Shannon Gilkey | Commissioner on postsecondary education
1. As the new higher-ed chief, what is your vision for at Rhode Island College and Community College of Rhode Island? Every Rhode Islander … deserves a fair shot at the economy by taking care of themselves and their family members. And that runs through educational attainment. If you look at the jobs that were created after the 2008 recession … 99% of the jobs required some form of postsecondary training. The more education you attain, typically the more lifetime earnings you have.
2. Do you worry young people are getting mixed messages about the value of higher education? We’ve seen a public shortage in living up to the sustainable investments in public education. For that reason, the ownership of financing higher education has shifted away from the public investment to the private investment, meaning tuition has gone up. To pay for that tuition, students are relying on federal aid, state aid and the private loan sector, which is why we’ve seen this dramatic increase in people taking on debt. … It’s our job as educators to improve how we deliver higher education but also advocate for more resources to meet those ends.
3. How can RIC and CCRI better prepare people without credentials for the jobs that are needed today? You need technical skills, but you also need academic knowledge to have workforce success. The combination of a workforce training center, like a Westerly Education Center, may get you that first job with those technical skills, that trade, but if you want to keep that job and continue to grow up that career ladder, then you need that academic knowledge. The future of work, the wave of automation, the wave of artificial intelligence, the impact that that’s going to have on our economy is going to call upon higher education to really develop more critical thinkers and communicators and people with social-emotional intelligence.
4. What do you need from state leaders to make this work? I’m really excited to see legislators committed to funding Rhode Island Promise. Rhode Island should be proud of that. We also need up-skilling and re-skilling strategies to help shore up the dislocated workers that were lost because of the pandemic.
5. What is your focus for the first year? We have a goal in Rhode Island that 70% of our population should have a postgraduate credential by 2025. In order to meet an ambitious goal like that, we need to get into the communities and … harness that power of local ownership to get the community to rally around education attainment.
Mary MacDonald is a PBN staff writer. Contact her at Macdonald@PBN.com.