CHARLOTTE (Oct. 4, 2017) – We’ve all sensed it – a growing divide in views of higher education.
A Pew Research Center survey in June revealed that 58% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters nationwide now say colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country – a dramatic shift from two years ago, when 54% of Republicans said colleges and universities had a positive effect.1
UNC President Margaret Spellings bluntly addresses the findings in the accompanying video from the Higher Education Works Foundation’s ‘Aim Higher, Achieve More’ forum in Charlotte. Some feel disaffected and left behind, she said.
“We’ve sold this belief that higher education is a pathway, and then priced people out of it, often. And so they think, ‘That’s not for me,’” Spellings says.
Raucous campus confrontations don’t help, she adds.
“This is not an easy time to be there. This is where our intense political debates that we’re having right now play out. So when speakers go to college campuses and are spit at, shouted at, beat up, that makes moms and dads in Kings Mountain say, ‘What the heck?’ So I think they often see maybe not a reflection of their own values and beliefs and orthodoxy reflected in American higher education.
“So we need to work on that – we need to bring that balance back. We need to see all points of view in American higher education, so that we can rebut this erroneous belief that higher education is part of the problem,” Spellings says.
Jennifer Haygood, acting president of the NC Community College System, says educators need to be “attached at the hip” with industry to make sure they are providing skills and critical thinking – critical thinking that is required in all fields.
“I do think that we need to improve that connection, and I think a strategy that we all need to be considering expanding on is work-based learning,” Haygood says, citing apprenticeships, internships and co-ops as examples.
NC House Speaker Tim Moore shares an anecdote about witnessing a heated campus demonstration and concluding: “I feel at home – this is like being in the legislature.”
But Moore says that when North Carolinians understand the full effects of higher education in their state, they support it.
“What I’m hearing is really support for the university when folks know and they understand. It’s not only about of course education, but the research and development,” Moore says, pointing to the growth of Research Triangle Park and analytics giant SAS as byproducts of the state’s universities.
“Just think back 30 years ago – would you ever have thought you’d have something like an iPhone? Nobody ever thought that – that was in the movies. Remember the James Bond movie where he pulled the thing out, made a picture of it? That was just science fiction.
“If you look at just about any kind of development of technology, you can just about always trace it back to higher education,” he says.
“It’s a long-term investment, and I think when folks understand and see what the payoff is by a great university system, they support it. I mean, if you went back and tried to single out in North Carolina, our economy, whether it’s biotech, high tech, you name it, it all comes back to where the universities are.”
1http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-national-institutions/
Bob Warwick says
President Spelling and Speaker Moore do not seem to understand that people are tired of paying money to colleges and universities that only support the liberal progressive point of view and attach conservatives and Christians on the campuses. The progressive control the bulk of higher education in this country and conservatives are tired of paying the bills for a bunch of spoiled children. If the conservatives do not have a place on the campus, let the campus pay its own bills. Do not force the taxpayer to pay for the left’s agenda.