In undertaking an essay about issues facing higher education, the first choice I face is deciding whether to list a dozen or a few. Certainly there are many issues, ranging from momentous to minute. But two stand out in Virginia and across the nation:

• Who in our society will be able to attend college?
• How good an education will they receive?

All the other issues, and they are legion, are subordinate to these two. Adequate faculty salaries are important, for instance, but only because in the long run they determine the quality of teaching and scholarship in our colleges and universities. Adequate student financial aid is important, but only because it determines whether millions of people will be able to attend college.

I think that everyone who wants and can benefit from higher education should be able to attend some college or university and that we should actively encourage everyone to participate. How good an education students will receive depends in part upon how well governments and individual donors support the colleges and universities. But it also depends upon how responsive the institutions are to the need for substantial changes in what they do and how they do it. On balance, Virginia's colleges and universities are very good. Whether they continue to be very good depends largely upon their adaptive capacity. The greatest enemy of Virginia higher education is complacency.

WHO GETS TO GO?

Two issues: who goes and what they can expect to get from going. That the first of these issues is even up for discussion is unsettling. The history of higher education in the past half century has been one of steadily increasing access. Indeed, other technologically advanced nations have come to realize that their economic prosperity depends upon having highly skilled and educated work forces. They are changing their elitist systems of higher education to make them more inclusive "massification" is the ugly word used among the member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

But in this country a strong reactionary alliance is calling broad general access into question. Too many people are going to college, they complain, ignoring the fact that the aging of our population makes it imperative that every young person become an economically productive, taxpaying citizen in the future. On the demographic chart of the United States, a rising geriatric population line may cross a falling college-going line, with dire consequences. Not only is it unfair for those who have achieved social and economic security to deny access to the next generation, it is foolish.

America's self-satisfaction at having the best and most inclusive higher education in the world will evaporate as other nations pass us by. It can happen in higher education, just as it has in several other industries such as consumer electronics, mainframe computing, and automobile manufacturing. And it can happen quickly, just as it did in these same industries.

The GI Bill marked the beginning of our national commitment to greatly expanded educational opportunity in this half century, as millions of returning soldiers traded weapons for textbooks in a generous and pragmatic program designed to help them complete the transition to prosperous civilian lives. Anyone who doubts that government can play an essential role in accomplishing large social purposes should consider how many American families owe their prosperity today to government subsidies provided as much as 50 years ago by the GI Bill.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Higher Education Act of 1965 continued the expansion of access, first to African Americans and other minorities who had been excluded by law or practice from most of the Nation's colleges and universities. Virginia and other states in which segregation was maintained by law came slowly and usually reluctantly into compliance with federal law. Now, even though much work remains before we achieve truly equal educational opportunity for all persons regardless of race, ethnicity, or sex, many of the southern states are substantially ahead of the large, northern industrial states in providing higher education access to minorities.

The Higher Education Act of 1965 radically changed the landscape of higher education by establishing the federal government as the nation's primary provider of student financial aid. Since then, the states have been primarily responsible for building and operating colleges and universities, while the federal government has ensured that financial need did not prevent access to them.

Giving financial aid directly to students was the beginning of the "consumer" movement in higher education. Because they could take their federal aid where they wanted, students gained some power to shop for the higher education that seemed best for them. Unfortunately, funding for the basic federal grant program has not kept up with price increases in higher education, with the result that the Pell grant no longer provides a substantial portion of the money needed by the most needy students. And the federal government is diverting increasingly large amounts of money from the most needy to middle income students. Looser eligibility requirements for Pell grants and middle class loan subsidies were the first steps, and President Clinton's ill-conceived "HOPE" scholarships are the latest initiative to help those who need it least.

Even more unfortunately, states are leading the way in designing programs that help the middle class avoid discomfort or sacrifice to send their children to college. Merit scholarships for highschool graduates with high grades and class standing, like Georgia's "Hope" scholarships that began it all, can be sold as incentives to high achievement. But they are handouts to middle class families, whose children are disproportionately those who earn the best grades in high school. Not coincidentally, they are handouts predominantly to white families.

But skill and technical expertness are colorblind, even if politicians are not. The high technology firms of northern Virginia and similar commercial regions around the country that cannot find the workers they need have two ready options: import the workers from other nations or ship their work abroad.

The social and economic consequences of limiting access to higher education are severe. Our prosperity as a nation now depends upon brainpower: the technical skills and knowledge of the American work force. It is perfectly clear that great numbers of the potential workers we need are leaving high school without adequate preparation to continue their educations, and improving public schooling is a major national priority.

WHAT IS THE PRICE FOR LIMITING ACCESS?

But we cannot sacrifice whole generations of students by restricting their access to higher education and enacting punitive regulations that snatch away their financial aid at the first sign that they are having academic difficulty. In the first place, we need them as workers in order to sustain our economic growth. And in the second, we cannot afford the financial and psychological costs associated with the creation of a permanent under-class in our society.

Our representative democracy cannot survive a division of the American people into two camps: rich and poor. Yet that is exactly where we are headed. Unemployment rates among highschool graduates are roughly twice what they are for persons holding baccalaureate degrees. Annual earnings for highschool graduates are roughly half of what they are for persons holding baccalaureate degrees. And the gap has grown during the past 15 years as the real earnings of highschool graduates and those who never even completed high school have declined precipitously. Persons with highschool degrees or less are more than 10 times more likely to have family incomes below the poverty level.

It doesn't stop there. The group that did not go beyond high school is less likely to have health insurance. Women are much more likely to be single mothers, and the children of parents who did not go beyond high school generally score lower on national examinations of educational performance.

We are in danger of becoming a society sharply divided between "haves" and "havenots." Government programs that funnel limited funds to the "haves" (like the so called "merit" scholarships popping up around the country) or that give them tax breaks (like prepaid tuition programs in which participants are overwhelmingly middle income) only deepen the ugly ditch between rich and poor. Government policies that discourage college going in the name of some vague, biased standard of quality do the same.

A good example is the "one strike and you're out!" approach to retaining financial aid included in the 19982000 budget proposal of Governor George Allen on the basis of a recommendation from the State Council of Higher Education. Under the proposal, students having a tough time during their first year in college are summarily deprived of their financial aid. "The clear assumption," writes Catherine Stimpson, is that students who do not do well in the first year "are lazy wastrels whose fondest desire is to mooch off the taxpayers of Virginia."

Stimpson is dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. She was a member of the Virginia Commission on the University of the 21st Century, whose report, "The Case for Change," (1989) remains the seminal planning document for Virginia higher education. She argues that the Council of Higher Education's decision to deny financial aid to students who have difficulty in their first year of college is seriously flawed. It "neglects the fact that many students with uneven records might be in their first year of college and in the first generation of their family to go to college at all. They might well be having a tough year but could eventually pull through if shown encouragement rather than disdain" (Chronicle of Higher Education, January 16, 1998).

The way into a prosperous future for America is through progressively more inclusive education. A college degree no longer guarantees a good job and a measure of personal economic security; rather, it has become the prerequisite to competing for these things. And it is not in our collective interest to assume the "carrying costs" of a permanent underclass of unskilled and impoverished women and men.

The great genius of American governmental policy since the end of the Second World War has been to create an increasingly more inclusive middle class through a variety of laws, social programs, and tax benefits. In education, the GI Bill, the Civil Rights Act, and the federal financial aid programs are among the ways in which access to higher education has played an important role in this effort. So has the development of community colleges and regional universities that offer virtually unlimited access to higher education without the restrictions of place or time.

But today we find some leaders with a less encompassing vision. These leaders often times exploit the fear of the "haves"that there may not be enough of the "good life" to go around and then encourage government actions that benefit only that part of the population at the expense of the rest. We need a large and ambitious commitment to opportunity, a part of which is commitment to universal access to advanced education in community colleges or baccalaureate granting institutions. Instead some leaders present opportunity as limited, as if there were only a certain number of seats in the lifeboat and we have to decide who won't be allowed in.

Our nation cannot survive with some people in the boat and the rest consigned to swim for shore as best they can. Virginia should eschew the politics of exclusion and embrace instead a vision of inclusion. We need to begin thinking more boldly and expansively. If we are going to shrink any social group, let it be the poor and not the middle class. That's not only common sense; it's the right thing to do. Again, access to higher education would be an essential part of such a commitment.

Several years ago, at the beginning of the administration of Governor Charles Robb, I proposed that Virginia make lifelong learning a reality by creating "workers' sabbaticals" for all fulltime wage earners and homemakers in the commonwealth. Because every one of us has to continue learning in order to remain employable and productive, we need to return again and again for further advanced education. I proposed that state government and the business community form a partnership to award fulltime wage earners and homemakers a year's tuition credit for every seven years of work. They could use this benefit either all at once as fulltime students or course-by-course over the next seven years.

And this need not become simply a program of "degree creep." Staying professionally relevant does not mean acquiring more and more degrees. Our state supported and independent colleges and universities would be challenged by workers' sabbaticals to design true lifelong learning opportunities: relevant educational experiences of varying duration, using modern communications technology to provide great flexibility as to time and place.

A worker's sabbatical would be a great opportunity for Virginia's colleges and universities. By designing educational experiences specifically for adults, Virginia's colleges and universities would become formidable competitors against the new, for-profit educational providers that will occupy a major place in the higher education marketplace in the next few years. Regardless of whether workers' sabbaticals are created or not, institutions that are not highly selective have to develop new kinds of adult education experiences or they will lose a significant share of the market to the new, customer oriented providers.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Virginia's colleges and universities can build upon their exemplary behavior during the severe recession at the beginning of this decade. While other state systems of higher education responded to budget cuts by slashing enrollment (during the same recession, more than 200,000 students were dropped from the rolls in California), our colleges and universities sustained cuts of about 30 percent without reducing enrollment at all. In fact, enrollment actually grew slightly during the recession. The General Assembly heeded the requests of higher education leaders for additional student financial aid that mitigated the effects of the tuition increases necessitated by cuts in state funding. The close cooperation between elected officials and higher education leaders enabled Virginia to sustain its commitment to an inclusive system of higher education.

But the recession was not a passing unpleasant moment. It signaled a major change in state spending priorities. Things will not go back to the way they used to be. ("Things aren't like they used to be," an elderly VMI graduate is reported to have said, "and they never were.") Virginia's colleges and universities were called upon to undertake a top-to-bottom restructuring: reduce administrative overhead and eliminate superfluous activities, close academic programs for which there was little student demand, redefine the professional responsibilities of the faculty, make effective use of modern communications and computing technology, and achieve significant reduction in the cost of educating each student.

About 100 academic programs have been closed and more than $100 million reallocated from administration to instruction and other services to students. But the work of restructuring is not over yet, and it would be a mistake to abandon the efforts in the euphoria of optimistic revenue forecasts for the next two years. The "unit cost" of educating each student can be reduced further while actually improving institutional performance.

Restructuring thus far has focused on reallocations of resources and elimination of unnecessary expenditures. But by now all the slow rabbits have been caught, and it is time to go after some more difficult game. Virginia should ask faculty members to begin discussing how they can organize curricula and deliver instruction more effectively to greater numbers of people.

This is not a matter of political gimmicks like turning down a program in African American studies, mandating faculty teaching loads, or deploring the lack of a core curriculum. Nor is it a task that the faculty and administrators can be allowed to ignore. Higher education is undergoing enormous change, probably more change than most of us realize. While some highly selective universities can afford to be oblivious to the turmoil around them, these often are the "flagships" of American higher education. Their leadership in a time of rapid and unpredictable change is apt to be very important. Yet even the most selective among them, with secure niches in the market, are apt to be affected by the changes that are coming.

The faculties of our colleges and universities should be asked to consider

• alternatives to the 910 month academic calendar that reflect the schedules and work pace of contemporary society;
• their own organization into departments that usually contain specialists in one or more disciplines;
• ways in which communications and computing technology can improve instruction, student discussions, and advising;
• a definition of intellectual property appropriate to an electronic age;
• appropriate methods of measuring (and reporting) how much students are learning as opposed to how long they are sitting in their seats; and
• appropriate methods for determining (and reporting) how much various activities actually cost.

Virginia higher education should be much better supported than it is. Its faculty should be better paid on average; it should have more money for supplies and equipment; and it especially should have more money to train and equip its faculty and staff to use modern technology. But like institutions in many states, Virginia's colleges and universities have to learn how to provide better education to more students using the money appropriated to them by the state, paid to them by students, and given to them by friends. Doing this will require faculty members to discard some vestiges of the past while preserving that which is essential to higher education.

Virginia should affirm this commitment to universal access to higher education: Every person who wants and probably can benefit from higher education will have the opportunity to attend a Virginia college or university.

And it should make this commitment to its colleges and universities: The commonwealth will increase its support of the services you offer but expects you to extend these services to increased numbers of students at a lower cost per student.

Both commitments can be met. All it takes is a willingness to think expansively about higher education's traditions and inclusively about meeting the needs of all Virginians, regardless of race, ethnicity, or wealth.