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Minnis also added some clarity to the issue of debt. He began by reading headlines from the 1950s and 1960s that sounded as if they could have been written yesterday, like this one from 1966: “Relatively few people can accept or cope with the spiraling cost of college education.” As he noted, the average student debt today is $29,000. A college degree, however, is worth $2 million in added income over a lifetime. Student loan payment on a $29,000 dollar debt is roughly $280 a month—a little more than half of the average car payment.
“We talk about this crisis,” said Minnis, “but in comparison to what you get from your college education, it is actually a better deal today than it was a generation ago.”
Dale Cushinberry, a retired educator, is concerned “that a nation like ours puts such a low priority on funding education.” Cushinberry worried, too, that academic institutions at all levels have moved away from teaching the basics. One result is that kids leave school with no skills. Another is that they leave with little knowledge.
At Avila University, Sister Marie Joan Harris, provost and vice-president for academic affairs, concerns herself with making the opportunity for an education available to the students and helping them take advantage of new delivery systems. “Their future is not the future that we faced,” said Sister Marie.
Linda Endecott, with Olin School of Business at Washington University, faces challenge of finding a place for the St. Louis-based university in a new and competitive market. Her goal is to make the university an “integral part of the KC community.”
The challenge for David Cook, vice chancellor of the KU Edwards campus, is to align campus offerings with work-force needs in the Kansas City region. “What keeps me up at night,” said Cook, “is making sure we are doing the right thing and providing the right kind of services.”
In summarizing the various pressures institutions that face, Ron Slepitza observed that “students are really re-quired to do more, and yet sill posses
a lot of the core, fundamental values.” This focus has the inevitable result
of causing administrators to focus on deficits. Slepitza asked his colleagues “to spend some time focusing on the assets.”
Leo Morton welcomed the opportunity of being chancellor of the University of Missouri–Kansas City and all of the demands that came with the opportunity. “I wake up every morning really excited about the progress we are making on strategies to address declining state support, increasing enrollment, retention and graduation rates, affordability, compensation for our faculty, and fundraising,” said Morton. “It’s a huge abundance of issues, but I think we are making good progress.”
Prema Arasu, CEO of Kansas State University’s campus in Olathe, expressed her faith in young people and spoke of the opportunity to bring a more business-centric, innovation-driven approach to higher education.
“We focus on the negatives,” conceded Shawn Naccarato, but for all of Pittsburg State’s issues with the Legislature, the university has still found a way to fund the $70 million worth of capital improvements taking place on campus now. That includes a $30 million center for the arts funded by private sources as well as a new indoor event facility being built thanks to a $5 million investment from the city of Pittsburg. “Our attitude,” said Naccarato, “has been we are going to grow it locally and not count on Topeka or D.C. to save us.”
