President’s Blog Flow of Ideas

I have a spam guard on my computer to try to eliminate the extraneous stuff that gets sent to my email address. It helps. It catches the virus-laden items and about three quarters of what I think of as electronic junk mail. Still, a couple of times a week I am obliged to review the accumulation to see whether a message from a high school classmate got trapped in the screen.

I have been struck recently by how many messages — tucked in the midst of Viagra pitches, offers of home equity loans, and stock tips — hold out the promise of a quick and inexpensive college diploma. “Online Education Is Easy and Affordable,” “You Can Start Your Higher Education Today, Easily,” and “Get an Instant Diploma” are just some of the recent headers.

I believe strongly that access to higher education is an issue of critical importance for our society. And I am deeply concerned that many young junior and senior high students, reading headlines about steep increases in tuition, or checking the quoted full cost of attendance at colleges like CC, may decide that they simply have no reason even to try. The cost is just beyond their reach.

Those of us who care about our young people and their education in this ever more competitive global economy must do a much better job of engaging these young folks to help them understand both the importance of a solid post-secondary education and the resources that help make it affordable for them. If we fail to do so, we leave these young students vulnerable to the “quick and easy” message.

The truth is, there is nothing quick or easy about preparing oneself to live successfully in the 21st century. On the contrary, it challenges each of us to be the very best that we can be. We must learn to read critically and deeply; we must learn to write persuasively; we must learn to integrate knowledge across boundaries of discipline and experience; we must cultivate our most creative impulses.

I had a conversation with our ten-year-old, Sam, yesterday. He was expressing unhappiness with the impending reopening of school. His most scathing comment, repeated all too often, is “boring.” Not all of the time, but too often. I challenged him, suggesting that an important part of education at this stage is laying the foundation for what is to come. “Still, Dad,” he said, “It shouldn’t be boring. Prof. Grogger wasn’t.” Prof. Grogger was a professor of geology at UCCS who taught a field geology course to Sam and twenty or so other specially chosen fourth graders.

As we continued to talk, Sam asked why they couldn’t study the news and current events more seriously, perhaps even create their own school paper. I was reminded of a time in the early 1960s when I was working in an inner city junior high school and we organized a “news show” with a different student each day serving as the “reporter” responsible for giving a three-minute audio report on news of the neighborhood. It posed extra work for each of these students, determined not to embarrass themselves, and extra work for the social studies teacher as well. The students, however, responded to the challenge. Some proved especially poised and articulate; others were adept at finding news in unexpected places. They were tough critics of each other, but never unfair. And in the end, they began to produce a weekly, two-page mimeographed neighborhood news that was widely circulated in the local places of business.

These young people were roused out of boredom — not by the promise of something quick and easy but by a challenge that they could handle with hard work and creativity.

Higher education in the United States, in fact education at every level, will not be enhanced by quick and easy solutions. We all must embrace hard work and the long haul. And in the process we must tap the enormous bounty of imagination and wit stored in those young people among us. Otherwise they are easy prey for a most beguiling and dangerous sort of spam.