During Monday’s visit to the Starkville Rotary Club, Mississippi State University President Mark Keenum drew a distinct line connecting the problems most affecting the state and higher education’s role in addressing them.
“I thought I would share some information about the importance of higher education in this state,” Keenum told his audience. “We all love Mississippi. Most of us were probably born and raised here and want to see our state prosper and grow. Unfortunately, Mississippi is ranked at the bottom of per capita income and next to last in the percentage of citizens with a four-year college degree.”
Keenum noted just 20 percent of Mississippians have attained college degrees. In Connecticut, which leads the nation in the percentage of its citizens with degrees, 40 percent have a college diploma.
“It just so happens that Connecticut is at the top of the list for per capita income,” he said. “There is a direct correlation between higher education and income.
“Now, can you imagine if 40 percent of our population had four-year degrees?” he added. “How much different would our state be? It would mean more better-paying jobs. It would mean we would have more money for things like K-12 education, roads and bridges and infrastructure. It would mean a much smaller number of people enrolled in Medicaid and a lot fewer people incarcerated. Our society would be a lot better.”
Keenum said those realities are what drives Mississippi State’s mission.
“I do talk to our leadership about what all that means,” he said. “It means having a strategic plan and a vision for where we want to see Mississippi in five years, 10 years, because the truth is we’re not going to be anywhere near where we need to be from a growth standpoint without our universities.”
Keenum pointed to MSU’s record enrollment this fall — 22,221 students (interestingly males outnumber females by a single student) at a time when the number of in-state high school graduates is declining.
“About two-thirds of our students are in-state,” Keenum said. “This year, there will be 30,000 high school graduates in Mississippi, but the projections are that there will be 27,000 students in the class of 2022. That’s a 10-percent decline, so it’s going to take quite an effort just to get the enrollment to up to where it is today by then.”
Keenum said the key to success revolves around providing education to meet the challenges of the evolving workplace, noting a study that said that 80 percent of the jobs people will work at in the year 2030 do not exist today.
“How do we, as a university, address that? By having the very best technology and the brightest instructors we can attract,” Keenum said.
He noted that MSU is already establishing itself in the kind of innovations the future requires, including computational analytics, auto and aeronautical engineering and agriculture.
“We are producing record numbers of graduates in fields that are highly-valued,” Keenum said. “A newly minted graduate from Mississippi State commands a higher income than (a graduate) from any other institution in our state. I think that shows we are rising to the challenge.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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