher education accomplishes for us all.

Too often taxpayers don’t connect the dots between the valuable work universities and colleges perform and its impact on our daily lives. It’s worth reminding voters that if you go to a veterinarian in Texas, chances are she earned a degree from Texas A&M University. If you have certain types of cancer you have renewed hope thanks to the pioneering work done at University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center. If you send your child to a public school in Houston, his teacher is likely to have graduated from University of Houston or Texas Southern University.

A new Brookings study provides a framework for this type of communication. The study rates universities on two benefits to society: whether they act as ladders for social mobility and whether they are laboratories for research.

“Ladder” universities help keep the American dream alive. College graduates have a growing advantage over everyone else, and these ladder universities give low-income students a shot at better employment, improved health, and long term financial stability. “Lab” universities expand knowledge in directions that can improve the welfare of the broader population.

Just 20 percent of America’s selective public universities fulfill both the ladder and lab role. Yet Texas boasts four of these leaders among the top 14 in the country: University of Texas at El Paso, the UH system, University of Texas at San Antonio and Texas A&M Commerce. None of Texas’ fouryear universities are what researchers dub “laggards” or poor investments, although the study excludes military institutions, liberal arts colleges and historically black colleges.

In anticipation of the next session, Texas universities and colleges need to harness their brain power and figure out a way to tell us their ladder and lab stories. Leaders of colleges and universities need to spend more time in their communities touting the contributions of their institutions. Whether they are in the science department or the department of education, professors need to take a more active role in sharing the power of higher ed.

With 1 in 10 school children in this nation living in Texas, our state’s need for strong public universities will only grow in the coming years. Whether these children will have access to a robust system of higher education will depend in large part on legislative support. But it will also rest on the ability of universities and colleges to learn to share their stories with all of us.