Part 3: Addressing Challenges While Maintaining Values

How can Texas A&M successfully address these challenges while maintaining the values, traditions and experiences that set us apart?

Transcript

Kathryn Greenwade ’88, Vice President, The Association of Former Students: How can Texas A&M successfully address these challenges while maintaining the values, traditions and experiences that set us apart?


Dr. R. Bowen Loftin ’71, President, Texas A&M University: That’s pretty broad question, I’ll just take a piece of it, probably. Let me first of all ground my answer in terms of our student population. When I was a student here during the ’60s, we were going through some very very fundamental changes at Texas A&M. Some of you in this room lived through that change as well, you know what I mean. A lot was said then about the loss of traditions, the loss of the sense of who we were. For example, we’ve gone from in the ‘60s when virtually all lived on campus to today when only about 20 percent of our students live on campus. We thought many years ago that would fundamentally change Texas A&M, but it hasn’t.

The students here are the ones who truly own our traditions—not the president, not even The Association of Former Students, but the students who are here today own the traditions. And guess what? They’re as strong today as they were 40 years ago or 80 years ago.

That is extraordinary to me, that we have been able to do that without having structures that are administratively driven or even driven by our alumni. We’ve been able to turn over, to our students, responsibility for maintaining what makes this place special, and guess what? It’s alive and well, and I appreciate that very much.

In my job I have the extraordinary ability every single day to talk to students. And that to me gives me great confidence in the future. Our students today are bright, engaged—I like to say they don’t know what can’t be done. They have this spirit, this enthusiasm, they can solve any problem. So a person like me, who’s worn down from years and lots of experiences that haven’t always been positive, often times feels a little bit dejected when thinking about the future. But then I go in and get a shot of my tonic which is talking to these students here and realize, wow, they really believe they can do anything. And that’s the first step toward solving any problem, quite frankly. So that, to me, gives us great hope that we’re going to find our way through any minefield the future puts in front of us right now.

So that’s kind of the underlying response to your question that I wanted to provide, that I have faith in our student population—today, tomorrow and in the future—to be able to do what has to be done to maintain Texas A&M’s excellence, its traditions, its roots in terms of all the core values of Texas A&M. Those things are really alive and well at Texas A&M and flourishing.

Having said that, we have to fundamentally get down and figure this out. I think there are lots to be done. Recently, I challenged the faculty senate to join with Jason Cook (vice president for marketing and communications for Texas A&M University) and his team and beginning to work through a communications strategy to address the very problem we talk about. How do we affect public perception of this university and of education in general? I appreciate Michael Benedict’s comment about education versus higher education. It is artificially distinguished. Most of us in this room probably view education as a pipeline that starts at birth and goes through to death. That, I believe, is the right way to look at it. Sure we have segments of it we identify. We have public education, so called—the pre-kindergarten through grade 12. We have the higher education, our piece of it, perhaps which might be a two-year school, a four year school, post graduate studies, and we have life-long learning going on beyond that. So have this full pipeline with branches going in and out of it, all along the way here. It’s an intricate system, and we also, I think, owe it to ourselves and to our future graduates to be able to better tie that together.

So we’re committed at A&M to working not just internally looking inward, but looking outward to what precedes us—that is the public education sector where so much formative work is done. I’m told by educators that often times by the age of 10 or 12, you have almost determined a student’s future course in terms of their ability to stay in education long term and be able to have a very successful career beyond the university, for example. So we can’t simply wait to receive the products of a high school here and say, “Oh, they’re not good enough for us.” We have to really partner with high schools, middle schools and preschools to make sure that, not only are teachers well equipped, but they’re also able to benefit from the latest learning and research that we do here at Texas A&M to be able to improve the education outcomes that they’re seeking to produce. We have to be able to, again, take students from where they might come and make sure we integrate them fully into Texas A&M, both academically and in other ways, to make sure that their experience is of the highest quality and is truly excellent, as Jorge (Bermudez) said.

We have to also keep engaged with post-grad work. We certainly have formalized work here at Texas A&M. We grant many masters and PhDs every single year. That’s the formal part of post-graduate studies, but we also have to worry about the fact that all of us need to be learning over our lifetimes, and how should A&M contribute to that. We haven’t really thought about that a lot.  We have some activities going on, and we’ve have some for a long time, but we haven’t thought holistically about it. So we have a long ways to go and be able to, again, look at this whole pipeline and understand where we can contribute to every piece of it. Not just the piece assigned to us by name, but every piece before us and after us in terms of that progress of individuals from that birth experience all the way to the end of their lives. That, to us, is a huge challenge right now, but I think we have the right people here, both in terms of our faculty, staff, current students, former students—and certainly our former students—to be able to make this happen the right way.


Dr. Richard Box ’61, Chairman, The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents: I’d like to build on what Bowen just said, from the system level. Of course we have 10 universities beside the flagship at A&M, College Station, in the University System, along with the Health Science Center and seven state agencies. We have just recently had a new addition to our board—Elaine Mendoza, who was a vice chairman of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating board, and I immediately appointed her to be a chairman of the Academic and Student Affairs Committee for the board. She’s gotten to work immediately and has had several meetings with the CEOs of the system, and Bowen (Loftin) has been involved and working some of these issues not only for the university here, but also for the system as a whole. We want to bring up all the members of the system but we don’t want to diminish the flagship. This is a Tier 1 University, one of three in the state. We prize it. It is very special to us, and we want to make it even better. So there are a lot of good things that I think we can look forward to, but these are issues that are very important for us to deal with and we’re going forward with that.


Dr. Michael Benedik, Speaker, Texas A&M Faculty Senate: I’d like to expand on another thing that Bowen had commented on, and that is integrating Texas A&M and universities in general with education over all. If Texas A&M is content with just educating the upper middle class, we can get 20,000 applicants a year. We can fill our class, it’s not going to be a problem; we can sort of rest on our laurels, but that’s not what we should be doing. We need to, sort of, be expanding education and making it accessible to people that it might not otherwise be accessible to, to be really getting that next generation—the kids who no one from their families have gone to college; the kids who are coming out of really poor neighborhoods, poor districts, poor parts of the state, parts of the state that are really growing. And if higher education doesn’t really tackle effectively that set of prospective students, then we’re really going to be a failure in the coming decades. So, partnering with schools somehow—with high schools, with elementary schools—and figuring out how to take those students who, perhaps at home no one’s ever graduated from college, they don’t know how to do education, and really partnering and being able to bring those students all the way through. So that when they go to college, they can be successful and they can really transform their family, transform their siblings, and completely transform their children. It will change the generation, and that’s really only going to happen if we start working openly with education broadly. And, like I said, continuing education is really important. I haven’t actually thought about that one yet, and it’s clearly going to be an area that we need to focus on, as well. So, I think, changing the way we perceive what higher education does is going to be fundamental to being able to stay relevant in the state.


Jorge Bermudez ’73, 2011 Chair of the Board, The Association of Former Students: It’s very gratifying to hear this because one of the things that we all notice as we travel around the world, and what other countries have figured out, is that part of what drove the United States and the level of life that we have was the education system. We were able to educate a broader part of our population, and so many countries, whether it’s India, Brazil, China, they are educating—whether it’s higher education or high school education—much larger percentages of their population than they traditionally did, and thus are able to compete more effectively with the United States and the other developed economies. In the United States, I believe we have a challenge, and that challenge—which has been mentioned here—is how do you get more students that are K-12 to be interested in and be part of higher education? And that’s a trend that we have to address because if we do not and if we continue to see some of the failings that are happening in certain parts of the largest segment growth demographically over the population, we’re not going to solve that challenge.

It is gratifying to me to see that Texas A&M and the system can both continue to seek excellence at Texas A&M—partnering with K-12 education—and really bring education to parts of our population of Texas, and of the nation, that may not be motivated at this point in time to seek a better education. Again, I go back to the roots of Texas A&M and its land grant mission—that was what it was set up to do. It’s to seek out those who could benefit from education and give them an affordable, excellent education. It’s gratifying to hear that it’s something that you all are working towards because I think it is part of the key of success to the state Texas and to the United States.


Loftin: Let me come back and amplify a bit of what Michael and Jorge both alluded to here. I’m a first generation college student myself; I was the first member to go to college. So that, to me, is important to recognize where I come from and never forget that particular benefit A&M game me. Even today, this much later in time, fully a quarter of our freshmen Class are first-generation college students. That’s important, I think. We do serve a tremendously large swath of the population here where there’s no history in the family of going beyond public education into a college environment. That’s very important to us. We haven’t lost that at all, but that’s a challenge for us in two ways. One, again, is simply cultural. If you’re not coming from a family where higher education has been in place, is there a driver? Is there motivation for you to go on? And also, that population tends to be lower in terms of income levels, and therefore you have the financial aspects as well. I hope I can live to see the day where no one does not come to A&M because they can’t afford it—hope that’s the case.

Right now, we’ve had a very big challenge. We’ve lost a severe amount of federal and state dollars just in the last few months that go to financial support here at Texas, and we’re still seeing what that does to our population. We, of course, admitted so many students, we’ve had many of those students accept our offer of administration and say they’re going to come, and later on, their letter came to say how much financial aid you’re going to get. We’re seeing how many, now, are affected by that letter because that letter is not as generous as the one they got last year. So, therein lies the challenge for us right now. What will happen? Will people say, “Ok, I will borrow more money or I’ll find some other way to do it?” It’s going to be a challenge for us. Right now Texas A&M actually awards over half a billion dollars each year of financial aid, but that takes several forms. A good form, of course, are grants and scholarships that don’t require payback. Those are good things for students to get. We also have to recognize that over 10,000 students work on campus. That’s a big part of our workforce but is also a way for those students help afford to be here at Texas A&M. Then there’s that thing called loans. It’s a dirty word for us often times, but it’s part of what drives the ability many have to get here.

It you’re in a family making $80,000 a year, that sounds like a lot of money, but that’s not a lot of money when it comes to, not only paying for the cost of living, but also educating a child or two or three. Yesterday, for example, I was talking to a family with triplets here; think about that. So you have three at once going through here right now. That has an effect. My point simply here is that loans are part of the equation. The good news is that Texas A&M’s payback ratio, as I mentioned to you earlier, means that many of our graduates—it depends on your major of course—come out of here able to secure very well-paying positions and, therefore, can retire those loans promptly without really impeding their ability to become independent and go forward with their career pathways. That’s a good thing to think about, but it’s a challenge. It really is a challenge, and I really have a problem sitting down with parents sometimes who really don’t understand how that might payoff for their child over time. Therefore, because of their lack of understanding, they may divert their child someplace else or even abandon coming to university at all. That to me is a shame. That kind of human capital can’t be wasted, and so I hope we can find the time where we’ll no longer have a situation where a person cannot be here because of money. That’s a dream I have.

We’ve come a long ways, and again, The Association and its membership has been a big part of that capability, and I hope that we’ll be able to see a growth of that support because, again, we’ve seen a big decline in state grants, Texas grants and in Pell Grants from the federal government in this year. I expect more to come, which means that we’ll have to find ways to make up that gap and even go beyond it to ensure everyone who wants to be here and qualified to be here can be here.