Last night, President Obama delivered an address to the nation.  He focused on the state of the economy and his administration’s plans for the economic future of our country focusing on energy, healthcare, and education.  I thought I would examine his plans for education as it relates to higher education and compare them to the public policy initiatives and thought pieces that have previously been published.

President Obama’s speech led off with a discussion of the global economy and the fact that “the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge.”  One of the first persons to stimulate a national discussion on this topic was author Thomas Friedman with the publication of his book, The World is Flat, in 2005.  Friedman cogently makes the point that technology has opened up the ability for companies to effectively employ engineers from India and China while conducting their business from the U.S.  Friedman also discusses the higher rates of education in countries with former third world status where it is recognized that the ticket to financial success is a good education.

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While reading a few papers about learning communities, I came across a reference to a publication by James Zull, entitled The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning.  Zull, a professor of biology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, is also the Director Emeritus of its University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE).  He states that his quest to explain why people learn differently and how teachers should teach to accommodate those differences led him to write this book explaining some of the physical characteristics of the human brain and how those characteristics influence our learning.

Zull combines a subject that to many might be dull (physical characteristics of the brain) with his personal experiences as a teacher and uses examples of students that he taught to illustrate his concepts.  His primary message in the book is that learning is change and “thus, the art of teaching must be the art of changing the brain.”  Zull deliberately does not define “learning” since he says that it has different meanings for all of us and he challenges the reader to review his book and see if the physical explanations of learning fit within their definitions of learning.

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In 1796, the last full year of George Washington’s presidency, the citizens of the United States honored their first president by celebrating his birthday, February 22nd.  From the celebration in 1796 sprung a tradition of honoring President Washington by celebrating his birthday.  By the early 1800s, wealthy Americans were celebrating Washington’s birthday with lavish parties and receptions; the average American commemorated the holiday by gathering with friends for picnics or a couple of drinks at the local bar.  Though the majority of Americans celebrated George Washington’s Birthday, it was not an official national holiday until 1880.  Many states instituted it as a state holiday, however, allowing Americans to enjoy a day off work to celebrate.

By the mid 1800s, another American president had captured the hearts of the American people: President Abraham Lincoln.  Coincidentally, Lincoln’s birthday is February 12th.  In 1865, one year after President Lincoln’s assassination, the nation officially honored his presidency and character by commemorating his birthday.  In 1880, George Washington’s birthday became a federal legal holiday, making Washington the first American to have a federal holiday named in his honor.  Though Lincoln’s birthday did not become an official federal holiday, many states began celebrating it either in addition to or in conjunction with George Washington’s birthday.  Those states that celebrated Lincoln’s birthday in conjunction with Washington’s began calling the holiday Presidents Day.

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With the number of articles about the financial difficulties in higher education increasing in frequency, it was bound to happen that someone would create a blog to track some of those articles.  Ray Schroeder, Director of COLRS/OTEL and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois  has done that.

New Realities in Higher Education is the name of his blog (and you can find it at http://www.recessionreality.blogspot.com/).  I signed up for the email feed and have received a daily email with several new articles posted each day.  The majority of the articles are about public colleges and universities and the impact on expenditures and tuition due to the state funding reductions generated by the recession’s impact on the tax revenues in most states.  In states where the real estate crash was felt first (like Arizona), the crunch is significant.  More people plan to return to college, but with their funding crunch, the public two and four year colleges may not have room for them.

There is a general lesson about economics and practical business sense that will be learned painfully.  Many colleges and universities made commitments to spend all of the increased revenues they received during the good years (just like most of the states spent their increased tax revenues).  When decisions are made in that manner, retrenching is difficult.  Most economists note that there are economic cycles and that downturns occur.  The issue in question is the duration of the particular cycle that we are in.  No one knows how long this particular downturn cycle will last but it will undoubtedly impact students, institutions, and the states for quite a while.

Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (NCPPHE) recently issued their report entitled Squeeze Play 2009: The Public’s Views on College Costs Today.  Given the state of the economy, Public Agenda and the NCPPHE decided to conduct a survey in December 2008 that they had conducted two years previously for their Squeeze Play 2007 report.

There were a couple of significant findings in this study.  For example, more Americans than ever believe that obtaining a college degree is the only way to succeed in America.  From a low of three out of ten Americans agreeing with that statement in 2000, the number has almost doubled to fifty-five percent, up twenty-four percent in only eight years.  In previous studies, people cited Bill Gates as an example of why you didn’t need a college degree to succeed, but this year’s survey has tipped the balance toward a majority believing that college degrees are a necessity.

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Every now and then, I run across a good book that has been out for a while and which escaped my attention.  Such was the case with David Maraniss‘ They Marched into Sunlight which was published in 2003.

Maraniss, an editor at the Washington Post, crafted an excellent non-fiction book which is actually two stories with the crescendo event of both occurring in the October 17-18, 1967 two-day period.  Storyline number one is about an ambush of two companies of the Black Lion battalion in Vietnam.  As the Vietnam War continued to escalate, General Westmoreland and the Pentagon were under pressure to bring back better news, and President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) was under fire from conservatives and liberals as well as the radicals against war.  Storyline number two is about students at the University of Wisconsin who led a sit-in against recruiters from Dow Chemical, manufacturers of napalm, and a favorite target of anti-war elements across the nation.

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