The Vision Project

Initiative Creates an Ambitious Agenda for Public Higher Ed

There are many moving parts to the state Department of Higher Education’s Vision Project, but the bottom line is jobs, or, to be more precise, properly preparing individuals for the jobs that define a new, technology-centered economy. The Vision Project aligns all 29 public colleges and universities behind seven identified goals — from improving graduation rates to getting more people into math and science fields — and adds several layers of accountability.

Richard Freeland says there’s nothing new or particularly imaginative about the goals spelled out in the Mass. Department of Higher Education’s so-called Vision Project.
They range from improving graduation rates to increasing the numbers of people entering college; from eliminating historical disparities among racial and ethnic groups to encouraging more people to enter the math and science fields of study — and they’ve been goals for individual colleges and universities for decades.
What is new, said Freeland, the state’s commissioner of Higher Education, is a heightened sense of urgency attached to these goals, created by truly global competition and technology-focused jobs that increasingly demand a college education.

“Given where our economy is and given where our state is demographically, and given the competitiveness of the economic world, both nationally and internationally, we’re at a point in the history of Massachusetts where we need first-class public higher education,” he explained. “And I don’t think that, historically, public higher education has been the kind of priority that it needs to be today.”
And what’s imaginative is the Vision Project’s approach, a coordinated effort involving all 29 public colleges and universities that adds several layers of accountability.
“This is an attempt to pull together, against the background I’ve described, the coordinated efforts of all public high education,” Freeland explained. “We have a highly decentralized system that features a great deal of autonomy granted by statute to the colleges and local boards of trustees. That makes it extremely difficult for public higher education as an entity, as a statewide institution, to respond in a collective and focused fashion to statewide needs.
“There is a bit of a mismatch between the structure — the decentralized, desegregated, fragmented structure of public higher education — and the urgency of the concentrated focus on building a first-class system of public education,” he continued, adding that the Vision Project was created to align the 29 public campuses behind a short list of critically important goals.
To show how it will all work, Freeland talked about one of the items on that short list, the often-controversial matter of graduation rates.
“This is where the rubber meets the road,” he said of the need to see people who enroll through to commencement night. “When people talk about graduation rates, the answer, across the country, is that they’re not high enough; too many people are falling by the wayside.
To address the problem in the Bay State, a comprehensive, three-part program, developed as part of a national initiative known as Completing College America, has been implemented to move the needle in the right direction.
“The first part calls for every institution to have specific goals to improve student success,” he said, citing just one example of how the Vision Project operates. “When we surveyed our institutions, we found that that was not currently the case; while everyone’s working to do better, a number of our institutions had not formulated specific aspirational goals against national benchmarks to hold themselves accountable for forward motion.”
Ira Rubenzahl, president of Springfield Technical Community College, said he’s a strong proponent of the Vision Project, although, like others, he stressed that it will need a strong funding commitment from the Legislature to meet its goals, and he has concerns about whether that will materialize.
He stresses that the need for the initiative is real, and that while the initiative has a number of moving parts, at its core it is about one word: jobs, and, more specifically, adequately preparing people for the jobs of tomorrow — and today, for that matter.
“We recognize that some college is critical for young people to get jobs in this new economy, and it’s critical to grow this new economy,” he said. “All the elements — getting more students to attend college, getting more students to complete, getting students to be successful while they’re at college, eliminating disparities, and aligning with local businesses — have an economic lens to them.”
For this issue and its focus on education, BusinessWest takes an indepth look at the Vision Project, its goals, and the unique strategy mapped out for attaining them.

Schools of Thought
Freeland told BusinessWest that there are several reasons why Massachusetts has historically lagged when it comes to attention to and funding of public higher education. One has been the predominance of private institutions that attract students from across the state and around the globe.
“The success and sheer number of these schools have made it possible for state leaders at different kinds of institutions, as well as the general public, to believe that, because we have Harvard and MIT, not to mention all those other great places like my alma matter, Northeastern, we don’t necessarily have to invest in public higher education the way California does or Texas does or Ohio does,” said Freeland, who speaks with decades of experience working in the public higher realm, including a lengthy stint at UMass Boston. “But that perspective is way, way out of date.
“Over time, public higher education has grown increasingly important as an educator of young people in this state,” he continued. “When I started in 1970, the majority of high-school students were still going to private institutions for college, but today, two-thirds of the students who graduate from our high schools are going to public institutions if they pursue education in this state; we have become overwhelmingly a primary provider of higher education for the broad population of this state at a time when we’re not having a lot of in-migration, we’re not having any population growth, and we have a workforce that needs a large number of highly educated workers.”
All this adds up to what Freeland called a heightened sense of urgency that hasn’t existed before, and the need for a plan of action, or agenda, moving forward.
And thus, the Vision Project was conceived in late 2009, and officially adopted by the Board of High Education in May 2010. It completed its first full year of implementation on June 30, and the Legislature is earmaking several million dollars in the fiscal 2012 budget for the Department of Higher Education to provide incentive grants to individual colleges and universities to organize activities around the goals of the vision project.
In a nutshell, the initiative was launched with the recognition that the state is in fierce competition with other states and countries for talent, investment, and jobs, and that its primary assets in this competition are the overall education level of its people, its workforce, and the overall competence and creativity of individuals and organizational leaders driving the state’s knowledge-based economy.
“There is a heightened sense of urgency, because I do believe that Massachusetts needs the best-educated citizenry and workforce in the country, because that’s about all we’ve got in the competition among states,” he said. “And if we neglect public higher education, we’re simply not going to have that.”
The Vision Project is, in essence, the vehicle through which public higher education will remain focused on preparing individuals for this economy — and holding itself accountable for results.
Several key outcomes have been identified, said Freeland, noting that, for the state to thrive in this highly competitive environment, it must achieve national leadership in several realms, including:
• College participation, or the college-going rates of high school graduates;
• College completion, or graduation and success rates of the students enrolled;
• Student learning, academic achievements by students on campus-level and national assessments of learning;
• Workforce alignment, or alignment of degree programs with the key areas of workforce need in the state’s economy; and
• Elimination of disparities, meaning achievement of comparable outcomes among different ethnic/racial, economic, and gender groups.
Meanwhile, the University of Massachusetts must claim national leadership in research activity related to economic development, and economic activity derived from research.
As it went about creating the Vision Project, the Commonwealth’s public higher-education community considered what other states are doing well in this regard, said Freeland, adding quickly that the state’s highly de-centralized system makes it difficult to replicate what other systems are doing. Meanwhile, the state’s track record with public higher education and a lingering lack of urgency in some camps makes it hard just to put such an agenda in place.
“You don’t have to make much of an argument in Ohio that public higher education is critical to a state that has been losing altitude as the Rust Belt has declined,” he explained. “There, public higher education is understood to be the name of the game, and Ohio State is the Harvard of that region. But you do have to make that case in Massachusetts much more strongly.”

Extreme Measures
As he talked about specific goals within the Vision Project, Freeland said there is a universal aspiration for each  — that phrase “national leadership.”
This is inherently a subjective phrase, he said, but not in the case of such matters as graduation rates and diversity, where there are hard numbers to compare and contrast performance. It is one of the underlying missions of the project to create meaningful measures for the specific goals, and then to score high in each category.
Returning to the subject of graduation rates, he said the numbers used are broad and often misleading.
“The best metric for measuring student success and graduation rates, particularly at community colleges, is a vexed question,” he said. “The rate that is often cited as the national standard [about 25%] is based on whether or not students who begin as full-time students graduate in three years, which is a very small percentage of the students who actually attend our community colleges.
“So we are working to develop a much more useful metric,” he continued, “which would measure such things as how successful we are in graduating part-time students, how successful we are in graduating people who transfer in from someplace else, and how successful we are transferring students who start at community colleges and transfer on before completing a degree.”
And while graduation rates are certainly one strong focus of attention, there are several other goals within the Vision Project that are key to achieving that overarching goal of making the Commonwealth more competitive on the global stage, said Freeland.
And with that he referenced an acronym, and statewide initiative, that is gaining visibility and attention across the state: STEM. That stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and increasing the numbers of students enrolled in these fields — and then graduating them from those programs — are top priorities, said Freeland.
“Far too few young Americans are pursuing academic studies and scientific and technologically oriented careers, and far too few are coming out of our colleges with appropriate skills to drive an innovation-oriented economy,” Freeland told BusinessWest. “This has been a major focus in the business community as well as the education community.”
Local programs have been created to help spawn interest in the STEM fields, he said, listing everything from field trips to manufacturing plants to scientists coming into the classrooms to talk about careers, a “traveling road show,” as he called it, designed to inform and even entertain students.
One of the Vision Project’s goals is to build on these programs aimed at energizing students about STEM and graduating more students in those fields. “We get a good number of people coming out of high school who say they want to major in STEM fields, and start out in them,” he said, “but the dropout rate is very high.”
And the so-called ‘persistence rate’ is comparatively low, he continued, adding that this gauges how many students stay in the field of study they’ve chosen. Work to move those numbers higher is still another matter that the Vision Project will measure — and inject accountability.
The goal with all the initiatives is to prepare individuals for the job market they will face and create a workforce that will enable the state to compete for companies and jobs, said Rubenzahl, who echoed Freeland when he said the landscape has changed in nearly all aspects of business, and public higher education now has a larger role than ever in helping to create a pipeline of qualified workers.
He cited manufacturing and related fields such as biotech as examples of how things have changed, and how the role of public higher education has been broadened.
“We had some pretty good-paying jobs in various industries — originally it was textiles — that left,” he said. “And for many of those jobs, you didn’t need a college education. However, for many of the industries that stayed here or grew up here, you need much more education.
“The economy has changed, and public higher ed has a much larger role than it had before,” he continued. “Let’s face it, Harvard and MIT are not going to train highly skilled factory workers who can run these CNC machines or production workers in these biotech plants. They have a role, but we think we have a greater role as well.”

The Bottom Line
Summing up the Vision Project, Freeland said it is a comprehensive — and very visible — attempt to take public high education to a new level of excellence, responsiveness, and accountability.
“The campuses believe in these things … this isn’t about persuading schools to do things they don’t want to do,” he explained. “It is about taking it to a higher level of focus and having a higher level of aspiration and holding ourselves accountable.”
And it’s a long-term initiative, one that will play itself out over the next several years, involving perhaps many different gubernatorial administrations and college presidents. But he believes the program will stay on track, mostly because it has to if the state is going to thrive in this truly global arena.
“It’s easy for institutions to run out of gas addressing these very tough problems,” Freeland said. “You can bank on the fact that I’m not going to be here forever and Gov. Patrick isn’t going to be here forever, but these issues are going to be here forever.
“These are not issues for one day or one week,” he continued. “But once we get focus on them and get some momentum behind them, the gravitational force of statewide need will keep us focused. But it’s not going to be easy.”

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]