On Thursday, September 20, the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education will release TIME TO LEAD: The Need for Excellence in Massachusetts Public Higher Education, a report which will:
** Document public higher education’s increasingly critical role in driving and supporting Massachusetts’ innovation economy;
** Provide the first comprehensive assessment of Massachusetts public higher education in comparison with other state systems; and
** Outline a strategic plan to achieve national leadership in public higher education.
PHENOM eagerly awaits this report which will be released Thursday at 10:30 at a ceremony in the Great Hall at the State House, with the Governor and other luminaries participating.
We look forward to a new degree of transparency, a mew sense of urgency, and, hopefully, a dramatic short- and long-term plan to make public higher education accessible to all, and of the highest quality.
We hope it includes but goes well beyond higher education as narrow workforce development, and embraces higher education as a vehicle to creative thinking, problem-solving, communications capabilities, and social and civic engagement.
We hope it recognizes the need to invest substantial sums to significantly reduce costs for our students and potential students, and as a way to hire sufficient numbers of full-time staff and faculty to support, teach and serve those students.
We hope it abandons the approach that allocates new funds to assessment and measurement, and instead allocates them toward operation of core activities and improvement of performance.
We hope it sets out a course consistent with PHENOM’s 5 principles so that we can unite in support of a new program for public higher education in Massachusetts.