Message from the Executive Director: David Longanecker
The theme for WICHE’s 2005-2006 workplan was The Commitment, which referred not only to WICHE’s promise to help our 15 member states “work collaboratively …to expand educational access and excellence for the citizens of the West” but also to the commitment our states need to make to sustain support for higher education, so that it can continue to serve well the public good. For our organization, our states, and our region, fulfilling these commitments is more critical than ever.
The WICHE Commission and staff have worked hard over the past year to deliver on our commitment. We made big strides on the significant policy projects and program initiatives included in our original workplan, adopted by the commission in May 2005. In addition, after amending the plan in August, we pursued – and won – a federal contract to administer the State Scholars Initiative, which taps the business community in each of the “Scholars” states to encourage high school students to prepare for postsecondary education and the world of work by taking a rigorous curriculum.
Accepting responsibility to administer this major federal program enhanced the portfolio of WICHE activities – but it didn’t diminish our other work. In the policy arena, we continued our major finance initiative, encouraging states to bring their “financing in sync” in order to sustain both quality and access; we also completed seminal work on state policies and practices related to accelerated learning programs, such as Advanced Placement, the International Baccalaureate, Tech-Prep, and dual/concurrent enrollment (both projects were supported by funding from Lumina Foundation). We also began work on a new initiative examining whether and how states align higher education and workforce development efforts to assure a sufficient supply of high-wage, high-skilled workers for the future and to make certain that students from traditionally disenfranchised backgrounds have the opportunity to secure good jobs.
In addition to our work in these areas, we sustained and enhanced our other core activities. Our Student Exchange Programs continued to grow, as we examined how to improve them to better serve our member states. WCET, which seeks to advance knowledge about how technology can best serve higher education, remained vibrant, despite having to relocate its national convention from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. And our Mental Health Program had its most successful year in recent history, garnering unprecedented support from federal and state contracts and grants.
It was a good year for WICHE, one that, as the theme of this annual report indicates, saw us Fulfilling the Commitment we’d made through a number of successful ventures. Our actions in the coming year will build upon those successes and will include new challenges and opportunities, as well. Our nation has slipped in comparison with the rest of the developed world with respect to student access to and success in higher education. Where once we led the world, we now rank below several nations in the share of our young adult population with a college degree – and we’ll see other countries surpass us in the next few years. In this regard, the West has fallen even farther behind than has the rest of the U.S. WICHE will work to help reverse this trend, to make the West a model for expanding access to high-quality education. That’s part of our commitment, and we will fulfill it.