My name is Matthew Rascoff and I'm the Vice President for Technology Based Learning and Innovation at the University of North Carolina system. I'm here today to talk about challenges facing higher education in our state, across the country and around the world. The economy of North Carolina, like many other economies around the U.S., is experiencing massive transition. We are becoming a knowledge economy and that is going to create great demand for a more educated work force in the future. The strategic plan of the University of North Carolina calls for moving from a state where only a quarter of our population has a college degree to a state where 37% of our people have a degree. Yet our institutions are not set up to serve a majority of people. They're set up to serve a relatively small slice of the population. The population that was able to participate in residential programs, like this one at UNC Chapel Hill. What can we do as an institution of higher education, and what can higher education more broadly in the US and around the world do to serve new kinds of students, wider populations, and increase access to the most important skills for life, for citizenship and for work? Our data show that in North Carolina, there are 1.5 million people who have some college, but no degree. We call these the part way home students. And we believe they can be the low hanging fruit for college completion. What can we do as an institution to bring these students back into college, help them finish, and help them succeed? In the U.S., college debt has become a topic of great debate. It's true, college does cost a lot, and students are taking on unprecedented amounts of debt in order to attend college. But it's also true that the extra earnings that you receive by being a college graduate have never been higher. Today, with a college degree, on average, you can expect to earn 1.8 times as much as you would earn with a high school degree alone. That's a tremendous difference. And it's never been higher in the history of American higher education. The problem is that if you don't graduate college, you take on the debt but you don't get the wage multiple, you don't get the wage benefit. So college completion becomes all the more important for our students. I think technology can be part of the solution for access. But the debates about education technology today are incredibly divisive. On the one hand there's a camp that believes technology is the beginning of the end of classic higher education. On the other hand, there's a camp that believes that its the solution to all of our problems of access and cost. To make progress, I think we have to tune out some of the rhetoric and actually focus on meaningful innovations that help our students Faculty are absolutely essential. The faculty are the heart of the University. And if we're going to make change in instruction, the faculty have to come along. The challenge is that our faculty of today signed up for a particular job, serving a particular kind of student. Now we're asking them to serve a very different population of students. What can we do to bring our faculty along? What can we do to empower them to serve this new group of students? To see the potential in reaching new populations? What sorts of professional development should we be offering them? And what kinds of supports will they need? And finally, what kinds of skills and what kinds of people should we be looking for in the next generation of faculty. An earlier generation of reformers focused on getting new populations into college. What they missed was the importance of finishing college. President Clinton, in one of his State of the Union addresses, said every American should have the right to some college. The problem is the benefits of college really only accrue if you finish, get your degree, and get a job. What can we do in this generation to make sure we're not just bringing students into college, but we're helping them finish? For profit universities have been very effective in access. What they have missed is an orientation toward quality and excellence. Public universities place a very high premium on quality. We have to compete, however, against these for profits. With less, less access to capital, no venture capital, and working with taxpayer dollars. That means sometimes we can't move as quickly. And we don't have all the tools available to a for profit institution. What can we do to learn from the for profits, reorient our institutions toward access and compete more effectively as public institutions against those faster moving private organizations? Debates about higher education sometimes miss a fundamental point about disruption. Disruptive innovations succeed not by competing against some high end, high quality offering in a market, but by competing against nothing. They offer an alternative for those who are under served by current offerings, by current markets and they give something that's better then nothing. So we've talked a lot about higher education and universities in business terms. But what's really at stake, when we're talking about universities, is not just training, and not just workers of the future. We're talking about the institutions that prepare our citizens for life, and that prepare our leaders. What we're talking about is truly, no more or no less, than a vision for what constitutes the future and what kinds of institutions we need to prepare our people for the future.
