JOHN D. WELTY: Let's learn from 'The Beast'

Published online on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009

We love our lists, but a new one out last week, "America's Smartest Cities," doesn't love us.

The Fresno-Visalia metropolitan area was ranked last among 55 metro areas nationwide by the Web site The Daily Beast. Using factors that included measurement of "education" and "intellectual environment," the survey noted that less than 20% of our population has four-year degrees.

That's pretty harsh. There are lots of things we can criticize and portray as frivolous in this kind of exercise. But one thing simply cannot be denied: Fresno and our entire region need more college-educated people.

That's a serious matter that those of us in higher education have been publicly discussing for years. In the San Joaquin Valley we're taking a regional approach to improving access to college for our residents with our Central Valley Higher Education Consortium.

Among the things the consortium is committed to is building and nurturing a college-going culture with more residents obtaining associates and bachelor's degrees. But inadequate state support severely limits our ability to prepare individuals who will lead our region and form an educated work force attractive to new businesses that will help our economy.

Sadly, the impact is heaviest on students and their families. They pay more but receive fewer enrollment opportunities, fewer and bigger classes and fewer scheduling options.

The Bee's editorial page editor, Jim Boren, got it right when he recently questioned the steady erosion in state support for public higher education.

"It would be nice for once to hear a candidate for governor say that he or she will return California to greatness by investing in the University of California and California State University systems and replace worn out roads, bridges and canals," he wrote. "But that will take money, a concept that makes candidates' knees tremble."

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, writing about the UC last week, said: "The danger is that as public support for the school declines, it will lose more and more of its public character. Substantially higher fees for incoming students would be the norm, and more and more students from out of state and out of the country [who can afford to pay the full freight of their education] would be recruited."

I assure you that those of us in California public higher education worry whenever the Legislature meets; we're apprehensive we'll be asked to do even more with less state funding.

Last year we made four rounds of budget cuts at Fresno State and our sister CSU campuses, but reduced funding will force us to close our doors to new students next spring and reduce enrollment next fall.

Fresno State has just been declared one of 12 impacted CSU campuses, meaning we must reduce the number of incoming freshmen next year by 400 because of budget constraints.

Those 400 young people worked through high school to qualify for Fresno State, inspired by a promise of admission that now is broken. Who knows where -- or if -- they will go to college, and if they leave this area, whether they'll ever return to help improve our region.

We need a reliable, adequate allocation of state resources to plan for the future so we can prevent constant increases in state fees and cutbacks that hinder students' progress toward degrees.

We are grateful that this survey -- flawed though it may be -- is a conversation starter. It allows us to spotlight the need to increase -- not further limit -- access to college, especially in our region.

By restoring public higher education to a higher priority in the state budgeting process, we will be investing in our students today and paying it forward into a brighter tomorrow for our region and to our mutual benefit.

If you'd like to know more about the importance of higher education in our region, please read the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium's report, "Why Access Matters," visit fblinks.com/viH.