Education in Nevada is changing. Not only have there been massive changes in funding due to shifting political sands, but the traditional path of pursuing a bachelor’s degree after high school is rapidly losing popularity. Instead, students are pursuing quick degrees and certificates that allow them to enter the workforce sooner with pay scales that historically required four-year degrees. AI is also changing the education space and challenging educators to grapple with the future of education, today.
Recently, a group of educators met at a roundtable Sponsored by Nevada State Bank to discuss the many changes and challenges in Nevada’s education. Connie Brennan, publisher and CEO of Nevada Business Magazine, served as moderator for the event. These monthly roundtables bring together different industries to discuss issues and solutions.
What Challenges Does Nevada Face With Funding?
Amy Carvalho: The biggest challenge facing education in Nevada is funding. But what comes with that is a renewal in what education, and especially public education, means to our communities and the future in Nevada. Without a driving education system, we lack so many things, and we struggle with that in Nevada. Making sure that we have the funding mechanisms to be able to provide a high-quality education for our students is the biggest challenge that we will be working on, especially with what is happening nationally as it impacts what happens in our state.
Dr. Renee Coffman: The biggest challenge that we face is with the changes at the federal level to the student loan program. All of our programs, with the exception of our nursing program, are at the graduate level or above, and the Grad Plus program and the Parent Plus program were eliminated. There is also a cap on lifetime loan limits for higher ed students. It costs us at least $50,000 to educate a pharmacy student per year. That number is a lot higher for dental and MD students, and that does not include the loans students take out for their living expenses while they are in school. There is a $8.1 billion gap in higher ed funding for students to pay for their education that was backed by the federal government. It is going to be a challenge across the United States and particularly in health professions education for students to be able to pay for their education.
Chris Heavey: The Big Beautiful Bill has created a lot of uncertainty and we are going to see this fall how it impacts students. Our hope is that since we are a fairly moderate cost institution of higher ed, that it will be manageable, but there will be tremendous impacts at many different levels, including potentially the issue of who is eligible for in-state tuition and who is not.
Coffman: There is merit in what was trying to be accomplished with the changes to the student loan program. Unfortunately, it felt like they took a sledgehammer to kill a fly. There has been a lot of abuse of the system, certainly by some of the more predatory types of higher education institutions and so an adjustment was necessary. But when you look at an institution like ours that has a student loan to fail rate that has never been above 1 percent, we are clearly adding value. We have a valuable degree that we are offering to students. They can get out and they can pay back their student loans.
Heavey: The dialog about the affordability of higher education has always been a challenge. There has been a lot of talk about the student loan crisis and that led to some of the changes. But a lot of those loans are taken by people getting high value degrees. The narrative is misleading and leads people to not think undergraduate degrees are affordable when in fact, all of our institutions are highly affordable institutions for in-state students.
Tami Hance-Lehr: From the elementary, middle, and high school level, I invite the business community to do more research about the impacts of restricted funding. People sometimes think these are just abstract changes and cuts, but they will affect our students in the way in which they show up in school and how they are able to stay after school, or not stay after school, and enjoy after school activities. We all want to make school a safe place for our kids, but a lot of the cuts that were made were things that made schools a safe place for our kids. What concerns me is that our kids will get frustrated and stop coming to school just when we were starting to make huge strides in chronic absenteeism. They will not graduate and then we will have a major workforce development problem.
Dr. J. Kyle Dalpe: We were starting to gain momentum, and it took grants to do that, whether state or federal. Now some of that has been disrupted and it could be a hinderance to the access point of community colleges. Forty-five percent of undergraduates in our state, and generally nationwide, started at community college. Nevada may not be at the top of the educational hierarchy in higher ed, but we embrace that because if we are not here, there are a lot of students that would not go anywhere and they need the training we offer to get into jobs.
Dr. Carrie Buck: Funding is always an issue, but we oftentimes use that as an excuse or a crutch for the lack of expectations we have for the kids that need it the most. A prime example is having two Title 1 schools that get the same amount of funding right next to each other and have the most disadvantaged students. But one is national Title I school, and one is a one-star school. We can’t make excuses about funding anymore. We need to make sure that we are raising expectations for all students across the board.
Is Enrollment a Challenge in Higher Education?
Dalpe: We have noticed a changing nature in our students, and particularly our adult students. We have 18-year-olds who really want to be in the classroom and others who want to learn on an iPad. We also have universal learners who want to come in and find a solution that fits their needs immediately and if we can’t do that, then they are going to go somewhere else. As a public community college, we are trying to find ways to reach those students and to offer them flexible learning options and a non-traditional classroom. Currently, we are at the highest enrollment we have had in more than a dozen years. A lot of high school students are also in our dual enrollment programs, and that is also changing the way we do things.
Dr. Jay Berckley: I am keenly aware of the shifting nature of enrollment at a school like ours as an independent institution. In terms of enrollment, we are at our largest ever. We are at about 1,010 students and are building infrastructure and modifying our campus to aim towards 1,500 students.
Heavey: One of the trends that has accelerated over the last few years in enrollment is the increasing divide between people of different political orientations that are likely to go into higher education. One of the things we are seeing is that right-leaning males are less likely to pursue bachelor’s degrees. We also have a big divide between the number of women obtaining bachelor’s degrees and the number of men obtaining bachelor’s degrees. It is even more pronounced on the right side of the political spectrum. There are tremendously more women pursuing bachelor’s degrees than men.
Coffman: Health profession’s education has skewed that way for many years. In pharmacy, typically the ratios are 60/40, 70/30 with more women than men. Nursing is trending slightly the other way with more males going into that profession.
Heavey: It is becoming a national issue, too and is creating unique social situations. College educated women are less inclined to date non college educated men. It is becoming a social issue because many young men cannot find partners because they do not have the educational credentials to match the women they want to date. This is one of the larger social tensions that we will need to manage going forward as a country.
Coffman: There may be even an earlier piece to this because the data shows that in K-12, there are fewer boys completing high school degrees than women. And if you do not have a high school degree, you are not going to get into UNLV. If you do not finish your first degree at UNLV, you are not going to get into a school like ours. There is a trickle-down effect.
Melissa Mackedon: I have a son who is going off to college and the targeted ads and messaging for 18 and 19-year-old boys on social media is that they do not need to be going to university because there is nothing there but woke people and ideology. That is going to have long-term impacts on our state and country, regardless of what side you are on politically.
Heavey: There is a political narrative of brainwashing in the higher education space, but the number one degree that people seek at UNLV is nursing. They are enrolling so that they can get jobs. We offer a full range of undergraduate degree programs, but there are not that many students coming in to study English or history these days. Students want to study engineering, computer science, nursing, and business. These are degrees that directly impact the workforce.
Berckley: A lot of our students are starting to look at programs that they can complete earlier. They are not as inclined to double major or get a cognate in a secondary issue.
Coffman: Students today are making not only cost-based decisions, but they are making time-based money decisions. The value of being able to get into the workforce sooner is a calculus that they are consciously making. We are going to have to adjust to thinking about what pathways allow students to do that. We are seeing a lot of direct development from high school and a lot of dual credits. That is going to be a trend that continues.
Heavey: The data has never been stronger in terms of the value of higher education. The lifelong expectations of returns are a million dollars plus and are higher for every degree above a bachelor’s degree. There seem to be two main narratives out there. One is the student loan debt crisis. The question is, is higher education affordable? It makes people feel like they can’t afford it, even though it is affordable if you are in an in-state public institution, especially for an undergraduate degree. The second narrative is of value, and the question is, is it worth it? And the data shows it is worth it in terms of attainment.
What Role Does Technology Play in the Classroom?
Heavey: Cellphones are a big challenge in the education space and the biggest challenge that humanity is facing right now is surviving the era of social media. It is lowering people’s attention spans by getting them to focus on instant gratification. There is a notion that you can turn the channel every 10 seconds if something is not interesting to you. It is making it harder for people to have sustained attention for long term. It is also immersing people in their own information environments, which is a challenge that we see nationally and internationally. In the education space we are trying to figure out how to operate in a world in which people are looking for information that confirms their beliefs while we teach critical thinking.
Mackedon: Another thing that is going to have a massive impact on education is AI. It already is having a massive impact, but as institutions, we are trying to keep up with it and can’t.
Heavey: It is safe to say that no one can get their arms fully around it or catch up with it. What we are doing at UNLV is trying to create communities of practice to empower different people to explore how to incorporate AI into their teaching, into their administrative work, and even into their research because it is an incredibly powerful tool in all of those spaces.
Dr. Ercan Aydogdu: AI is a great tool if we can teach our teachers how to implement it and use it in their classes. It can make their jobs easier so they can spend more time teaching.
Heavey: What we need to do is infect people with the AI bug to get them excited about it so they can learn about it themselves and then pass that excitement and their knowledge in a mentor-based way to others. Because no one is prepared to lead in this world. No one knows the answers. What is best is to graduate students who have been immersed in at least different kinds of instantiations of how AI can impact what they can do.
Dr. Amber Donnelli: Students are using AI in high school for math. And often, instead of just using it to cheat and obtain the answer to a math problem, students are using AI to learn how to break the math problem down because maybe they are stuck and need the help. It will be interesting to see what that technology does to impact math and writing scores.
Heavey: The commoditization of knowledge that what we have operated in the education space is by teaching people things, and now those things are essentially at your fingertips. I certainly have ChatGPT on my phone and ask it questions all the time and get impressive answers from that. Education has not historically been nimble. And the question is, how do we adapt to this rapidly changing environment to still be relevant to that value as educational institutions?
How Is Education Changing?
Donnelli: A bachelor’s degree or higher used to be required to be in a higher income bracket. That is no longer the case because welders and diesel mechanics are making an incredible living. These kids come out of high school, enter into one of our programs, and then start making $80,000 a year after one year of training. They can’t even go to the bar yet and were just recently able to vote, and yet these are the incomes they are earning, and that does not include overtime. You can go through our electrical program and then 13 months later, you have a bachelor’s degree. You are able to earn these degrees at a much faster pace and have a paid apprenticeship where employers are paying you while you are getting your education.
Gil Lopez: In recent years the conversations with the K-12 system changed from making students college ready, to making them college and career ready. The conversation began with expanding the notion that children have to go to college to now include CTE (career and technical education) programs and military service. That conversation has evolved and at the state level the curriculum is much more focused on CTE programs.
Donnelli: Kids are now able to graduate and have no debt. They are able to make money while they are in school, and then step into jobs with great health benefits and a 401K. Those things used to require a university education and now after a year or two, kids are able to have these opportunities. Nursing is a great example because it is cyclic. Right now, it is in a cycle where there are not enough nurses and so there is immense value to students being able to go to a two-year program at a low cost and then work right away. Getting a bachelor’s degree has to become a personal benefit for students, because right now the value is equivalent. The same thing applies for master’s and doctoral degrees. It is one of the reasons why our nursing programs are all hurting for faculty, because you can typically make a lot more money without getting a master’s degree and just working in practice.
Dalpe: For industries moving into Nevada, outside of hospitality and gaming, they require one master’s degree, two bachelor’s degrees, and seven technicians. As a community college, the seven technicians are the ones that we train. They require more than high school, but less than a bachelor’s degree. That is where half of our jobs are in the state according to national data. That has changed some because 40 or 50 years ago, many of these positions did not require any education. Now, many jobs require some form of CTE training.
Donnelli: A couple of students from CSN’s high school dual enrollment program enrolled into our industrial maintenance program and shared their story about how when they came to our institution their parents did not own a car. In fact, they did not even have drivers’ licenses. The students experienced challenges with their apprenticeships initially because in order to receive direct deposits, they had to have bank accounts which they did not have because they did not have driver’s licenses. By the time they finished the program, they had jobs, they had full benefits, and they were suddenly working jobs that earned them $70,000 to $90,000 a year. And when you consider that a year before they did not have driver’s licenses or vehicles, it is impressive. And that is the value of education. And these are the stories that we need to share because there is value at that level.
