Battaglia/Corcoran/Rhodes and Simon: Adopting cheaper college learning materials

The formidable-looking Science Building at Eastern Connecticut State University, in Willimantic

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

The 17-institution Connecticut State Colleges & Universities System (CSCU) formed a systemwide open educational resources (OER) Council in 2017 that was primarily focused on the adoption of no-cost or low-cost (NOLO) course materials as a means to provide equitable access to learning materials.

Our CSCU consortium of library directors partnered with the OER Council to construct a Web site, OpenCSCU, providing curated OER, a support network and a faculty-recognition program. The OER Council also has hosted annual OER workshops. Additionally, the CSCU system office funded a “mini-grant” program to further assist adoption. Much of the council’s focus and its connected OER efforts have been centered on equitable access to affordable learning materials. Over time, the council has expanded its focus to include open practices as a critical component to diversity, equity and inclusion in support of student success.

Even as we made strides in expanding the reach and focus of our OER efforts, the council recognized a communication gap persisted. The primary means of disseminating information from the council had been its representatives. We recognized that our institutions may have been at varying levels of engagement with OER and that our council representatives may have had competing priorities. It became clear that to better serve our institutions we needed to create a centralized communication channel to provide broader engagement and reach. Enter the blog.

With the OpenCSCU site established as a clearinghouse for OER-related information, it was a natural progression to take advantage of the existing technology for this new communications effort. Recognizing the limitations of our previous communications methods, which relied heavily on email, the council sought to better utilize the OpenCSCU Web site feature set. The website runs off the Springshare LibGuides platform and provides a blog option that is flexible and visually appealing. Creating posts with persistent URLs (such as “/blog” vs. system-generated code) and a consistent location would allow us to easily disseminate up-to-date content more widely beyond the confines of email, such as through social media channels and other means of link sharing.

The CSCU OER Council formed a task force to explore how the blog could support the council’s goals of broader dissemination of open practices, recognizing the work of practitioners and advocates and growing the open community.

Creating the blog

As the task force began its work, we felt compelled to establish guiding principles for this initiative. We wanted our OER efforts to be deeply rooted in equity as well as community members’ innovations and successes. A consistent piece of feedback we had received from our previous efforts was a call for more perspectives from faculty and less from staff and administration. (After all, our faculty are the primary audience.) As a result, we decided early on that our featured posts would focus on faculty practitioners and their application of open practices and principles within their courses but also would include perspectives of students, staff and administration.

The lengthiest discussions centered around determining editorial standards for the blog. The task force looked to established academic blogs for insights and inspiration. The New England Board for Higher Education and its New England Journal of Higher Education provided some invaluable guidance to help us move forward. The WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) also shared documented standards for its long-running blog site, Frontiers.

As a result, our standards focused on acceptable content and tone, readability and accessibility, format, media usage, licensing and the editorial review process. As OER advocates, we emphasized the requirement of open licensing for submitted content.

The OER Council’s blog task force made a conscience decision to solicit selected authors versus issuing a broad call. Our intent was to recruit three to four innovative faculty to share their stories in Year One of launching this new initiative. This approach ensured that we had a full year of highly relevant content. In future years, we will be providing an online form for interested individuals to submit proposals.

In determining the quarterly release schedule, we considered how our featured blog posts might correspond with national and regional events such as the Open Ed Conference, Open Ed Week, and the Northeast OER Summit, to coincide with heightened interest in OER. In addition to our invited authors, we agreed that we would supplement the quarterly features with timely and relevant news and events, spotlighting professional development and grant opportunities

The future of the blog

On Sept. 21, the OpenCSCU Blog was launched. Its featured post was entitled “Presenting and Promoting Open Pedagogy Through Different Frameworks” by Nicolas Simon, an assistant professor at Eastern Connecticut State University who was joined by three of his students: Tara Nguyen, Jean Rienzo and Maya Vanderberg. With feedback still coming in, the editorial board has shifted to planning the next featured post and identifying newsworthy items to share in the interim.

We plan to present practical examples that can be replicated by others, including an in-depth look at open pedagogy, regaining intellectual property rights, and publishing an open text. Looking beyond the next scheduled releases, the editorial board in conjunction with the full OER Council have started to explore the next steps for the blog. In the short term, the editorial board will establish and publish criteria for selection. In the long term, we will explore how the blog can facilitate two-way conversations.

Overall, we intend to provide guidance and support to readers by demonstrating the value of open content and practices to better serve student success. As we share more content, we hope that our reader base will grow and that our blog posts will encourage conversation and innovation in open education.  We hope to generate broader awareness of open practices and build a community of practice that not only validates and normalizes open pedagogy, but also inspires new efforts.

Hayley Battaglia is the serials & electronic resources librarian at Hilton C. Buley Library of Southern Connecticut State University. She is a member of the CSCU OER Advisory Council, chair of the OER Committee at Buley Library, a graduate of the Creative Commons Certificate Course and editor of the OpenCSCU Blog.

Kevin Corcoran is the executive director for digital learning at the Connecticut State Colleges & Universities System. He currently chairs the CSCU OER Advisory Council and the statewide Connecticut OER Coordinating Council and serves on the NEBHE OER Advisory Board.

Eileen Rhodes currently serves as the interim director of the Connecticut State Community College Library. Prior to this, she served as director of library services at Capital Community College in Hartford, Conn., for more than seven years. She is an OER advocate, initiating a “NOLO” labeling program at her college to identify courses with no-cost/low-cost course materials. 

Nicolas P. Simon is an assistant professor of sociology at Eastern Connecticut State University. The supplemental works co-authored with his students have been featured in Introduction to Sociology, third edition, published by OpenStax. 

John O. Harney: Are N.E. colleges ready for the next recession?

Maine Maritime Academy, in Castine, Maine. Its graduates incur high debt levels but have very low default rates.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Times are already complex for higher education. In Massachusetts, 18 higher education institutions (HEIs) have closed or merged in the past five years. In Vermont, College of St. Joseph, Green Mountain College and Southern Vermont College all held their final graduation ceremonies in the spring. What would happen if a recession were to add to this uncertainty?

With that question in mind, NEBHE in mid-October convened a small group* of higher education leaders and economists to talk about “The Future of Higher Education and the Economy: Lessons Learned from the Last Recession.”

To be sure, some of the problems that have forced college closures are national, but New England (along with the rest of the Northeast and the Upper Midwest) faces specific challenges: most importantly, a daunting demography that spells trouble for college enrollments. By 2032, the number of new high school graduates in New England is projected to decline by 22,000 to a total 140,273, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

The NEBHE confab aimed to better understand the key challenges and consequences HEIs faced as a result of the so-called “Great Recession” and what can be learned from them. Among guiding questions:

• What is the likely course of the economy over the next 18 to 24 months?

• How prepared are institutions for the next recession?

• What lessons did higher education learn from the Great Recession?

• What conversations should HEIs—presidents, senior leaders, board leaders—be having now?

• How fragile are higher ed institutions in New England and beyond?

• What economic or other indicators should we be watching at this point in the economic cycle?

• What’s the impact of reduced or stagnant state and federal government support?

• How did the last recession impact families—and what does it mean for their ability to pay ever-increasing tuition and fees?

• When another recession hits, are there adequate social safety nets to cushion the blow?

• Which responses to changing demographics, customer preferences and new technology could help institutions avert closure … and even thrive?

The current state and future course of the economy

NEBHE President and CEO Michael K. Thomas opened the discussion asking for panelists’ perceptions of the state of the economy.

The U.S. has been enjoying the longest economic expansion in history. But looking worldwide, China’s economy is slowing, global manufacturing is suffering, and trading nations like Germany and Singapore are close to recession.

Nigel Gault, chief economist in the Boston office of EY-Parthenon, noted that the current expansion has been long (more than 10 years) but slow, not reaching 3% GDP growth in any year. Moreover, higher education enrollments have trended down while student loan debt has exploded. Tuition prices keep going up, raising increasing questions about whether the investment in higher education is worth it. And the demography will get even worse after 2025.

In addition, the international enrollment that kept some HEIs above water is under increased pressure. For international students, “it’s a combination of sensing they’re not wanted and facing more hurdles to get the necessary visa to come,” said Gault.

The overall result: fewer traditional-age college applicants.

“Back in the last expansion, enrollment was still growing 1 to 2%, which is not great, but this time, the expansion has been much slower overall, and enrollment growth is only half a percent to 1%,” said Thomas College President Laurie Lachance.

In her previous roles as the Maine state economist and as corporate economist at Central Maine Power Co., Lachance heard from businesses that bad economic policy is better than frequently changing policy. She wondered if the current whiplash of national policies could tip us into recession.

Gault shared the thought: “Bad policy and volatile policy is a toxic combination. Often the best thing for the economy is policy paralysis because people know the rules are going to stay as they are now and they can plan on that basis.”

What kind of recession?

Recessions can result from global market downturns or be sparked by outside geopolitical events such as the Gulf War in the early 1990s or the subprime mortgage crisis that began in 2007 and led to the 2008 Great Recession.

None of the panelists thought a 2008-magnitude recession would come soon. But Gault suggested the No. 1 risk is the intensification of trade wars between the U.S. and China or the U.S. and Europe. Gault added that China can no longer play the role of savior of the global economy as it did after the Great Recession.

Participants agreed that different kinds of HEIs would be hurt differently by different kinds of recessions.  Not only would a recession caused by global downturn be very different from one caused by local or even institution-specific financial factors. At the family level, a recession centered around the financial sector would directly hit a different group of New Englanders than one centered on manufacturing recession.

The panelists imagined multiple scenarios. Some elite HEIs with significant endowments will be hurt for a short time with a market downturn, but they’ll be OK. Some state universities will be too big to fail. Some independent HEI leaders wonder if state governments will consider consolidating low-performing public campuses? If some public HEIs adopt free tuition models, their programs will be hard to resist for students whose parents lose their jobs in a recession. But a downturn would slow public investment in such programs.

If the past is a guide, any recession will bring some enrollment spurt, especially among older students because job options will be less plentiful, Gault observed. But unlike the tailwind during the Great Recession, the demographic headwind this time around, will probably result in a smaller enrollment spike. A modest recession that takes unemployment up to 6% could bring a less than 3% increase in annual enrollment, Gault said.

Even the recovery from the Great Recession varied by HEI based on the regions from which they drew students and whether their students were in programs that are cyclical or counter-cyclical, said University of Saint Joseph President Rhona Free. USJ’s latest focus has been nursing, teaching and social work, which were not especially hurt in 2008. The experience may have been different at liberal arts institutions that primarily offer disciplines, which in careerist times and places get reactions ranging from disparagement for having weak immediate career prospects to praise for being the key to critical thinking, noted Free, who was provost at Eastern Connecticut State University before joining USJ.

Endowment pressures

On average, 12% of operating budgets at HEIs are covered by endowments, though the figure at some wealthy institutions exceeds 50%, according to Timothy T. Yates, Jr., president and CEO of Commonfund Asset Management Company. He pointed out that most investment committees think of endowments by size, but the more important metric is how dependent institutions’ operating budgets are on endowment returns. He told of a private HEI where the share of operating budget covered by endowment went from 18% in 2008 to 15% in 2009. “That’s a huge hole in their operating budget and it took six years to recover.”

Moreover, most investment committees have not been happy with their recent return rates, Yates said. He explained that a market downturn on an endowment causes a drop in funding. HEIs generally draw about 5% from their endowments to support themselves. Yates said about 32% of HEIs have taken special-purpose appropriations from their endowments this year, up from 26% in 2017 and 18% in 2009. Some of these special appropriations have gone to marketing campaigns to drive enrollment; others have been aimed at addressing a deficit, Yates said.

“If people are drawing from their endowments with a one-time, one-year promise-we-won’t-do-it-again appropriation, I’m not sure that’s the way we should be operating. It’s potentially a Hail Mary activity.” said Susan Whealler Johnston, president and CEO of the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO).

Lachance saw all the high-finance handwringing as “first-world” problems. Her Thomas College, with just 800 undergraduates and a $13 million endowment, was on the brink of bankruptcy three decades ago. Now, the college, in the same Maine town, Waterville, as the richer Colby College (which has 2,000 undergraduates and an endowment of more than $800 million), makes tough business decisions to invest in only things that could lead to higher enrollment. Thomas draws just a few percentage points of its endowment annually for its operating budget.

Among new business models, Thomas College has added three-year degrees for high-performing high school students, and key employability programs such as a “golf guarantee” to make sure students, many the first in their families to attend college, graduate networking-ready and more familiar with practical realities of business leadership.

The demographic factor

In the 1970s and early ‘80s, when endowment values dropped sharply, high inflation exacerbated the problem, Yates said. But what higher ed had at that time was a big demographic tailwind with baby boomers starting to come into colleges. Baby boomers now represent about 25% of the population but nearly half of charitable giving.

Also in the ‘70s, higher ed saw the front end of more structured fundraising and the consolidation benefits of single-sex institutions merging. Plus, since there hadn’t yet been large tuition increases, there was room to fill classes with students who were willing to pay more. “In higher education, history has been kind to the continuation of bad business practices, for example, thinking you could just go on and on raising tuition,” Lachance said. But our expert panelists agreed that such slack was no longer in the system.

All in all, a lot of New England higher education’s fortunes can be tied to an aging population. Too few babies are being born to sustain our overbuilt higher education infrastructure. Adults, though underserved, are seen as possible saviors. Professors are aging too, and the older ones are less likely to buy into cost-saving technology and open-education resources that some HEIs such as Thomas College consider a key to success. College presidents, whose average tenure is less than seven years, and chief business officers are also heading toward a retirement cliff.

Johnston reflected on the challenges of HEI governance and added that a lot of board members are in their seventies and will be retiring soon. “Are they the big givers that institutions want to hold onto, or do we need new bring in younger, different thinkers?” Or is the best approach to encourage both, since senior trustees can help newer board members with the institutional context for board decision-making?

Young blood with a new perspective may also bring more honesty to boards. Roger Goodman of the Yuba Group and previously Moody’s (where he wrote for (NEJHE during the last recession) was surprised when a poll at a recent conference for higher education trustees showed nearly 65% believed their HEIs were on a solid financial footing. Such findings suggest a certain level of naivete or denial about the realities facing HEIs.

Then, there are questions about the whole higher education governance model. Board members’ connections to the world outside higher ed surely bring value. But does someone who’s made millions in private equity know the complexities of dealing with a shared governance model and the challenges of higher ed finances? And what about those trustees of public HEIs, some named to boards partly based on connections to governors and other appointing authorities?

Student loans and defaults

One of higher education’s biggest challenges is captured by a staggering number: $1.6 trillion. That’s the current total amount of student loan debt. And unlike other forms of consumer credit, student loan debt is only rising.

Phil Oliff noted that a fifth of federal loan borrowers are in default. There has been much discussion about how student loan debt itself may delay markers of adulthood such as buying a car or home, starting a family or starting a business. Default is an even bigger deal. Wages can be garnished. In some places, professional certifications can be stripped. And credit scores can be hit.

Notably and counterintuitively, the higher defaults are among students with low balances, often because they left college without completing a degree that would provide the earnings to repay their loans.

In Maine, not just community colleges but also lower-tiered university campuses, have higher default rates. Higher default rates seem to be more highly correlated with low graduation rates than they are with larger loan balances. For example, Maine Maritime graduates incur high debt levels but very low default rates, said Lachance.

Much was made of defaults among students at for-profit colleges. But enrollment at for-profits has plummeted since spiking around the time of the last recession.

Public investment in higher education

State funding of higher education has come back somewhat and state fiscal reserves have been built up since the Great Recession, said Oliff. But public higher ed gets disproportionately hit in recessions—as it is seen as a “balance wheel” for legislators struggling to write budgets during downturns.

In the last recession, Oliff added, the federal government created a specific pot of money for states to prop up budgets, plus policy decisions to increase the maximum Pell Grant award, veterans benefits and tax expenditures, such as credits for tuition and college savings incentives. The impact of the last recession, albeit significant, was softened by federal policy interventions. But there’s no guarantee that D.C. will act in the same way in the next recession.

The student debt issue also feeds into and grows out of the changing perceptions of the value of higher education. Increasing critiques of higher ed could affect the cyclical dynamic that has sent more students back to college during recessions. When a recession occurs, will some people question if investing in some or more higher education is a good strategy? Further, shorter-term credentials, rather than degrees, may be key in a changing economy, Gault said. Indeed, NEBHE and others increasingly focus on how “high-value” credentials can more efficiently prepare students for in-demand jobs than can full degree programs.

As an immigrant, USJ’s Rhona Free said she always saw “part of the American Dream is that your 18-year-old goes off to live on a campus and grows in many ways for four years, but the reality is that is largely a middle-class, upper-income, white American Dream. We have to innovate in getting all families to believe that this is achievable for their children and there’s a good return on investment. It will be less debt than if they bought a new car.”

Mergers and alliances

Johnston warned that presidents and boards should be talking about what alliances and mergers might mean to their institutions. But many do not want to talk about it, until they’re hard-pressed. Some of that is reflected in the sentiment noted by Goodman in which two-thirds of board members saw their HEIs as being on solid ground.

In addition, the process of mergers can put a lot of pressure on surviving HEIs. An institution facing the threat of closure might decide to get by for another year with an unsustainable discount, say 75%, to get the incremental student it wants. That can put a lot of pressure on other HEIs that are competing in the market. Johnston pointed out that one HEI in Virginia, determined to grow its enrollment, decided to go deeper into its waiting lists, which affected enrollments at competitors across the state, many of whom did not meet their revenue goals as a result.

“The business model isn’t working for us, and that requires innovation,” said Johnston. And it is explained poorly to the public and students with confounding concepts such as “tuition discounts” and “net prices vs. sticker prices.”

Students and families

When the discussion turned to the condition of social safety nets, Lachance lamented: “The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. When I was growing up, there were so many mills around us where a high school grad could do just fine. They’d get on a union wage scale and they had a great standard of living to send their own kids to college. Now it seems like the difference is based on your educational attainment. And if you don’t attend college and you don’t persist and graduate, you’ll never earn the return on that investment and you’ll be in debt.”

A recession will surely exacerbate the difference between those who have and those who have not, concluded Johnston. The question is not just which institutions will be most affected, but which students, for example, those with food insecurity. As President Free noted, HEIs’ food pantries and in-demand mental health services are now key social safety nets upon which many students already depend.

Moreover, “Kids who were watching their families go through the last recession may bring a separate set of anxieties with them if there’s another recession,” said Johnston. “They may dial back what they think they can do even if the circumstances don’t require it.”

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

* The panelists …

Rhona C. Free became the ninth president of the West Hartford, Conn.-based University of Saint Joseph in July 2015. During her time at USJ, she has championed the creation of the Women’s Leadership Center and guided the deliberations that led to the university’s decision to become fully coeducational in fall 2018. She joined USJ from Eastern Connecticut State University, where she served as vice president for academic affairs from 2007 to 2013 and provost from 2013 to 2015. She taught Economics at Eastern for 25 years before becoming an administrator.

Roger Goodman is a partner in the Boston office of The Yuba Group LLC, which provides independent financial advice and consulting to higher education institutions on debt and credit-related matters. Prior to joining the Yuba Group, he served as the team leader for the Higher Education and Not-for-Profit Team at Moody’s Investors Service, leading a team of 11 analysts responsible for credit analysis and credit ratings.

Nigel Gault is EY-Parthenon’s chief economist based in the Boston office. He was with Parthenon for a year before its combination with EY in August 2014. He advises clients on issues relating to their strategies, market growth and pricing. Gault was most recently chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight, where he was a seven-time winner of the Marketwatch Forecaster of the Month accolade for key economic indicators. He has also served as chief European economist in London for Standard & Poor’s/Data Resources and for Decision Economics.

Susan Whealler Johnston is president and CEO of the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), a position she has held since Aug. 1, 2018. Prior to joining NACUBO, she was at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB), where she served as executive vice president and chief operating officer, responsible for the day-to-day operations of the organization as well as strategic planning. Prior to joining AGB, she was professor of English and dean of academic development at Rockford University.

Laurie Lachance is Thomas College’s fifth president and the first female and alumna to lead the college in its 125-year history. From 2004 to 2012, she served as president and CEO of the Maine Development Foundation. Prior to MDF, she served three governors as the Maine state economist. Before joining state government, she served as the corporate economist at Central Maine Power Company.

Phillip Oliff is senior manager at The Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C., where he leads Pew’s work exploring the fiscal and policy relationships between the federal and state governments on a variety of topics, including how federal budget and tax changes could affect states, the role that federal and state finances play in higher education and surface transportation. He previously was a policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where he wrote reports on topics including education finance, state tax policy, states’ post-recession fiscal conditions and the impact of emergency federal aid on state budgets.

Timothy T. Yates, Jr. is president and CEO of Commonfund Asset Management and responsible for managing all aspects of Commonfund’s Outsourced Chief Investment Office (OCIO) business, which focuses exclusively on nonprofit institutions. Before joining Commonfund, he was an instructor of Spanish and Italian at Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx, N.Y.

Elsa Nunez: 'Dreamers' are at heart of the American Dream

Science Building at Eastern Connecticut State University, in Willimantic.

WILLIMANTIC, Conn.

The recent controversy surrounding a proposed ban on immigration from seven Middle East countries recalls similar times in our history. More than 130 years ago, Chinese immigration was restricted. In 1924, Japanese immigrants were effectively barred from entering the U.S., and Mexicans living here during the Depression were the subject of repatriation, even those who were U.S. citizens. Other restrictions on immigration have marked our history, based on the domestic and global politics of the times.

The latest policy pronouncements reaffirm the need for comprehensive immigration reform in this country. It is time for Congress to decide how to balance securing our borders with the need for a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people already in the U.S.

While we wait to see what Congress does, 1.8 million young people deserve better. Known as “Dreamers,” this entire generation of talented, dedicated students was born abroad but raised in this country without documented legal status. Since 2012, more than 740,000 Dreamers have been given Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, allowing them to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit.

DACA students came to this country as children, they have grown up here, been schooled here, and dream of having productive, engaged lives here as American citizens. They think of themselves as Americans. They are exactly like the children of immigrants arriving in our country throughout most of our nation’s history, and today, they are like the children sitting next to them in school, except for the matter of permanent legal status.

Even with DACA status, these young people still face an uphill battle to achieve the promise of a college education. In 16 states, DACA students are either prevented from attending their in-state public college or university, or are forced to pay prohibitively expensive out-of-state tuition to attend their home-state public institutions. “Locked out” states include Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

TheDream.US, a national foundation created by former Washington Post publisher Donald Graham and his wife, Amanda Bennett, has established the Opportunity Scholarship program to support upwards of 500 Dreamers over the next few years. Opportunity Scholars receive sufficient scholarship funds to fully pay for their tuition, fees, room and board.

In fall 2016, Eastern Connecticut State University was one of two institutions nationally—Delaware State University is the other—to enroll the very first cohort of Opportunity Scholars. In addition to 42 eligible Dreamers from the 16 locked-out states, the Dream.US foundation is also supporting five DACA students from Connecticut to attend Eastern. No public funds are being used to support Eastern’s Dreamers, and no in-state students are being denied admission because of the program.

Our 42 out-of-state Dreamers come from eight locked out states—Georgia, Idaho, Wisconsin, North Carolina, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Indiana—and from 13 different countries, ranging from Brazil to India, Ecuador and Zimbabwe. Applications are already being accepted for fall 2017, and Eastern will likely enroll another 75 Opportunity Scholars.

How are our Opportunity Scholars doing in this first year at Eastern? All 42 out-of-state Opportunity Scholars—as well as all five from Connecticut—have successfully weathered their first semester on campus and are back for the spring. The median GPA of our out-of-state Dreamers is an impressive 3.58! They are already becoming campus leaders—as members of the Honors Program, as resident assistants and as senators on the Student Government Association. The key has been to treat them with respect—they aren’t singled out nor housed in a single dormitory or made to feel different from their peers on campus. They receive the same personal attention for which our close-knit, public liberal arts campus is known.

When I speak to our Opportunity Scholars—and I make an effort to seek them out individually whenever possible—I am struck by their gratitude and their determination to succeed. These young people—like the native-born citizens they sit next to in class—are our nation’s future leaders, doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers and business leaders. Their talents, work ethic and diversity bode well for our economy and society.

As much as this success story at Eastern is uplifting, the broader issue of the future of Dreamers in our country is a test of this nation’s moral fiber. Everyone in this country—except Native Americans—has ancestors who originally came from other lands to create the rich diversity we have today in the U.S. Like other members of American society, motivated, high-achieving immigrant students, no matter their nation of origin, should also have access to education—the key to social mobility and economic security in the U.S. That must be our commitment to them, knowing that what we get in return—a rich diversity of culture, religion, race and political thought—is the core strength of our democracy.

It is not by accident that our nation is the world’s melting pot, brimming with people of all nationalities and backgrounds. The U.S.—the greatest experiment in democracy the world has ever known—has enjoyed a moral standing throughout the world because it serves as a beacon of hope to all who long for freedom and opportunity. Acknowledging the right of today’s Dreamers to pursue a college education will reaffirm this moral high ground. Returning them to home nations that they cannot remember would be a disservice to these young people, would prevent them from making a contribution to our society, and would diminish our moral standing around the globe.

At Eastern, we will continue to enroll, support and advocate for the outstanding Opportunity Scholars who have come to us to earn their college degree. We urge all educators—all Americans!—to lobby our congressional leaders to do the right thing—extend the American Dream to a deserving generation of Dreamers while pursuing a viable long-term solution to the immigration issue.

Elsa Nunez is president of Eastern Connecticut State University. This piece first ran on the Web site of the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org).

Chris Powell: Politically incorrect crime data; illegals get preference; plutocrat Pequots

Cellphone video from around the country continues to suggest that white police officers can be too quick to confront and shoot black men. But whenever there is such cellphone video, nobody wants to wait for due process of law to determine exactly what happened. It's always "no justice, no peace" immediately, even as justice requires a little time.

Immediate justice constitutes lynching, which is as wrong when it is demanded today by black mobs as it was in the last century when it was perpetrated by white mobs.

A report issued last month by Central Connecticut State University, concluding that police in the state use their stun guns more often against Hispanics and blacks than against whites, is not helpful in pursuing justice. It seems meant mainly to intimidate officers out of doing their jobs with racial minorities.

Of course to some extent racial prejudice and racial fear will always figure in police work. Such prejudice and fear may be the most likely explanations for why black people are shot to death by white officers in confrontations that begin over trivia like a broken taillight or the sale of CDs in front of a convenience store.

But crime itself is correlated with race and poverty. For example, that the great majority of Connecticut's prison population is black and Hispanic is not mainly the result of racist cops, prosecutors, judges and juries; it results mainly from the concentration of crime and poverty among certain racial and ethnic groups.

So maybe Connecticut needs a study quantifying the racial disproportions in crime. But since its data would be politically incorrect, the state probably has no institution of higher education capable of the work.

 xxx

ILLEGAL ALIENS GET PREFERENCE. Expanding its campaign to nullify federal immigration law and devalue citizenship, state government will place at Eastern Connecticut State University 46 students from other states who are living in the country illegally.

The university won't pay for the students; a national scholarship fund for illegal aliens will cover their expenses. Most of the students are living in states that either prohibit the admission of illegal aliens to their own public colleges or charge them higher nonresident rates. But admitting the illegals to Eastern will reduce admissions for Connecticut's own legal residents and for U.S. citizens generally.

Since the plight of the illegal alien students is largely the responsibility of their parents, they deserve some sympathy. But what compels state government to give them such preference? Only the political correctness that seems to be the highest principle of the current state administration.

xxx

THEY LOOK LIKE PLUTOCRATS. Hardly a day passes when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump doesn't say something insulting, mistaken, or stupid. So why last week did Connecticut's Mashantucket Pequot tribe bother denouncing him for his remark about the tribe in 1993?

Trump, a casino developer competing with the Pequots, told a congressional hearing, "They don't look like Indians to me."

The Pequots want to construe this as a slur on their ancestry. But Trump was actually challenging the casino privileges the Pequots had gained from the government. For while the federal law authorizing casinos on Indian reservations was presented as economic development for long-oppressed people consigned to Western wastelands, no modern Pequot had ever encountered such disadvantages.

No, the tribe was reconstituted to exploit the casino privilege meant for the oppressed. The people reconstituting the tribe were fully part of the broader community of southeastern Connecticut and had been living in raised ranches and working at Electric Boat like everybody else. Now, because of ethnic patronage and privilege, they're rich, and it's not necessary to support Trump to resent it.

Chris Powell,  a Connecticut-based essayist on cultural and political topics, is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.