Provost Hodgson calls for customer-oriented approach to serving students

In his first appearance before the general faculty, the new provost and vice president for academic affairs, on the job since Aug. 1, outlined what he called the principal problems facing higher education and possible ways to solve them.

Despite rising costs, Hodgson said, "We should be making sure that people realize that a college education is still priceless and that all alternatives are vastly inferior."

The unemployment rate among college graduates is half the national average while salaries are double the national average, he said.

"We must accept a responsibility to become actively involved in ensuring that society continues to understand that even on the narrow grounds of employment opportunity, a college degree is as valuable as ever," Hodgson said.

Some projections that most future jobs won't require college degrees omit an important point: those jobs won't be permanent, he said.

"If we teach people the skills for the job that is available today, five years from now our former student will be unemployable because that job and all jobs like it will have gone away. This generation of students will change careers, not just jobs, many times," Hodgson said.

"More than anything, they must be adaptable, they must be able to think. The simple fact is that a higher education is the only key to their futures."

Hodgson called on the faculty to "embrace" public demands to make undergraduate teaching the top priority. "We shall make every effort to change what the public perceives to be our position on the relative merit of teaching and research, so that each is held to be equally meritorious and some of us do more of one, some more of the other, but all of us are contributing to the success of the unit and the institution," he said.

Hodgson also urged a customer-oriented approach to students. "Our students are our customers, as well as our product," he said. "We must treat them accordingly, in the way that you expect to be treated when you go to make a major purchase.

"This generation of young people learns differently than we did; not less well, just differently. They are almost entirely visual, but we still give an audio-based education. . . . We must make increasingly better use of the technology that our students are comfortable with."

He noted that Mississippi State is a leader in the development of visualization techniques, and called for their wider introduction to the classroom. Hodgson said he will seek funds to help faculty learn how to produce visualization tools to help students learn better.

"There is nowhere in the country better situated to make use of visualization techniques than here," Hodgson said. "This is the place, and this is the time."

The challenge presented by new admission standards mandated by the Board of Trustees of state universities should be used as "an opportunity to re-evaluate the ways in which we serve our entering students," Hodgson said.

"We have all said, on countless occasions, that we wish we had 'better' students. . . . This is a complex issue, but I can give you a very plain answer to it: The best way to enhance the quality of our students is to enhance the quality of our teaching.

"This is the essential distinction between this university and lesser institutions: we constantly ask ourselves what we can do to help our students learn; our gratification comes only from the success of our students," Hodgson said.

He urged faculty to become more personally involved in retention of students and in helping them graduate within a reasonable time.

"A student does us great honor by entrusting her or his higher education to us; they give us their future. In return, let us be certain that we do everything that we can to ensure that when they leave here, they are as well prepared for that future as we can possibly make them."