For anyone interested in the state and direction of higher education, Boston's Fairmount Copley Plaza was the place to be on Mar. 20.
On that date, the hotel hosted an important public hearing held by the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which was formed in September of 2005 to gather public opinion on higher education.
By August, the Commission is set to report its recommendations to Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
Five members of the Commission were in attendance at the hearing. So was Tufts University President Lawrence Bacow, who - along with his counterparts from many top New England schools - shared his thoughts on higher education.
"Clearly, the United States is blessed with an education system with extraordinary diversity," Bacow said at the hearing, one of a series of discussions the Commission is holding across the nation.
Bacow followed MIT's President Susan Hockfield and Boston University's President Robert Brown. After praising America's education system, Bacow discussed the competitive nature of the country's colleges and universities.
"Our institutions compete for students, we compete for staff, we compete for faculty, we compete for resources," Bacow said. "I would argue that this competition in higher education is every bit as intense as the competition that one would find in any sector of the economy, and competition, as we all know, produces innovation."
Arguing that this competition and innovation is "the envy of the rest of the world," Bacow asked the commission "not to do anything that would in any way stifle this innovation."
Bacow then addressed the increasing cost of college tuition, citing Tufts' price tag, which this year tops $42,000.
He praised the financial aid efforts made by the university but also discussed the school's need for an additional $200 million to achieve "need-blind" admissions. Bacow stressed the necessity of broader access to higher education.
"Like many others who have gone to college in the United States, both of my parents were immigrants; in fact they were refugees," Bacow said. "There are very, very few countries in the world that provide the kind of opportunity I and many others have enjoyed, where people can literally go in one generation from being fresh off the boat with the shirts on their backs, to achieve at the highest levels of our society."
Bacow named higher education as the main catalyst to upward mobility across generations.
To keep up with the rising costs of energy and healthcare, Tufts' budget has grown enormously overall, Bacow said. But "the fastest growing component of our budget is our financial aid budget," he said.
One area of financial aid that Bacow spoke against was merit-based scholarships.
"These students are going to go to college, usually very good colleges, regardless of whether merit aid is provided," he said. "It's far from clear to me how society as a whole is better off if we expend scarce financial aid resources merely to redistribute the brightest kids among our institutions."
Bacow urged the commission to "refocus attention on our students whose need is greatest." He went on to suggest that Congress "do some experiments to take a look at how differential financial aid policies might influence access."
He concluded by acknowledging the need for of an emphasis on math and science-as both President George W. Bush and the Congressional Democratic leadership have suggested. But he also stressed a greater need to educate students on public policy issues.
"These are important policy questions," Bacow said, referring to Social Security reform, universal healthcare and immigration, "which candidly, are not going to be influenced by how well we teach science and math ... but rather by how we develop broadly critical reasoning skills, how we develop communication skills, how well we teach our students to read and write."
In his closing words, Bacow stressed the importance of higher education in a functioning democracy and made some final recommendations to the Commission.
"This nation, at this point in time, is investing a tremendous amount in order to make democracy work abroad, indeed throughout the world," Bacow said. "I think it's equally important that as you think about higher education ... you also focus on the role we have to contribute to making democracy work at home."
The Mar. 20 event was the second of two public hearings in the Commission's series. The first took place in Seattle.
The commission has also held three meetings - as opposed to public hearings - in Washington D.C., Nashville and San Diego. One more is set for next week in Indianapolis.
