2020 Commission Promise For Future
Washington Gov. Gary Locke may have found his legacy when he named a committee of 21 top business and education leaders and asked them to chart a long-term vision for higher education.
The recommendations of the 2020 Commission command attention due to the credibility of the members: John Creighton Jr. of Weyerhaeuser, Bob Craves of Costco, Wendell Satre of Washington Water Power, Phyllis Campbell of U.S. Bank, former Gov. Daniel J. Evans, and others of similar stature.
A group like this creates a powerful constituency to press for follow-through by the governor and Legislature.
But it is the 15 recommendations that make the committee’s work deserving of a prominent place in Washington’s policy goals.
The recommendations shatter many of the assumptions of the current higher education system. That’s a good thing. Higher education, alone among the major public-policy undertakings - welfare, public schools, criminal justice - so far has escaped aggressive reform.
Wisely, however, the commission does not recommend that politicians or Olympia bureaucracies micromanage the reforms. Rather, it recommends that the governing boards of each college and university be given greater incentives, tools and authority to innovate. The boards know their schools best.
But the boards have been hamstrung. So, the commission urges that state schools be freed to set tuition, keep and invest any money they save through efficiencies, measure educational outcomes, and contract out with low-cost specialty firms for such services as maintenance, computing and meals.
Most important, the commission calls for a strengthened community college system, a tapping of unused capacity in private colleges and the further development of branch campuses and “distance learning” (instruction via telecommunications).
The committee wants to remedy the underfunding and political neglect that have hurt community colleges. Appropriately so. Two years of postsecondary education will be essential to good-job careers in the information economy. Community colleges excel at low-cost, practical training with direct links to local job opportunities.
The committee urges that the state provide scholarships for every successful high school graduate, enough to cover the cost of two years in a community college.
The money could be spent at any in-state school, public or private.
The scholarships, costing $150 million a year, represent a profound shift in the definition of a minimal education. In the past, taxpayers have funded 13 years of schooling. In the future, they’d fund 15.
If Washington state meets this challenge, it will equip young people to rise above the social ills to which so many tax dollars are now diverted. It will, at long last, prod higher education to reinvent itself for the needs of the new century.