Chancellor Erroll B. Davis Jr.
25th Biennial Institute
Noon, Monday, December 11, 2006
Georgia Center for Continuing Education
Athens, Georgia

Thank you, Mike (Mike Adams, president of the University of Georgia), and thank you Steve Wrigley and your staff for all you do for this Institute Let me also recognize the Speaker of the House, Rep. Glenn Richardson. I want to point out that he is responsible for my being here today. You will need to wait until I am done to see if that was a good idea or a bad one.

More seriously, the University System appreciates all that the Speaker does and all that the General Assembly does for Georgia and for our students. Let me thank each of you here -- for your willingness to serve this state. Public service is hard work -- it takes time and a tremendous toll on your life, your family, and your occupation. You have to make tough decisions -- you take a lot of grief and get very little praise.

So, I want to make it clear, on behalf of the Board of Regents and University System -- our 260,000 students and 38,000 employees on 35 campuses -- we appreciate your service. I look forward to your partnership as we work to educate more Georgians to higher and higher levels.

It has been informative to me to participate in this program. I certainly enjoyed the panel discussion this morning. As was noted last night, this Biennial Institute is unique in the country. There is nothing else like it. From my perspective, this institute is a great example of how Georgia uses its higher education resources to benefit the state.

December marks my 11th month as Chancellor -- it’s been a tough learning curve -- I’ve been force fed-from a fire hose. I am sure many of you new legislators will learn exactly what I mean once the session begins! It will be fast paced, exciting, and there are lots and lots of moving parts. This will be my second session and I am looking forward to it.

Over the past months I have learned a great deal about Georgia and about the University System. As some of you enter your legislative career, you’ll probably have a few awkward moments as you learn the legislative ropes. I hope this institute gives you the background and tools to handle those situations. Regardless, you’ll have to work hard to top some of my own awkward moments as I toured our campuses earlier this year. I have learned that mistakes can make you humble. That’s not a bad idea for people like yourselves in powerful and influential positions. Of course, I always tell my colleagues that whenever I begin to feel too important and too influential, I try to order someone else’s dog around!

Let me take just a few moments to make a few key points about higher education, the University System, and Georgia. I will discuss the following:

• The changing role of higher education.
• What we are doing in the University System to address this changing role, coupled with some of the challenges we currently face in doing so, and lastly
• The leadership role each of you plays in partnering with us to effect the changes necessary to benefit the state and its citizens.

So, here is the major problem: the role of higher education has changed --- and not everybody noticed. Technology, globalization, the drive in other countries to educate a competitive workforce -- all forcing change in higher education in this country. These forces are reshaping the earth -- Tom Friedman’s book, “The World is Flat” outlines them well. It’s a new world -- one in which individuals must be educated – and they must be highly educated if we are to succeed as a nation.

The challenge we face is to educate a much higher percentage of our population to a much higher level than ever before. We are no longer just educating a small or elite governing class such as yourselves. That is a model that no longer works -- and any college or university holding onto it is, or will soon be, an anachronism. We are in the mass production education business -- like it or not.

The U.S. has a hard earned and well deserved reputation for its higher education system -- but other nations have taken note and are educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels. India and China are prime examples. We have remained so far ahead of the competition for so long, that we may have taken our postsecondary education superiority for granted.

We operate with the complacent and at times arrogant self-assurance that we are serving the right mix with the right programming and the correct incentives to maintain our leadership role. This attitude is costly. It is self-serving. It will lead to failure and decline. This is a key finding of the recent report of a commission appointed by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

Two-thirds of high growth jobs require a college degree, which only one-third of Americans have. It is our shared responsibility in Georgia to confront this challenge --not only in ways that serve this state’s citizens ---but also in ways that serve as national examples of how things should be done in the education arena. In short, there is no reason why -- with your continuing support -- we cannot be educational thought leaders in this country.

Georgia is a state that is on the leading edge of growth in its college-age population. Yet, historically, it has done poorly in the percentage of its population who attend college. So for us, the truth that we must educate more people to a higher education level than in the past poses a tremendous opportunity as well as a significant challenge for both the higher education system and the K-12 system in this state.

Our customers -- whether political leaders such as are gathered here, alumni, businesses, or students -- are looking more than ever to higher education. They are looking to us to meet the nation’s needs for a highly educated workforce. They are looking to us for more basic and applied research; and in short, they are looking to us for the knowledge to help this nation maintain its competitive edge.

Our customers expect that the University System will address -- not deprecate -- the key issues of concern to them: accessibility, affordability, and accountability. These must be our areas of focus moving forward.

Educating more of our population means ensuring that all segments of that population have access to higher education. We must structure our higher education system in ways designed to provide broad access -- whether through our efforts with K-12 to prepare students for college, whether through our admissions policies, or through the ways in which we offer degree programs.

For example, we must use technology to increase access. We must use scheduling and geographic location to increase access. We must look at our costs and we must take a look at more financial aid to increase access. As you may be aware, there is increasing concern about the fact that college costs may be moving out of the reach of some students. This is not the direction in which we want to go as a state or a nation. And it is up to the public colleges and universities to provide the affordable access.

One of the disturbing trends in this country is the growing gap between private institutions with great resources and public institutions with diminished resources. As Charles Miller, chair of the Spellings Commission has noted, this gap is dangerous for the nation. Our challenge -- public higher education and elected leaders -- is to work together to reduce this gap in order to not only maintain, but also enlarge access to public higher education.

Affordability is uppermost in the minds of many Americans when it comes to access to college. When the goal is to educate more and more of our population, we obviously cannot afford to price a large segment of the population out of the market. Historically, tuition at Georgia’s public colleges and universities has been a bargain when compared to other states. It is a bargain, however created not by our low cost structures but instead by the support you give to the system. In the University System, we need to celebrate the reality of low prices; not hold them out as a reason to raise them!

Our new guaranteed tuition policy sends a strong message to students and parents that we want to provide financial stability in planning for college. Public and private, we need to send a message that to not pursue postsecondary education is, in the long run, more costly than that upfront investment. Yet, we cannot expect people to intuitively understand or grasp the connection between the investment now and the payoff later -- on average a million dollars more in a college graduate’s working lifetime, or $23,000 a year.

Another important focus of ours must be accountability. Our customers -- students, government, and business – like all customers in America today, are becoming a lot more demanding. They demand our maximum efficiency and total focus on meeting our challenges -- and on meeting the key challenge of educating more Georgians to a higher level than ever before. We will respond to our customers -- all of them -- and we will meet and exceed expectations.

In the University System we are implementing new methods for financial reporting, new budgeting procedures for our institutions, and a focus on increasing efficiency and productivity in our back office operations. We may have world class academics, but across the board, we do not have world class efficiency. So, we have a very good opportunity to realize significant improvements in productivity and efficiency in our back office operations. This, in turn, will free up resources for our primary teaching, research, and service missions. Further, these changes will have the added benefit of providing an increased level of transparency and accountability for our operations.

Looking at accountability from another perspective, I want us to shift our thinking from what is too-often a self-congratulatory tone to one that demonstrates instead our service to society. We need to stop focusing on our national rankings and high incoming SAT scores as if these were our sole or primary objectives These are important but they must become by-products of our quality and success. Instead, we need show how we are transforming individual lives and enhancing the communities we serve. We must show how we are meeting society’s needs -- not our own -- that must be our message going forward.

In addressing these challenges of access, affordability, and accountability, we face some other pressures that I want to briefly note for your information. These issues will be part of our ongoing discussions with you -- both in the budget process and elsewhere. I have touched upon some of these issues in the challenges I have discussed, but it is important to reinforce both the importance of these issues, how we are focusing the University System resources on them, and our commitment to dealing with them with your support. The issues are:

1. Balancing access and retention:

As we seek to expand access to educate more Georgians to a higher level, we must also recognize that as the base expands to include students who may not be as well prepared for college, we will see some erosion short term of our retention rates. We are seeing it already. This means will need to continue to focus our attention and resources on improving retention, even as we expand access.

2. Graduation rates:

Georgia is not where it should be -- we rank 37th among the states in our graduation rates for 2005 -- this is an improvement from 39th in 2004. We have set and are meeting our goal of improving graduation rates by one percent a year (which in the context of graduation rates is a very significant performance target).

3. Increasing efficiency and productivity:

I have mentioned some of the things we are pursuing toward this end. We will make progress. The challenge here is to engage the workforce. The challenge here is to be creative in how we provide incentives for our workforce in the System to make increasing efficiency a permanent part of our DNA. We may need your assistance in looking at some options.

4. Keeping faculty salaries competitive:

Georgia has slipped from fourth to fifth among the Southern Regional Education Board states in faculty salaries. Generally, the NY Yankees being the exception, the better people we have, the better we perform as a System. We don’t want to be the Marlins in terms of pay, but perhaps the Oakland A’s who have strong performers and are cost effective.

We will be increasing our internal investment in training and development to help retain our people. But frankly, we must do a much better job of communicating to the public the contributions faculty make to student learning and to the communities where we are privileged to live and work. This has to happen in order to build the public support necessary to give you the ability to support higher salaries.

5. Developing strategy:

No organization can be successful over the long run without a sound strategy. We are currently in the process of developing our strategic plan for the system. As you may have guessed – one focus will be to create and manage the physical and intellectual capacity to educate more Georgians to higher levels. Along the way, we will also address access, affordability, and accountability.

6. Distance Learning:

How should the University System evolve to meet the needs of its customers? One of the findings of the Spellings Report is that higher education has not done a great job of investing in technology or using technology for innovation in both teaching and learning and back office operations. We must address this issue -- the rest of the world is; higher education simply cannot fall behind technologically if we are going to continue to serve customers and communities well.

7. The final issue -- Keeping Pace with Growth:

We are a growing, dynamic enterprise. This month and next mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of the University System of Georgia. Over this period we have seen steady -- sometimes explosive -- growth. In fact over the last eight years, we have added the equivalent of a UGA and a Georgia State University to our system.

We must also manage growth in ways that show good and sound stewardship of the resources you and others provide. Keeping pace with growth is the issue with which we will have the highest level of interaction with our funding partners. For us to be successful in meeting our goals and addressing our challenges, we clearly need a strong partnership with both the General Assembly and the Governor. And it requires leadership -- on our part and from each of you.

However, I understand that a partnership is a two-way street. Yes, we need your support. We need it desperately! But you need us to do the job in the areas I have discussed -- increasing access, maintaining affordability, and providing accountability. We must do these things to help you support us. In short, it’s our job to “do the right thing” that creates public understanding of and support for higher education. And that, in turn, provides you with the political capital that you can then use to support our shared goal of educating more Georgians to a higher level.

I’ve been busy spreading the word on our campuses that presidents, faculty, and staff can’t expect me just to stroll by and throw money over the transom as a reward for excellence that often only we can recognize. In the University System, we have a great deal of work ahead to make our case for public support. We need to do the “heavy lifting” in a number of areas -- private giving, entrepreneurial activity, research, and productivity -- in order to justify public support from state appropriations and, lastly, from tuition.

To be successful, we must have leadership at every level. We are going to be focusing on that at the University System. We are going to train and develop leaders who can take our processes and systems and, at the end of the year, deliver a stronger, better-performing operation than at the beginning. So -- our leadership to generate the results that build public support -- coupled with your leadership to demand high performance -- will be a dynamic partnership.

I look forward to working with each of you in the coming months – and, hopefully, years. Let me thank you again for your public service. And thank you in advance for your partnership and your continuing support. We will work hard, every day, to earn it.