Education essential for recovery

JIll Derby

Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.

What every smart economist and investor knows is that you don’t squander your capital for short-term gain — particularly for short-term Band-Aid remedies that don’t stem the bleeding, but do lessen recovery opportunity. I’m talking about the suggestions that have surfaced about closing our state college and some community colleges, and collapsing their distinct missions into larger conglomerates.

Let me be clear. This is a self-defeating and wrongheaded idea. It neither serves students all over Nevada nor the economic aspirations of a state in a serious economic hole.

At the turn of the millennium, when I was chairwoman of the Board of Regents, our Nevada System of Higher Education commissioned two important studies to guide Nevada’s higher education system into the 21st century. The Battelle study focused on economic development in Nevada and the Nevada System of Higher Education, particularly the crucial role our community colleges play in workforce training and development. The second study was done by the Rand Corporation; among its most prominent recommendations was the establishment of a state college sector to educate students more affordably at the bachelor’s degree level.

Given that Nevada needed more capacity to educate students to that level, the cost to the state and student is significantly less at a state college than at a university. Teachers and nurses were among those professions cited as areas of crucial workforce needs. The Rand study recommended not just one state college, which we managed to build, but six.

What we are hearing from leaders around the state, beginning with our governor, is the profound need for economic diversification and development to pull Nevada out of economic decline. Yet one of our most glaring failures as a state is our low number of associate and bachelor’s degree-educated adults and our slow progress in gaining ground in this arena.

It is no accident that Intel leapfrogged over Nevada from Oregon in its recent announcement to establish a computer chip plant in Arizona, delivering thousands of jobs. Nevada fails to compete too often because of our educational shortcomings — our lack of a highly skilled workforce and a low number of postsecondary-educated citizens.

Nevadans must rally to support each and every one of our eight Nevada System of Higher Education institutions. Each has a separate, crucial mission and geographical service area to educate that are essential to our economic future as a state. Each of our colleges and universities trimmed its budget last biennium to a point of bare bones, and will undoubtedly have to trim more this budget cycle.

But we must lobby our legislators to protect Nevada’s future by adequately funding higher education, and lobby the regents to keep all our institutions intact, so that when the recovery comes, we can build again from a solid base — not a truncated one.

Jill Derby, who lives in Gardnerville, is former chairwoman of the Nevada Board of Regents.