NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – University of Maryland System Chancellor William Kirwan opened the annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE) characterizing stagnant educational performance as the “gravest crisis” facing our nation.
“We can only keep (our competitive) edge if we continue to produce new generations of highly educated and highly motivated young people,” Kirwan said during the NCORE opening session Wednesday afternoon.
Like numerous education advocates and officials over the past year, Kirwan invoked President Barack Obama’s 2020 goal of the U.S. becoming the world’s leading nation in college degree completion. Praising the president’s vision, Kirwan said the initiative is as much about social equity as it is international competitiveness.
He said that according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development the U.S. currently ranks 10th in overall educational attainment among young adults for industrialized nations and 23rd in high school graduation rates.
“We simply cannot be the America we have been and hope to be in the future if we allow (educational decline) to occur,” Kirwan said. “I’m sure you agree with me this is not the legacy we want to leave our children and grandchildren.”
Success, Kirwan said, rests on three factors. First, he said, leaders need to reconfigure education as a continuum from preschool to a bachelor’s degree and eliminate the separation between K-12, two-year, and four-year schooling in policy-making and program development.
Secondly, the strategies for producing high quality education need also be cost-effective as state support for higher education declines. Kirwan said nearly 200,000 students are being turned away by the Golden State’s community colleges due to budget constraints. Seamless transfer articulation, online education, and standardized K-12 curricula that focuses on college readiness are all techniques institutions must replicate and scale up to meet the decade-long goal, he urged.
