Escalating Engagement: State Policy to Protect Access to Higher Education
Escalating Engagement: State Policy to Protect Access to Higher Education continues a project funded by The Ford Foundation by expanding the work we have started. The West cannot be characterized as a single entity, and thus we are focusing more sharply on two of the most important state-level issues currently facing our region: access for historically underrepresented groups and the role of higher education in state workforce development and economic development. Our goal is to help states build the capacity for change and to initiate that change by consensus building and action-oriented work.
We are employing tools that we have found to be highly effective in informing policymakers and in moving the change process forward. The project's major activities will include:
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Regional and sub-regional forums to bring together policymakers from different sectors of the policy community with experts for in-depth discussions of critical issues facing higher education.
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Roundtables involving key high-level players needed to make progress on transformation in higher education policy in the West.
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Technical assistance to support an assessment of a state's existing capacity to capitalize on its postsecondary education sector to support its current economic development and workforce development needs and discussion of new strategies to more closely link postsecondary education to future near-term state economic development and workforce development goals.
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Commissioned papers to support state and regional discussions on our major issue areas and to inform policymaking.
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Ford/WICHE Fellows to conduct research and develop papers on the project's topics.
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Annual meetings of WICHE's Legislative Advisory Committee to engage members in the project's activities and discussion of its core issues.
For a fuller description of the project, link to the Escalating Engagement Project Description
Regional and Sub-Regional Forums
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Western Summit on Workforce Certification and Higher Education, June 11-13, 2008, South Lake Tahoe, CA
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Finding the Right Port in a Storm: Strengthening the Connection between Higher Education and State Workforce Development Goals, June 25-26, 2007, Denver, CO
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If We Don't Build It, Who Will Come? Higher Education, State Workforce, and Economic Development, December 2004, Denver, CO
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Increasing Access and Retention in Times of Limited Growth, August 2004, Minneapolis, MN
Western Summit Web page, June 11-13, 2008, South Lake Tahoe, CA
Technical Assistance
Six states will be selected under the current Ford grant to receive technical assistance from WICHE and its partners in order to strengthen the linkages between higher education and state workforce development goals, especially with respect to traditionally underrepresented groups.
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Commissioned Papers
The Threat of Inequality to Workforce Development in the Western United States
by Patrick Kelly, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems
Updated Profiles for All 50 States and Including International Comparative Data
by Dennis Jones and Patrick Kelly, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems
Ford/WICHE Fellows
This grant funded several individuals for appointments as Policy Fellows. The Fellows worked on individually designed research projects and received feedback from WICHE staff. The resulting papers were compiled into a single publication that is available for download
Additionally, one Fellows paper has been separately published as Sustaining a Public Agenda for Higher Education: A Case Study of the North Dakota Higher Education Roundtable by Jason E. Lane, University at Albany, State University of New York
The Fellows also participated in a meeting at WICHE’s offices in Boulder in April 2008. The agenda can be viewed here
Additionally, the following links are a sample of work produced by Fellows who were funded under a related, previous Ford Foundation grant.
Other Activities
