Georgia Educational Advancement Council
Friday, November 17, 2006
Chancellor Erroll B. Davis Jr.
King & Prince
St. Simons, Georgia
Thank you John. In the interest of full disclosure let me point out that John works for me in our System office, and part of his responsibilities include research and the shaping of key points for me to consider in my public speeches. So, if you like what I have to say, please send me a line. If this doesn’t work, talk to John!
Let me also recognize our Interim Chief Operating Officer, Tom Daniel, as well as our Interim Chief Academic Officer, Beheruz Sethna. Beheruz also serves as president of the University of West Georgia. If you noticed both had interim titles, I think everyone on my staff is interim. They are all waiting to see if I implode so they are keeping their options open.
I could be the interim chancellor!
All kidding aside, it’s an honor to be with you today. Over the past months I have met with a number of higher education groups and organizations — both within the University System of Georgia as well as those representing both public and private higher education in the state. But as the “masters of communication,” I understand when you hear a speaker say: “it’s an honor to be here,” some of you have penned those very lines for individuals within your organization to make in public addresses.
You could quite rightly ask: “Is he sincere or being pro forma in such a statement?” Let me be, in State Department parlance, “be frank and candid.” Even though I am an electrical engineer by training, throughout my life I have been someone who has loved language and who appreciates the power of words. John can attest that when it comes to the right word, correct grammar, I can be unrelenting in the quest for accuracy and perfection.
I know and understand the central role communication plays in the success of any organization or program. And I know the role each of you play in communicating the right message to the right audience in order to achieve specific or general goals for your institution. And so, when I say that it is an honor to be with you today — I mean just that. It is an honor to be with those who carry the message. Of course, as an old utility executive, it’s an honor to speak with a group that isn’t booing — or isn’t just yet!
Seriously, I would like to take this time to share with you some thoughts regarding messaging. And I want to talk about messages with meat.
Higher education — both public and private — is at a critical point in its history. We are facing many challenges. The way in which we move forward depends at one level on our structural response to these challenges.
And on another level, we must then communicate clearly, broadly, and effectively with our key stakeholders and customers that higher education is dynamic, flexible, and responsive in addressing these challenges and serving the needs of our customers. What I want to discuss today is this:
- What are the challenges we face?
- The importance of identifying these challenges correctly;
- How these challenges affect how higher education operates;
- What should be our response going forward; and
- The development of communications that both inform and inspire our customers and our constituents to support our vision and our plans to deal with these challenges.
Here is the major problem: the role of higher education has changed —-and not everybody noticed. Higher education’s role has changed because of forces that have converged to force this change. These forces include technology, globalization, the drive in other countries to educate a competitive workforce — leading, of course, to the reshaped earth made famous in Tom Friedman’s book, “The World is Flat.” These forces create a world in which individuals must be educated — highly educated — but even more critically — a world where individuals must know how to learn and in the process, adapt to changing environments.
This, then, crystallizes the general challenge — to ensure that higher education prepares individuals to succeed in this flat world. We must prepare people to learn how to learn — to be ready for careers that don’t currently exist, let alone the careers that already exist that most of us don’t understand. Today’s students can pursue careers such as a search engine optimizer, for example.
But it is not enough to understand the challenge — we must have the correct interpretation of the challenge. Thus, in today’s world, our challenge in higher education is to educate a much higher percentage of our population to a much higher level than in the past.
As many of you are well aware, the United States faces many challenges in preparing its citizens for productive roles in a fast-changing, interconnected world. While the U.S. has long enjoyed a deserved reputation for its higher education system, today other nations have taken note and are educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels. India and China are prime examples.
This is a key finding of the recent report of a commission appointed by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. Two-thirds of high growth jobs require a college degree, which only one-third of Americans have. It is important that we understand both inside and outside of the Academy that we are no longer educating a small or elite governing class. That is a model that not longer works — and any college or university holding onto it is, or will soon be, an anachronism.
It is our shared responsibility in Georgia to confront this challenge not only in ways that serve this state’s citizens but also in ways that serve as national examples of how things should be done in the education arena. In short, there is no reason why we cannot be educational thought leaders in this country.
And our thinking — and action — here must begin with an understanding of how this challenge — more individuals to higher levels — affects how we operate in higher education. The unfortunate reality is that we have remained so far ahead of the competition for so long, that we may have taken our postsecondary education superiority for granted. We operate with the complacent and at times arrogant self-assurance that we are serving the right mix with the right programming and the correct incentives to maintain our leadership role. This attitude is costly. It is self-serving. It will lead to failure.
Georgia is a state that is on the leading edge of growth in its college-age population. Yet, historically, it has done poorly in the percentage of its population who attend college. So for us, the truth that we must educate more people to a higher education level than in the past poses a tremendous opportunity as well as a significant challenge for higher education in this state.
We thus must engage in a rigorous and honest analysis of our current structure. We must ask a number of questions, such as:
- Are we set up to truly educate a broader population?
- Are we engaged in preparing students for global living and continual learning?
- Do we have communications strategies that send the messages that connect with audiences in ways that motivate them to pursue higher education?
Our customers — whether political leaders, alumni, businesses, or students — are looking more than ever to higher education.
- They are looking to us to meet the nation’s needs for a highly educated workforce;
- They are looking to us for more basic and applied research; and
- In short, they are looking to us for the knowledge to help this nation maintain its competitive edge.
Given that an increasingly flat world poses a challenge to US higher education to educate more of the population to higher levels; and given that we need to assess where on the education spectrum we currently sit — with one end being broad access and the other and educated elite; and given that the changes we make on these two items must then be effectively communicated to our customers; then what should our response be moving forward?
First, the expectation from our customers is that we in the Academy will address — not deprecate — the key issues of concern to most: accessibility, affordability, and accountability. These should be our areas of focus moving forward. How we address these issues will determine our success in meeting that overall challenge of educating more Georgians to higher levels.
So, let me discuss quickly how we within the University System of Georgia will approach these three issues — access, affordability, and accountability. Our approach to each — and our success in dealing with these three issues — will depend upon how well we communicate with our various audiences. The work you do will take on added significance.
Educating more of our population means ensuring that all segments of that population have access to higher education. And here we have a number of challenges. Key among them is sending a message that truly hits home with a much broader audience — the message that some form of postsecondary education must be part of virtually everyone’s life experience.
Access doesn’t mean anything if people don’t understand first that they must have the passion, the drive, and the hunger to walk up to and through that door of educational opportunity. That is a messaging opportunity that higher education must embrace. We must instill in people an absolute belief that each person must have access to higher education. Then we must make sure that door is indeed open through the ways in which we made academic offerings available, accessible, and affordable.
Affordability is uppermost in the minds of many Americans when it comes to access to college. When the goal is to educate more and more of our population, we obviously cannot afford to price a large segment of the population out of college. Historically, tuition at Georgia’s public colleges and universities has been a bargain when compared to other states. In the University System, we need to celebrate this reality. Our communications — our messaging — must inform a broader spectrum of the population that college is indeed affordable and indeed attainable. Public and private, we need to send a message that to not pursue postsecondary education is, in the long run, more costly than that upfront investment.
We cannot expect people to intuitively understand or grasp the connection between the investment now and the payoff later — on average a million dollars more in a college graduate’s working lifetime, or $23,000 a year. That understanding only comes through the messages we send and how we send them.
Another important focus must be on accountability. Our customers — students, government, business - like all customers in America today, are a lot more demanding. They demand our maximum efficiency and total focus on meeting our challenges — and on meeting the key challenge of educating more Georgians to a higher level than ever before. We will respond to our customers — all of them — and we will meet and exceed expectations. Again, this is a messaging opportunity for us.
Our communications must shift from a self-congratulatory tone to one that demonstrates our service to society. We need to stop bragging on our national rankings and SAT scores. Instead, we need show how we are transforming individual lives and the communities we serve. How are we meeting society’s needs — not our own — that must be the message.
So, going forward, we must:
One, review our current strategic thinking and align our resources with the needs and expectations of our customers and the realities of a flat earth;
Two, analyze and where needed, make changes in our operations that ensure the Academy is truly engaged in educating not just an elite, but the broadest spectrum of society; and
Three, ensure that we have addressed the concerns of access, affordability and accountability. If we do that, we will generate both increased participation in higher education as well as higher levels of support from the public and private sectors.
If there is one theme I might suggest for us to keep in the forefront as we work together to shape the messaging required to inform our customers it is this: Tom Friedman noted in his book that in India, Bill Gates is Brittany Spears. In the United State, Brittany Spears is Brittany Spears — and that is our problem. When people aspire to be Brittany Spears or sports stars, that is a limited field. But when people aspire to be Bill Gates, the chances of success — if prepared by education — are unlimited.
Our communications must shape a new perception of success in this new world — one that helps our customers hold a self-image more attuned to Bill Gates than Brittany Spears or the latest football icon one injury away from a truncated career. And going further, our communications must help our customers connect the dots between being Bill Gates and higher education being the vehicle to get to that point.
I know many of you are thinking, “You cannot be serious. We cannot fight the power of popular culture and mass media.” You are right in understanding the daunting nature of this challenge. It will not be easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is!
But it is essential — it is essential for the Academy in terms of truly changing to remain relevant to the challenges of this flat world. It is essential that we make the effort on behalf of our future students so that they can engage in education in new ways that prepare them for this flat world.
The Academy must take those who are hungry for knowledge, and feed them. The Academy must go further — it must take the not-so-hungry, and create a hunger and motivate them. And reaching out to both of these groups is, in the end, based upon communications. In other words, the work that each of you do.
Take your skills and work with your president, your colleagues, faculty, staff, students and other customers, to address this challenge of educating more Georgians to higher levels. You have the skills and the motivation to help create a broader and deeper awareness in the public of higher education’s role in preparing a more educated society. Each of you has a key role —- and a high responsibility in this effort.
I appreciate what you have done and what you will do in our shared efforts to “Create A More Educated Georgia.” Just to keep this on a high intellectual plane, let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes — from the Terminator movies: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
Thank you for all you do to shape the message and send the message. It has been an honor to meet with you today.