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Montana University system aims to help economy
Improving education is one of the most important things a state can do to boost its economy, Commissioner of Higher Education Sheila Stearns told a gathering in Billings on Tuesday.
About 85 legislators, businessmen, university professors and administrators and others heard Stearns and Dave Gibson, the governor’s top business officer, speak at the Montana State University-Billings downtown campus.
By MARY PICKETT
Of The Gazette Staff
When Stearns was hired last year, the Montana Board of Regents asked her to come up with a way for the university system, state and local governments, business and kindergarten to high-school education to work together to beef up the state’s economy.
The result is Shared Leadership for a Stronger Montana Economy, a program that has come up with six ways the university system can help the economy.
The top three are:
# Workforce training and education.
# Improving students’ access to post-secondary education.
# Expanding distance learning.
The other three ways are:
# Developing partnerships between business and the university system.
# Creating a way for the university system to collaborate with state and local government on solving problems.
# Promoting Montana travel to university alumni.
Addressing the first priority, Gibson said that more thought needs to go into two-year college programs because they train workers, including those in medical and computer fields, for local economies.
Access to higher education also is critical. If enough students can’t go on to some form of higher education, wages in the state won’t increase, Gibson said.
Providing more scholarship money, particularly for students from low- and medium-income families, is important.
Campuses across the state need to follow MSU-B’s lead in creating a wide array of distance learning classes, he said.
Montana lags behind some other states in key educational areas that are important for economic growth, Stearns said.
For example:
# Only 53 percent of Native American students graduate from high school in the state.
# Just 42 percent of all Montana high-school graduates enroll in higher education.
# Only 67 percent of the state’s college freshmen return for their sophomore year.
# Only 42 percent of first-time freshmen complete a bachelor’s degree in six years or less.
Economic development also depends heavily on the quality of K-12 education, said George White, dean of MSU-B’s College of Education and Human Services.
Research has shown that inferior teachers can take a child out of the loop to go on to college early in his or her education. Yet Montana pays its teachers some of the lowest salaries in the country. Poor salaries encourage some of the best teacher graduates to leave the state for better-paying jobs and experienced teachers to retire early, White said.
This was the fourth community discussion that Stearns and Gibson have had on the Shared Leadership program. They appeared earlier in Miles City, Butte and Dillon and traveled to Lewistown on Tuesday afternoon for another program.
Other programs will be in Kalispell, Missoula, Great Falls, Havre, Shelby, Bozeman Sidney, Poplar and Glasgow in August and September.
Mary Pickett can be reached at 657-1262 or at [email protected].
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