Baby New Year 2025 has entered into the record books with quite a bang the last two months, what with my first three Greater Springfield snowmageddons, a Super Bowl outcome that left Missouri disconsolate, and a host of international conflagrations over time, territory, and tariffs. A few thunderbolts have landed in the higher education space as well, including some — potential reduction of grants and calls to limit support programs for various students — that appear short-sighted, at least in comparison to America’s historic interest in access, affordability, innovation, ingenuity, and excellence.

Let me start by checking my biases: I am an historian and a university president, each of which have allowed me to publish and present research on a variety of topics and be exposed to other scholars, research funders, corporate and non-profit partners, and students. My expertise as an historian is in the post-World War II American South, but I have studied, written, and taught about American history widely, particularly in the years of the 20th and 21st centuries. And I’ve worked with students, faculty, and leaders of every description in the public and private space for the last 22 years. I believe in college because there is decades of data on higher education’s success rates in helping graduates earn more, live longer and healthier lives, and reap a host of other easily searchable benefits. In teaching so many different types of students, I have witnessed firsthand the tremendous personal and professional success of graduates.

American higher education grew significantly in the early 20th century as bustling industrial and agricultural economies needed bankers, salespeople, engineers and the like, and society pushed for greater public health, cleaner, safer, and more organized urban centers, and better mechanized approaches to farming. Private and public institutions met the need and then expanded again in the thirty-plus years after World War II brought the GI Bill, social and educational integration, the Pell Grant, Title IX, and eventually the Americans with Disabilities Act into existence. This period, characterized by access and affordability, brought veterans, minorities, women, first generation college students, poor kids, rural folk, and others into a world where they could attend a university, dare to dream of fulfilling their personal and professional calling, and enjoy the benefits and opportunities made possible by a college degree. This was American greatness personified. Most universities created formal and informal ways to help these new college students succeed. And in so doing, America got better, stronger, more capable and more representative.

With the exception of a four-year or more military enlistment, not much else prepares a person with the depth and breadth of skills that a college experience, inside and outside of the classroom, can. Foolproof? Not hardly. Plenty of folks, then and now, live deep and fulfilling lives without ever taking the first college class. Equally true, all of our lives are enriched and touched by those millions whose university experience gave them the expertise and research-informed tools to make our families, society, and nation better, more capable and caring, and stronger.

That same post-war period witnessed American ingenuity and intellectual heft emerging unmatched around the globe as the combination of talent, research, and a level playing field transitioned the American worker and economy from agriculture and manufacturing to one of information and knowledge. Springfield has echoed this trajectory, evolving into a healthcare, education, banking, non-profit, and advanced manufacturing city to be reckoned with. America’s status as the world’s global economic and intellectual superpower situated it as capable of not only triumphing in the Cold War, but providing soft power aid all over the world to feed, clothe, educate, treat the world, and encourage democracy and equitable social construction. Some came to these practices from a perspective of faith and values, others from the sense of American might, still others from the sense of economic self-interest. No matter, higher education provided a multifaceted and diverse workforce and the research practices to lend expertise at home and abroad. Is it an anomaly that America’s ascendance aligned with the growth of and access to higher education? Not hardly.

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Surely America made mistakes at home and abroad, but the Cold War ended emphatically with America transcendent as a fortress of strength that sought to do good in the world, and a beacon of democracy and equality. Americans, over time, became freer than before by committing to a shared creed within the operating system of individual liberty. Personally, all could increasingly be who they are or might choose to be; professionally, all could be what they willed themselves to achieve. That’s liberty 101. And much of those successes came directly or indirectly from higher ed: invention, innovation, applied research, workforce development, talent empowerment, and identifying meaningful ways for everyone to rise or fall within academic cultures that value growth, persistence, advocacy, development, and, of course, graduation and employment.

Waves of medical, technological, industrial, business, and social entrepreneurship followed and the list of accomplishments that came through higher ed over the last 75 years has revolutionized all of our lives: computing, eradicating polio, the seat belt, CAT scans, laser surgery, agricultural products and techniques, disease resistant grass, DNA fingerprinting, lithium batteries and even Google would be on a searchable list of modernity whose length is measured in yards, not inches. Was every research project a surefire pathway to better living? Not hardly. But the net result has been incontrovertible. Higher education’s mission of workforce development and research, partially fueled by federal and state governments, drove American values and excellence.

The connective tissue between using federal and state funding to assist universities and students, public and private, and American achievement is more than elastic; it’s unmistakable. Innovation and invention can come from all quarters, but higher education prepares graduates to think critically, solve current and future problems, understand context, cause, and effect, and think and do the types of creative research and development that changes lives. These attributes have allowed America and Americans to excel. Can we lead the world by making it harder to conduct life-enhancing research or by pushing away from student support practices that build a more talented, capable, and emotionally and creatively intelligent work force? Not hardly. And it would be best not to try.