Extra Curricular

Hello, and welcome to St. Catherine University's Extra Curricular. In Extra Curricular, we bring you heart to hearts and tete-a-tetes with people of exceptional insight in education from educators and administrators to students and policymakers, this series will tap into their stories to better understand the current state of teaching and learning in the United States. I am David Stricker, and I am the associate professor of education and director of teacher licensure and I'm sitting with St. Catherine University’s President ReBecca Roloff in her office on the first floor of Derham Hall. We have a great show for you today. In addition to getting to know President Roloff, or Becky as she likes to be called, you'll hear thoughts on the pressing topics that shape academia. Our first question Becky, what we'd like to investigate is describe a teacher who has made a lasting impression on you. Well first of all thank you David, these were great questions that you had given to me and it was really fun to think about them. You said one teacher and I thought well maybe one teacher for each stage of my life right so I think my parents would be my best and early teachers most consistently. But the names that popped up for me were in high school, Dickinson North Dakota, were two sisters, they were school sisters of Notre Dame, Sister Charlene and Sister Irene, and they were the debate coaches and they just believed that if we wanted to be competitive, we had to drive all the way to the big schools of Fargo and Grand Forks and into Minnesota to be able to get really high-quality competition and we turned out to just do a fabulous job and they were really great English teacher and Sister Irene was my Latin teacher, too. At St. Kate's, because I'm a graduate of St. Kate's, 1976, two faces just popped for me. One was Dr. Alan Grebner, who was a history teacher here. I had him first semester of freshman year and I don't remember the name of the course. It could have been Women in Economics, but the books we read introduced these ideas that I never thought of like if you don't control your money you really don't control your life and the power of women especially having their economic freedom. And Lucille Loughlin I got to know later once I declared a business major when I was a junior and she was the chair of the business department which was a tiny, tiny, I think there were 13 of us that graduated from the business department and she was someone who just had fought for a business major at St. Kate's, very professional woman. Her daughter was an artist who later either taught here or was here, I don't remember the whole story, but those teachers were the ones that I really remember. Then, when I went to Harvard Business School, I had a lot of great professors there, but the one I really remember was Regi Herzlinger, and she taught Control in Accounting, which there were so many accountants and CPAs in that class and I just made up my mind I was gonna get an A even though I wasn't an accountant, but the way she taught was how you applied accounting principles to problems that you read and her expertise was in healthcare, but also academia, so those were just the faces that popped for me and I was really glad to have the time to think about that. Well thank you. Did you have a common thread that you think wove through each one of those instructors? I believe the integrity of an instructor comes through. I would say I think they were just decent human beings and you wanted to be respected like they were. I had a lot of great teachers in my life, but I think in addition to their functional expertise if you will, I think it was their confidence and care and drive to just pull it out of you and set the standard high. From your vantage point, our next piece is, what appears to be an issue in education today? And by issue, I mean what’s a big, fundamental problem that is really averse to an answer that kind of struggles with imperfect kind of solutions. What from your perspective, what is an issue in education today? I think there, for me, there's two, well there's many, but there's two big ones that seem to affect my day-to-day life the most and they're related but they're different. So, just a bit of context, the first one is, the proportion of how we give and the source of financial aid to students. So, I put myself through St. Kate's. I completely funded it, I would have qualified for all maximum financial aid from need, now I’m not talking merit, I'm talking need now. When I'm talking to groups, I try to have a small vessel let's say the size of a wine glass and I say in 1972 to 1976, when I came to St. Kate's and I would have qualified for maximum financial aid based on need, 80% of that state and federal aid would have been grants and about 20% would have been loans. So someone like me who qualified for maximum assistance could leave St. Kate's with no debt. You know I had work study, I lifeguarded on Saturdays, I cleaned houses in Highland Park, I managed the lifeguard pools in the summer, but your package, your financial aid package, the sources the college had available to them for grants. So today, let's imagine, a gallon of wine, ok, so it's maximum, it's much larger than that glass, it's a huge amount. But the proportion in that jug of wine is 80% loans, and 20% grants. So someone from the same financial background 40 years later ends up with debt. That is a huge, structural problem that St. Kate's can't solve, that it's a problem that we as citizens and as taxpayers have chosen to not keep that proportion of grants. We've outsourced some of those loans to private companies who charge higher interest rates than we all pay for a car loan or a house loan. That is really a big issue and that's one of the reasons people like me 40 years ago could make it through with no debt and today I think the chatter is about the cost, the loan thing goes back to education costs too much and in fact, it's that mix is a significant driver of loans for, proportionally for students. So that's a bucket of, a great big bucket, that I think is a significant issue. The other one is one that's not just particular to Minnesota, but it's very true in our nation which is the gap of achievement between children of color and between white children and in my previous role I fought hard at the legislature for scholarships for Pre-K students of greatest need because if you don't catch those kids early and give that foundational base, you pull that gap all the way through their grade school, all the way through their high school and they're never gonna end up at St. Kate's or institutions like St. Kate's because they didn't have a solid foundation, so if you don't, if that core gap isn't fixed from prenatal care, from early childcare, you've set a foundation that we as a society and as an educational institution and as a community will deal with forever. It's linked to the money, but the money issue I think is really that proportion of it, it's how we underinvest in poor children and unfortunately, most poor children are children of color in our community, and so that's how you end up in Minnesota where we live which has the largest achievement gap in high school graduation rates between children of color and between white children. Well that just goes forward into the college system and the University system doesn't it. Those are major issues. Those are major issues, societal issues that has to do with housing, it has to do with employment, it has to do with zip code, it has to do with how we fund public education, etc. Those are, there's more we could probably all terrify ourselves with, but those are two that I think are two of the issues at the core. Yeah, they certainly defy easy answer. They defy easy answer, because they're so complex. You'd have to fix so many things and the thing on that is that we've gotta figure it out. I agree, I agree. Now, what we're gonna do is move on to, and what I'm interested to tap into your expertise with is what appears to be a trend in education as opposed to these large issues. In particular, what we found is trends tend to come and go, these movements often times, these initiatives that capture attention and then also have a major flow and ebb to them. They're actually operational kind of definitions to big-issue types of problems, workable, themes that inspire a collective effort if you will. What do you see as a trend in education? Well this was an interesting one too. What I wrote down was fear of the general liberal arts education and seeing that as a luxury versus a force to versus being supportive of specialization and I think it's linked to the problem I talked about as an issue which is whether we like it or not, parents, especially I think post-recession are looking at education as an investment. So if it's an investment, what am I going to get back for it right away? So I think there's this drive toward getting a specific skill, which I completely understand. The thing that I think is a very troubling trend is people who are talking down broad education. They're talking down an educated citizenship. They're talking down the fact that college isn't your way out to a better life. I fundamentally disagree with that. I think that when you work with new Americans when our own family of my parents having 8th grade graduation is education is the road out of poverty, it is the great equalizer in our country, it is what has made the United States a strong, strong country was an education. I, so, that to me is a trend that I think has large political overtones, I think it's an impact coming off the recession when middle class lives got blown up in addition to everything else, and it's somehow acceptable or it sounds, I don't even know the right word, to dismiss or show as a luxury a broad-base of education. So maybe I've made a statement of hope more, that I hope that's a trend, but I think there's a lot of rhet