How can we best prepare students for college?

Kevin: Mitch Daniels is president emeritus of Purdue University and a former governor of Indiana. He was central to the founding of Purdue Polytechnic High Schools, a series of charter schools that helped prepare students for college and future technical careers. Mitch also served in both the Reagan and Bush administrations and has long been a proponent of innovation in education. Today, Mitch joins me to discuss how we can better prepare students for college and the jobs of the future. Mitch, welcome to the show.

Mitch: I appreciate being invited. I’m a fan of the show.

Kevin: Mitch, I’ve known you for a long time. Going back to your days, I think back in the Reagan and Bush administrations and then as governor of Indiana, you’ve always had this interest in education, and I must say that you were very instrumental in helping to start the Oaks Academy. I had Andrew Hart on the show, and he talked about the good work that Oaks is still doing. But where did this interest in education — particularly for some of our most challenged students — where did it come from? Because you do stand out as someone who has always been focused on the least of us in terms of educational offerings in this country.

Mitch: I’d like to be thought of that way. I’d like to think that’s accurate. I don’t know, Kevin, how an active or concerned citizen could fail to be very deeply interested in these subjects. We all know that the most essential thing we can do for upward mobility and the maintenance of the American dream for all is to make certain that young people, particularly those who come from, I’ll say, difficult cultural circumstances where education is not a part of life from the early earliest days, is not maybe as encouraged as it ought to be, who are sent — if we don’t take steps — sent to schools, which aren’t going to do much to improve that. I don’t know how you can be interested in the quality of life in general in America, the success of our economy, just the simple justice, fairness of our society unless you’re very interested in the subject you ask about. So, I guess that’s where it came from. And I’ve tried to chip in from literally every job I can think of: public, business, and more recently, actively in education at Purdue University.

Kevin: So I want to talk to you about a number of different things. Obviously, your role as governor as it relates to education, more recently as the president of Purdue University, one of the leading universities in the country, and some of the unique things you’ve done there. But I want to start with kind of this global question about the state of education generally. You’ve been involved in several ways, at many different levels. How would you assess the state of our K-12 education system generally, both the challenges and the opportunities?

Mitch: It’s unacceptable, and that contention is unassailable year after year after year in which the measurable results for our young people are far behind those of the nations that we hope to compete with and even nations that we don’t think of as competitive. And so, yes, there are many, many bright spots and many, many wonderful people trying hard and working hard. But to answer your question directly, I don’t know how anyone can look at the results that we’ve been experiencing and to say that they are either doing justice to the young people involved who are arriving at adult life far less well-prepared than they should be, or to our society as a whole that is going to depend on those young people to continue being prosperous and free.

Kevin: Now, of course, the whole issue of how we educate — indeed, how we treat our young — is wrapped around a political package, if you will. You and I both know this. I’ve always said there’s no Republican or Democratic way to teach a kid how to read, write, or count. That being said, the partisan politics have gotten extremely intense. You faced this as governor; how would you respond to folks who talk about things with that political lens attached to it?

Mitch: As in other contexts, you want to say to such folks, “Put the cudgel down, will you? Just for a little bit. In fact, if you can’t stop looking at life through a partisan lens in other respects where our young ones are involved, why don’t we cease fire for a little while? Let’s talk about what works. Surely we can all agree that preparing young people for successful autonomous lives is a common goal, and one would hope so.” And I did always try to appeal to people that whatever our other differences, however irresolvable other debates may be, let’s agree that when it comes to our young ones, and not so young ones, our college students, we ought to be searching for ways to get better results: things that are actually practical. It’s not that long ago, but it seems an age ago in terms of our political system. But when I left my previous job or now my second previous job, we had made a lot of progress in changing the education system and, at the time, results in Indiana. And a lot of that happened in a bipartisan way.

Kevin: What’s interesting, Mitch, though, is that once you decided to take on this job as president of Purdue, it really tied together in an interesting way. It knitted together your commitment to working-class minority students who had challenges and weren’t really served well in the K-12 system and, in particular, because of the STEM realities. And it’s fascinating when you think about it. So many minorities in the state graduate and don’t even qualify to apply to a place like Purdue. So many working-class families don’t come from schools that give them even the credits they need to apply at a place like Purdue. And you decided to take it upon yourself to do what I think other college leaders should consider doing. You know you wanted to create your own pipeline that would allow for some of these young students to graduate from a school that would make them more instantly eligible to apply to a place like Purdue. So talk about the Purdue Polytechnic High School and its sort of seeding, if you will, because it’s so unique. And frankly, I think it is so trendsetting that everyone in every state should consider something like it.

Mitch: Well, thanks for noticing. You expressed it accurately. I mean, let me just point out what a lot of people don’t know. I mean Purdue has been a place of such excellence for a long time, Nobel Prize winners and all the rest, that many people don’t even know we’re a public university, let alone a land grant university. And land grant universities, of course, were created to expand opportunity beyond the elites of society to higher education. And 150-plus years later, we’re still committed to that mission and that identity. And so, of course, it’s unacceptable to us when too few young people from modest backgrounds, and first-generation backgrounds, and low-income backgrounds, minorities, were qualifying and coming to our school. So I finally decided again, I guess with the benefit of the direct exposure I’d had at K-12 education, that if we waited on that system to produce enough African American students and other minorities, enough low-income students to meet our goals here, we’d wait forever.

So we did start high schools. We’re up to three now, and we have multiplied the very low number of students from the Indianapolis schools and now the South Bend, Indiana, inner city coming to Purdue. It’s still far too few. This is very hard to do, Kevin. I don’t have to tell you; you’re a longtime leader in this area, but we don’t — at least at present we start at ninth grade. So the students, and these are charter schools, so you take first comers or lottery winners, and many of these students are well behind when they come to our high schools. We have to really work hard. Now we’re achieving — they are achieving — superior test scores and other measures of achievement compared to the schools around them. But it’s hard still. I’ll tell you what we’ve learned is just as hard as trying to catch a student up in math, let’s say, or just basic study skills. It is just convincing them that they belong on a college campus.

Cultivating basic practices like showing up on time and showing up for class and turning in homework by a deadline sometimes takes extra effort. So we make a lot of extra effort. We now require each graduate of our high schools who qualifies to come for what we call summer start, which is weeks before the freshman year starts, where they get their first exposure. They learn a little bit about being a successful college student, earn their first few credits. I’m just going on at too much length but this is so important, and the challenges of doing it — as proud as we are of that — the challenges are very tough.

Kevin: I hope you’re enjoying this episode of What I Want to Know, one of the most downloaded K-12 education podcasts in the country. Make sure you don’t miss any of these important topics. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast or social media platform, and leave a rating and review so we can bring you more of the topics you want to hear about. Now, back to the conversation.

What I love about this program is, as you said, look, you’re not attacking the K-12 system of the state. What you’re doing is saying there are challenges, but you’re going to make sure you build a pipeline of students. What advice would you give to other college presidents, and I’m sure you’ve talked to some from land grant colleges and other states who may be thinking about this? But they’re concerned about their board’s reaction, their K-12 state superintendent’s reaction. What advice would you give them if they’re thinking about doing something similar?

Mitch: Go for it. And I know that many states — including some that always surprised me, Virginia, for instance — are hostile and are still captive, I guess, by those who so fiercely regard or defend the status quo. But I wouldn’t let any of that, at least in our case. You had to start somewhere, and the numbers were so low that we could make a noticeable improvement even out of the first, and second, and now three schools. So don’t let the difficulties dissuade you from trying. Purdue would be happy to share both those things that have worked well and the mistakes we’ve made with anybody who wants to try a school or schools of their own. But again, unless you’re prepared to just settle for a student population that is, in most places, not what any of us would wish it to be, you just may have to take some direct action. Maybe there’s a better way than we’ve chosen, but doing nothing I don’t think does justice to the mission of higher ed.

Kevin: One of the things I really like about the Purdue Polytechnic High Schools, as you’ve started now three in the state, and you alluded to this earlier, Mitch, it’s not just about sort of the academic preparation, but it’s also about making sure that there are the life skills so that you’re ready to learn. And there’s a direct link to career and particularly jobs of the future, jobs in high tech, really in the sweet spot of what Purdue does and offers for their graduates. So talk about this whole notion of school to career and not only where it is, but where you see it going in the future. Because in the past there was so much talk around: you need a college education, maybe you need a liberal arts education. But now I think there’s this reality that, for these kids today who are graduating, you want to set them up for success in their careers and allow them to be able to access jobs of the future.

Mitch: I don’t think it’s treasonous of somebody who’s spent years and years in higher ed to say that we have, I think, overemphasized the four-year degree and told too many young people that that’s an essential, that’s the passport to a good career. “You’ve got to go for it.” Because many, many of them tried and didn’t succeed and wound up no better off — in fact, in too many cases, worse off. They don’t have a credential that did them any good, and they do have debt, or at least they lost a couple three years they could have been earning money or learning skills. So, I think we see across society now and business for sure and, increasingly, government awakening to the fact that there are many other ways and pathways that might suit many of today’s young people better than a bachelor’s degree that we’ve held out there for a long time.

And so I applaud all that. We’ve got to somehow solve the community college problem. We’re pouring lots of money in there; it’s a good thing to do. Results there are not very good, but we’ve got to get better at it. I think in many cases — at least in Indiana I see this — we drifted away from what we’d call vocational education, the teaching of hard, tangible job skills, and tried to send a lot of students down, again, an academic path maybe toward an associate degree dreaming that they would finally wind up with a bachelor’s, and it didn’t happen in that high of a percentage of cases. So all those things I think are important. I want to mention one other aspect of this, Kevin, that Purdue’s jumped into, and that’s adult education.

Kevin: Yes.

Mitch: As your listeners will know, but most Americans don’t — there are far more Americans out there who started college and never finished than all the students who are in college today. In fact, it’s about twice as many. And so, we believed that just as we had to extend the land grant mission at the early end, the high school end, we just talked about how, in the 21st century, the land grant mission can’t stop at age 22, or 23, or 24. And so, we now operate Purdue Global. It has 35,000-plus students. They’re almost all working adults.

And when we get those students, and we do now — thousands apply a year to a degree they didn’t complete before — their prospects in life go up very measurably. And so, that’s something else we’ve got to get better at as a society. And I think there’s a lot of attention to that now, and I hope a lot of talented people will find ways to make that successful. I mean, these people aren’t going to be able to move back on a college campus. They shouldn’t even think about it. It has to be basically online or something using the tools we have these days. But it can be done successfully. And if you want to have an emotional experience, just come to a Purdue Global graduation and see single moms, grandparents, people who have hit dead ends in life for one reason or another, who now suddenly have a new lease as we say. And it’s a very fulfilling thing to do, every bit as much to me as watching brilliant young engineers and biologists leave our undergraduate commencements.

Kevin: So Mitch, I really appreciate you joining, and I do have one last question that I can’t ask everybody. But with your sort depth of experience in the K-12 and higher ed systems, I wanted to get your thoughts on something that I really want to know. And here it is. If you had to start up our K-12 system from scratch, and that means you had the power, you like being an executive — this is an executive position where you’re reshaping K-12 with an eye toward where you think we’re headed in the future — what would it look like? And again, that’s not an insult to people who are already in the system, but your focus on innovation, creativity, and forward-looking approaches to engaging young people has been the centerpiece of your career. And for many who, like you, feel that we can do things differently. One of the first things that you hear people say is, “If I could wave a magic wand, I would do this.” What would that look like in K-12?

Mitch: I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but it’s an interesting question. I’ll make a partial stab at it. The early years would be really concentrated on fundamentals. It simply should be an absolute must that young people after the second or third grade are somewhere in there, are literate, and numerate, and have the basic skills to learn all the complex material that the world is going to throw at them. And if a school doesn’t do anything else, it should do that. I used to say sometimes in frustration, seeing how many young people were moving into fourth, and fifth, and sixth grade couldn’t even read. Sometimes high school students. I used to say, “By the time a young person gets through third grade, Indiana spent, I don’t know, $50,000 or more on them. I guarantee you I could find a reading tutor who could teach them that for less.”

And so, it’s those basics, I would say. I would have a system of great freedom where the dollars follow students, wherever the students’ parents believe is best for them, that would encourage innovation and creativity in how they’re taught. I would have very, as we do in many places, clear standards that schools, whatever their nature, need to meet — that is to say, their students need to meet. And as we can with charter schools, close those that aren’t doing a good job, and then enable and encourage the young people to go to some schools doing a better job. So, maximum choice would certainly be a part of it.

And then I would, again, as I think enlightened states are doing in teacher preparation selection, put much less emphasis on classroom methodology, much more emphasis on practical time in the classroom before becoming a full-time teacher, and much more requirement for content knowledge, especially in the sciences and in math. So I know there are certainly more complete answers and probably better answers, but there’s a stab at some of the things that on my whiteboard I would draw.

Kevin: All worthwhile, and if they only would listen to us. Right, Mitch? Thank you so much. I appreciate having you on What I Want to Know.

Thanks for listening to What I Want to Know. Be sure to follow and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app so you can explore other episodes and dive into our discussions on the future of education, and write a review of the show. I also encourage you to join the conversation and let me know what you want to know using #WIWTK on social media. That’s #WIWTK. For more information on Stride and online education, visit stridelearning.com. I’m your host, Kevin P. Chavous; thank you for joining What I Want to Know.