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The Roundtable project was formed because postsecondary education is vital to Oregon's future yet plagued by problems such as growing enrollments, shrinking public dollars, rising tuition, and
lagging state support for need-based student aid. There is a danger in this environment that more and more students of modest means will find a higher education financially inaccessible. Oregon, in turn, will lose the talents, contributions, and competitive edge that these students would have brought to its economy.
It has become increasingly clear in the Roundtable's work
that Oregon's PreK-12 school system is a vital part of improving postsecondary
education. At the earlier level, student expectations, academic preparation, and
alignment of curriculum, assessments, and credentials play a pivotal role in
postsecondary success.
Because the Governor has made education a high priority, there is a window of opportunity to look at
ways to improve Oregon's education systems from preschool to graduate school,
and to see how Oregon can raise the education attainment of its citizens.
In this respect, the Roundtable will play a number of roles. It will:
- Unify the business and philanthropy communities around a common agenda for improving
Oregon education
- Support the State Board of Higher Education's three working groups tasked to improve postsecondary access, service delivery, and contributions to economic development.
- Provide validation in some cases and offer push-back in other cases on ideas and proposals generated by the working groups and the Board.
- Assist state policy makers in developing a more transparent budget process for
all of its education funding.
- Provide a forum for the business and philanthropy communities, and for others, to exchange ideas, views, and information.
- Commission research and analysis on ways to improve
PreK-20 education in Oregon.
- Offer findings and recommendations that can be taken up by advocates among business groups and elected leaders. (The Roundtable itself will not take an advocacy role.)
What will success look like?
- The Roundtable will have an impact on the PreK-20 education agenda that the Governor and Legislature take up.
- The Roundtable's research and deliberation will help provide a policy framework to guide the development of education
improvement over the next decade.
The Roundtable's scope of interest includes public and private colleges and universities, community colleges, for-profit degree and non-degree vocational training, and adult continuing education. It also includes preparation in K-12 institutions for success in postsecondary education, as well as online and other distance programs.
Oregon has a multi-faceted challenge in PreK-20 education:
- We must graduate more students from high school.
- We must get more students into postsecondary schooling in a way that's affordable.
- They must be prepared to do more demanding academic work.
- They must get though as rapidly as possible and acquire skills that make them valuable workers and thinkers.
- We don't have much public money to do that, so we need to get better at how we invest and stretch our dollars.
- We must evaluate what we're getting for the dollars we put in, and we should use outcome metrics in that evaluation.
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