Georgia chancellor focused on increasing colleges' graduation rates

University System of Georgia Chancellor Hank Huckaby speaks during a interview with the Chattanooga News Free Press.  Chancellor Huckaby was visiting the campus of Dalton State College on Friday, August 28, 2015.
University System of Georgia Chancellor Hank Huckaby speaks during a interview with the Chattanooga News Free Press. Chancellor Huckaby was visiting the campus of Dalton State College on Friday, August 28, 2015.

DALTON, Ga. - Hank Huckaby isn't focused on increasing the number of students who attend Georgia universities and colleges.

Instead, the chancellor of the University System of Georgia is focused on graduating students already enrolled or who have been to college before.

"It's estimated that there's 1.2 million people in Georgia who had some level of college," Huckaby said. "And we want them to come back to school and finish their degree maybe and get training in a different career. And that would be important to us and the state in being able to provide the workforce needed."

Huckaby, chancellor since 2011, spoke with the Times Free Press last week on issues affecting Georgia students, ranging from free textbooks to sexual assault prevention.

As chancellor, Huckaby oversees 30 public colleges and universities with a $7.7 billion annual budget.

One of his main goals is raising the share of workers who have college degrees. Right now, 42 percent of the Georgia workforce has a degree of some kind. The goal is 60 percent.

"That means working in partnership with the technical college system, our colleagues in the private and independent colleges. Over the next 10 years we have to produce 250,000 more graduates," Huckaby said.

The system doesn't have a goal of raising the attendance rate, although it did see a slight increase last year. When he first took the job, Huckaby was told the student population would increase by a third.

"Well, that's over 400,000 students," he said. "That's not going to happen."

The demographics have been better studied since then, he said. Nationwide, the number of students attending higher education institutions has decreased because high school graduation rates have gone down.

Another big issue is minimizing student debt, which has grown to $1.2 trillion, according to recent estimates.

The topic made headlines in the 2016 presidential race when Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton proposed a $350 billion plan earlier this month both to help alleviate the amount of debt students face and to eliminate the need for them to go into debt in the first place.

"No student should have to borrow to pay tuition at a public college or university," Clinton said.

Among the states, Georgia's almost 1.5 million student borrowers have the highest average debt - $30,443, according to data released by the White House in March. That prompted President Obama to speak in Atlanta to unveil his 'Student Aid Bill of Rights,' also in March.

Huckaby said he's doing several things, such as petitioning for more need-based financial aid, keeping tuition rate increases small and exploring programs to teach not only students, but parents and counselors, about the cost of higher education.

Families have a lot of financial illiteracy, he said. Contractors can be hired to run these programs to increase financial literacy, and the system is looking into programs like that.

"Borrowing should be the last option," he said.

Huckaby also is working on lowering textbook prices by including more free and open-source books. The system looked at the 50 most popular courses students take and offered alternatives to traditional textbooks. Significant strides were made, he said.

"For this academic year," Huckaby said, "we'll be able to save Georgia students as much as $9 million."

That practice will be extended to the most popular 100 classes. While all these cost reductions are great for the students, the textbook publishers have had mixed feelings, Huckaby said.

"Probably some publishers are concerned about it, I'm sure not embracing it entirely," he said. "But some of the textbooks have gotten exorbitant in cost."

Arguably the most important issue facing college students is their own safety.

Huckaby appointed a campus safety security committee a year ago, which recommended a couple of ideas. For example, each of the system's 30 institutions had student safety policies, but they were all different. So now the university system is working to create a standard policy.

And when dealing with sexual assault and sexual harassment, the committee discovered more than 90 percent of those instances involved alcohol, drugs or both. That's much higher than the average of the general population, according to a study by the University of Illinois at Chicago. That study found that in 62 percent of sexual assault cases examined, some kind of drug was involved.

A separate task force is studying further and will give a report of its findings to Huckaby in May 2016.

"That will be a much tougher issue, but it's one that we have to take on," he said. "Because it's obvious that we can't make the kind of progress that we need and want to make on that aspect of sexual assault without dealing with the alcohol and drug issue."

Contact staff writer Evan Hoopfer at ehoopfer@timesfreepress.com or @EvanHoopfer on Twitter or 423-757-6731.

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