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the University of Washington Tacoma has helped transform Tacoma and the South Sound.

Now, four years into her tenure as the chancellor of University of Washington, Tacoma doctor Sheila Edwards Lange sits down with northwest now to talk about that transformation and what the future might hold.

In an era of declining state and federal support.

Doctor Sheila Edwards Lange is next on northwest now.

You.

Doctor Sheila Edwards Lange was raised in rural Mississippi, but wound up spending her academic and professional life thousands of miles west.

First as an ecology undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine, and then here in western Washington at UW Seattle for a master's and doctorate in education and policy studies.

Doctor Lange came to you from her role as president of Seattle Central College.

She's the University of Washington Alumni of Distinction Award winner, among others, and sits on several educational, service and civic boards, including the Seattle branch of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Doctor Lange, thanks so much for coming to northwest now.

Great to have a conversation with the Chancellor of the, you know, I've said for years, and this is not a novel thought everybody in Tacoma thinks this, you know, has been such a a major part of the transformation of downtown Tacoma and really the reinvigoration, I think, of the South sound, being this hub of academic, power and social power here in the South sound.

But let's start a little before that with your background.

You came up in rural Mississippi, and here you are.

Talk a little bit about how you came up, your background and how that influenced you and prepared you for this job.

Okay.

So yes, I was born in a little small town, Battuta, Mississippi.

I lived there till I was ten and my parents divorced, and I moved to California with my mom.

So I grew up in a single parent household and South Central LA, went to college because I was always in those gifted programs and bus to to schools.

And was fortunate to have teachers who saw something in me that I didn't actually see in myself and encouraged me to go to college.

You talk about a particular teacher in your life that really did have an influence on you.

Would you talk about her a little bit?

I think every child needs a special encourager in their lives.

Talk a little bit about that and how that worked out for you.

Absolutely.

So, Mrs.

Calhoun, and my only regret is that I never got to thank her.

I didn't realize how extraordinary it was for a teacher to take that level of interest in a student.

So, Mrs.

Calhoun, I was in her Spanish class my junior year.

I was in all these clubs and organizations and student leader, and she was like, you need to go to college.

And, I, you know, I was thinking about, well, what would that mean?

My family couldn't really afford it.

We were, like, living in section eight housing, on, you know, food stamps and the whole deal.

So, she's like, I'm going to help you get to college.

And so she did.

She she paid for applications for me.

She helped me navigate the process.

My mom and dad didn't even finish high school, so I didn't really have anyone to talk to about those kinds of things.

So she was just such a fierce champion.

And she's just this little old white lady who, wanted something different for me.

That's great, great story.

I in some of the other things you've written about mentors, you're a real proponent of mentorship and some of the ones that you really remember, not only were they supporters, but they were disciplinarians.

They, they they kind of held you to account.

Yeah.

Didn't get you a lot of way with a lot of foolishness.

So talk a little bit about, that piece of it and we hear all the time now that, well, these kids today don't have grit and, they don't have discipline.

Is that old people talking?

What are your observations?

So I always feel like I'm the old people talking, when I say those things.

You know, I think having people in your lives, who are champions for you, who are, going to push you in ways I was very uncomfortable a lot of times.

I mean, I was was very concerned about leaving home.

I was the oldest child with my mom.

What it would mean I was the caregiver for the kids.

I felt like I was, abandoning the family, but, to have someone push and push like that meant I owed them a responsibility.

I owed them to do well because they invested time and energy.

I owed Mrs.

Calhoun to go to college and do well.

So what about these darn kids today?

Do you see that in them?

I see it in some students.

And I see it in every student who has someone who takes an interest in them.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Transforming Tacoma.

I mentioned that a little bit in the introduction of you.

We're in a bit of a time of contraction right now.

And with that said, with federal funding and state funding, we'll get into some of that in a moment.

Some of the specifics.

But with that, that that tide starting to go out a little bit, talk about the importance of, of partnerships.

You've got one with the law school, but there are others out there.

And that was one of the great things of one of the great promises of it is to bring this kind of critical mass of partnerships and surrounding industries and businesses to come together and to make something greater than the whole.

Absolutely.

That is actually the Tacoma way.

And I think that having the University of Washington be part of just the Ecos system and Tacoma, this community, more than any other community, and that I've lived and really believes and collective impact and coming together in partnerships.

So we're an urban serving university, and that means that we are in service to the community where we're located.

And that was how U-dub Tacoma was founded.

It was founded.

And to be in service, to be an economic driver, to provide access to education for students who might not otherwise have it in the South Sound, and to be a partner, to community based organizations, to government and others to solve problems in the South.

Sound.

Yeah.

And really to be that pathway into the middle class.

Absolutely.

We serve we have 5000 students at U-dub Tacoma now, and we're celebrating our 35th anniversary of our founding.

And, still more than half of our students are our first in their family to go to college and half are Pell eligible, meaning the lowest income students and and 80% get some form of financial aid.

And so we are providing access in a way that it was not possible in the South Sound before we we came here.

35.

I'm going to fast forward a little bit with state and but state and federal budgets declining.

Are you a little worried about Pell Grants?

A little worried about financial aid?

I know the Washington College grant college grant program is has been changed and some of the funding is coming up.

What are the implications of that?

And we I am very concerned.

You know, people ask me what keeps me up at night.

Very little keeps me up at night.

But I am very concerned about what's happening with federal financial aid, because that has been the pathway to the middle class for so many people to get access to education, to get access to a living wage job, and to go on and become, you know, the doctors and lawyers who said we have a, you know, a partnership with Seattle, use JD flex program, and our graduates have become community leaders.

They're leading nonprofits, businesses, entrepreneurs.

And so taking away financial aid, that's the pathway to education and not just to u-dub t my sister colleges, Pierce College, Tacoma Community College, all of us rely on federal financial aid as a way for our students to get access to our programs.

I want to circle back a little bit to what we were talking about in terms of moving into the middle class and serving that community.

Workforce development is such a huge piece of Pierce County.

We do have some pretty good living wages, family wage jobs in the port and, and whatnot.

But we still have a lot of people get down 167 and I-5 and go in going north every day.

So we we talk about that a lot when it comes to workforce development.

With that in mind, what can you do as a college chancellor to impact that?

And I would also say to futureproof the people you're trying to have that impact on against things like, I, I mean, how do you even know what the jobs are going to be?

Yes.

Pierce County is definitely what we call an exporter of talent.

Our talent gets on the freeway and goes north.

So, u-dub and me personally, I serve on the Economic Development board.

So, we see our job is trying to provide talent.

That businesses would, would need if they were to locate here.

So we partner to when businesses are considering locating in Pierce County.

We trying and the part of those visits and we have been part of we have an entrepreneur initiative at Udev Tacoma where we're trying to create more small businesses.

So being part of that, supporting small businesses, we especially during the pandemic, we did a lot of that in partnership with the county.

And so we see ourselves as not only producing talent that companies might want, but also being an attractor attraction for folks who want to come here, to know that they can get the talent that they need.

At U-dub t, we're really trying to make sure that students have the skills, to be, as you said, a future future ready for, for whatever may come.

So critical thinking skills, not necessarily focusing.

Although, you know, we have majors and we're focusing on specific, degree pathways, learning how to learn.

But we want students to be able to think for themselves and learn for themselves.

And and I has really emphasized the need for this because, you know, we're teaching students how to use AI as a tool and a resource not to write their papers for them, but to be able to discern what's real.

When you ask, ChatGPT or whatever tool you use, how do you discern what's real?

How do you know that's a real, citation?

That and that?

It's not just hallucinating as I see, it looks like skills in vocational training are finally kind of having their day because of things like AI and outsourcing and supply chains and a lot of those things.

Here at KTC, we're obviously the licensee of Base Technical College.

So I get on the soapbox from time to time, but I really think, and this is just my personal view, the secret sauce these days is merging that four year degree with that extra skills and vocational training.

And boy, you get both those things going together and you've got some secret sauce happening.

How do you is that just me?

How do you view that?

And, what are your thoughts?

No, it's not just you know, many, many college presidents, whether you're the president, two year technical college or community college or Fourier university, we are all thinking about this because students are making choices about how they enter and the world of work.

After high school, I strongly feel that every student needs some kind of post-secondary credential, and they may come to Bates thinking that they're going to, train to be an electrical lineman, person.

They may get so excited about that work.

I want to know more about electrical engineering, about how these systems work.

So, every credential, every certificate can be an entry way to another degree.

And so our new president, University of Washington, just started August 1st.

And, he is very big on stackable credentials, thinking about short term certificates, even badging, and how students, how students want to enter work and and how they actually into work.

Some of them, they don't need a four year degree to work at Amazon or Microsoft.

Yeah, I hear about that electrical student.

You bring up that theoretical one, and I'm thinking he gets a business degree at JWT and now he's run in six trucks.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

We had a student who came in, as a plumber, had trained to be a plumber, and she and her husband started a plumbing company.

And they are doing fabulous.

Now, a big piece of your background, a lot of work in Dei at various institutions and, and and and being a piece of that world in the academia, as you know, the Trump administration.

Here they come.

Anti-woke antidote.

I all those things.

I'm going to toss you a devil's advocate question.

The Trump administration says dye is racist.

On the face of it.

Why isn't it, you know, because dye is actually American history and work.

I mean, it's it's who we are as a country.

And to say that we are, we're founded on the values of equal opportunity for all.

So no matter what you call it, equal opportunity for all is foundational to American history, to American ideals and who we say we are as a country.

Now, we can disagree on how you get to equal opportunity for all and I think that's where we've gotten into, this huge disagreement.

But when you talk to folks who, don't necessarily, support DEA and you ask them what the AI is, they actually don't know how to articulate it, what it is.

So if you say, do you believe and that everyone should have an equal opportunity to leave living wage job to healthy outcomes for their kids, a safe place to live?

Of course, everyone believes that.

I think there's also it's easy to fall into this idea of being in a zero sum game though, too, whereas the pie is going to have to get smaller for somebody, right?

If we if we put more pie over here, this pie has to get smaller.

I kind of feel like, why can't we think about growing more pie?

Exactly.

You know, or give up the pie altogether.

Let's make cake and just think about different ways of bringing more people into this equal opportunity for all.

And, and recognizing that there are disparities now, there are disparities based on race.

They're disparities based on, socioeconomic class and even disparities based on where you are born, your zip code.

And so we really have to, you know, and here in Pierce County, we have rural families that are really struggling and poor white families.

Yeah, exactly.

And they are not getting access to the same kind of experiences that will give them that opportunity to, have a living wage job talking about the budget pressures, a little bit, some notes here and I wrote here in my notes is a perfect storm.

Federal and state dollars are declining plus inflation and then the loss of foreign students, and it's added up to something like a 26% cut in federal research support for for for the UW as the system $376 million total system wide.

Then a 6.5% state funding cut for the for the system.

So what has any of that flowed into you?

Have you seen staffing cuts or student populations or what's the impact on our piece of the UW system?

So fortunately we don't do a lot of, large sponsored research.

At UW, we we average about $12 million a year in federal research funding.

But we have lost we've lost grants.

And so we we're laying folks off.

And with the state budget cut, we've had to lay people off because we just haven't been able to we've got to reorganize and think about how we do the work differently.

One of the things that I said I love about Tacoma, I'm not alone in these kind of reductions, trio, which was just cut, which is a program run here in the city of Tacoma.

That is a college access program that we rely heavily on.

So we're going to have to pull together our K-12 school districts, community based organizations, anyone who works with young people to try to figure out how we, fill that gap.

And no one institution is going to be able to fill that gap alone because we're all struggling, together.

But the thing in Tacoma that we care about is we really do care about our kids, who care about our future, because we know that our kids are our future.

Yeah.

How have you managed that?

Have have there have you had to trim majors, or have you had to have larger class sizes within those majors with fewer profs?

Or how how have you moved those chess pieces?

Both.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

So, some of my engineering faculty will tell you that they we we're definitely seeing larger class sizes.

And, we are, we've had to look at enrollment, during the pandemic, U-dub Tacoma lost enrollment.

And we're just beginning to regain that enrollment.

But when we lost enrollment, we had to look at where the programs where we're losing enrollment and, make some, some difficult access decisions to close those programs.

We talked about the Washington College grant, stepping stepping down in terms of funding a little bit.

But on top of that, it was both sides of that balance sheet got hit.

There's also an increase in tuition of 3.3%.

It seems small.

You say 3.3%.

Is it small or what is the actual impact of that when you look across the student body?

Well, it is small when you consider, as you mentioned, inflation, the rate of inflation, when, you know, when it was, double digit inflation, we were still only increasing tuition by 2 to 3%.

If there's actually a formula that is set by the like.

So you were falling behind.

Oh, definitely falling behind.

Because the other thing that happens for you that t is, we, we give salary increases to legislature, authorizes salary increases.

So they authorized salary increases of 3%, but they don't give us the full funding for it.

So we are expected to make up that difference from tuition revenue, which is also not keeping up.

So there are things that we're obligated to pay for that tuition revenue does not cover.

So everything I say every time I give a salary increase to employees at U-dub t, it's a budget reduction for the university.

So when you look at all this in kind of this era of declining resources, that I kind of feel like we're stepping into, across the board in a lot of ways, ultimately optimistic, pessimistic.

How do you you talked about what keeps you up at night, I guess.

What what also keeps you walking forward?

That I feel like I'm not in this and work alone, that I do.

I feel like the need for an educated workforce, is still, very strong in our community.

And and that educated workforce can, as I said, can be a short term certificate all the way to a four year university, degree.

The need is still there, and our community recognizes that need.

So we're trying to be more collaborative in how we meet that need, be more creative and how we meet that need.

And we want to grow our health care programs, for example.

And one of the things that we have been thinking about is, is there a way for us to partner with our health care workforce, and employers here in Pierce County to have students do an, earn while they learn so that they don't have to quit their jobs to come and get a, a degree at U-dub Tacoma.

So those kind of partnerships, we're already doing it at Clover Park Technical College.

They, they have a partnership with Kaiser where they're doing that kind of thing.

So it's possible we just need to be more creative in how we do that work.

And I think that everyone sees the need and and no one's backing away from what we need to do here in the South sound.

We're just trying to be more creative in how we do it.

You mentioned health care is being on your wish list.

What else if if, you know, if you could sit on Santa's lap and say, well, these are the things I really like.

Is it facilities?

Is it more majors?

Is it a graduate program?

What what is on your wish list when you kind of, plan a growth path for you?

What is that?

Two things and more degrees that meet the workforce needs in the South sound.

So, health care is at the top of the list there.

But we also need more engineers and and we're launching a data analytics degree.

What's the other one?

Supply chain management, which is really big.

Yeah.

So there are things that we know we need here in this region to grow our workforce.

So but in order for me to do that, I need faculty, and, and space.

So my other big wish is space.

We just finished our campus campus master plan.

We have a vision for how we're going to grow up the hill from Pacific Avenue all the way to Tacoma Avenue.

And that, requires more facilities.

We we were actually, launching an initiative to build our first, traditional residence hall at UW, this fall.

So.

And so we'll be living on campus at UW.

Well, we have an apartment already.

We have an apartment building, but it really appeals to older students.

So, we did not admit freshmen at UW until 2006.

And what we found is that the traditional 18 year old wants a traditional dress, and it's hall with a dining facility.

Yeah.

So we're we will be going out to bed, and find a partner in November.

For a traditional residence hall.

I talked a little bit about the the the skills, training piece that I think marries up real well with, with four year degrees.

And the bright side of that picture is that skills training and vocational technical training is being talked up.

The dark side, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's also come with an attack a little bit.

I think on four year schools, you know, what's the value proposition?

You're going to be in this tremendous debt.

And when we talk about funding cuts and some of the supports that are going away, that that argument gets even stronger now.

Right?

So what is your what is your elevator speech or what do you tell folks about the value proposition of a college education these days when it's kind of cool, a little bit to say, hey, man, drop out, you know, or or don't go?

Well, first of all, I changed the language about a college education because it's post-secondary training that everyone needs.

So that could be a short term, nine month certificate that can lead to a living wage job.

Or it could be a four year degree where someone comes out and, you know, our engineering majors, for example, are making well over six figures with signing bonuses.

So it both are providing living wage jobs and old guys sign up for those classes.

So it you know, I think a student has to make the decision about what's best for them.

And at a four year degree is not going to be best for everyone.

So students have to think about what they're interested in, what they're passionate about.

I am super excited that we're doing a maritime academy here.

And with the port and Tacoma Public Schools, because those are living wage jobs short term to, short time, to enter the workforce.

Now, if those students want to go on and become the managers and leaders, they're going to need to come to us to get business degrees.

But, they can enter the workforce.

And with the maritime, certificate and then work their way towards something so, so, so much of your job that occurs to me as I'm sitting here listening to you talk about it, these partnerships and the things that you're aware of in the community, I mean, you people, I'd say one of the other dark arguments about four year educations is an ivory tower.

You sit there and you're the chancellor and you have a robe on at all times, and you look out over your over your campus and make great pronouncements.

But I mean, you have it sounds like you really have to get out there and figure out what's going on to get these partnerships going and to really assess the needs in the community that you're trying to serve.

Well, that's U-dub Tacoma is unique mission.

So unlike our Bothell and Seattle campus, we are focused, and our mission is to partner with community to empower and and strengthen community.

So yes, my job is I'm like the, head cheerleader for partnerships.

What you that Tacoma.

And I've had some proposals that have been out there and I'm like, no, we can't do that.

But most often when I hear folks and they have ideas, I'm like, let's figure out how we can make it happen.

Last 60s for shameless promotion.

How do people get involved and interface with you if they want to learn more, or get their grandkids or their kids to learn more, what's the pathway there?

And so we have an Office of Community Partnerships, where if the community based organization wants to partner with us and then our admissions office, we actually, you know, have tours that students and families can come on to learn more about education at UW.

So the admissions are through our Office of Community Partnerships.

Doctor link, great conversation.

I'm really glad we had you in.

And I think you really provide some unique insights to both what's happening locally and also big picture wise when it comes to education and post-secondary education training.

That's what I'll call it from now on.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for coming to northwest, Nate.

Thank you for having me.

If your professional life revolves around receiving state or federal funding, the next 50 years are going to be tough.

As the true cost of debts and deficits come home to roost, just as automation and the wealth and achievement gaps make joining the middle class that much harder.

The bottom line despite all that, receiving a relevant and affordable education along with skills training is going to be the key to success.

Just as it's always been, our thanks to Doctor Sheila Edwards Lange for coming to northwest now.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

You can find this program on the web at kbtc dot org, streaming through the PBS app, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

That's going to do it for this edition of northwest.

Now, until next time, I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.

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