Letter from Lisa Castillo Richmond | Letter from the PCC Board Chair
As I conclude my tenure at PCC after almost a decade of working alongside colleagues and partners to improve equity and outcomes in Illinois higher education, I leave you with an urgent call to both protect our colleges and universities and address what is not working across the system and has made higher education vulnerable to attack.
Today, we find ourselves within a deeply consequential moment that will test and change higher education. The foundations of our democratic system are shaking under the weight of very anti-democratic forces and right in the center of that is higher education. Our entire education system from early childhood through postsecondary education sits at the center. These attacks are direct, intentional, and ideological. Forces who fear the free flow of knowledge and information and who has access to it are cutting funding, cutting programs, decimating departments, and eliminating oversight, hurting our students and institutions.
If we do not do whatever we can, from wherever we sit, our children and our younger siblings, for the first time in the history of this country, will have less access to college than we did.
Higher education is so many things. It is research. It is discovery. It is opportunity. It is the pathway to careers that are meaningful to us as individuals. It is discovery and ideas. It is about advancements in science, understanding ourselves, and improving our societies. It seeks better health and better government. It fosters dialogue and discussion. It is about understanding our shared history, our systems, and how they are interconnected and interdependent. It is a different experience for each of us, but it is about creating a place that works for all of us. It is about the financial stability of our loved ones. It is about deeply engaging in questions of how we can make the world better, more inclusive, more just, and more equitable. And you better believe it is about democracy.
I am a first-generation college student from this great state. This personal experience has shaped my approach to these challenges and the sense of urgency that guides my work every day. The choices I had to make about higher education were different than the ones my parents and their parents made, had to make, and were able to make. And not only did I need to go to college for the career to which I aspired, but I desperately wanted to go to college for myself. And those experiences throughout my higher education journey and what came after fundamentally changed my life. PCC’s policies and programs are guided by the deep belief that every student should be able to make that choice for themselves.
At the same time, higher education has many flaws that have made it not work well for all of today’s students. We need to mend the things that need fixing within and across our colleges and universities precisely because we know how important it is. We need to make college more affordable. Illinois has a crisis of college affordability that has priced many students and families out of college altogether and caused others to grapple with unsustainable debt. These rising costs have been the direct result of policy choices made here over the first two decades of this century that stripped funding out of our higher education system. We need to improve our graduation rates and address longstanding disparities in student outcomes that have nothing to do with students’ abilities or effort. We need to make transfer more streamlined. We must commit to sustained reinvestment in our public colleges, universities, and need-based aid—not just accept a few good years, followed by bad years that keep us at a standstill. We need to ensure our community colleges are well funded in every district across the state. We must pass and fund a funding formula for public universities that take the politics and inequitable power dynamics out of the appropriations process. Individually, these efforts alone will impact hundreds or thousands of students per campus. Collectively, these will determine the opportunities available to hundreds of thousands of current and future students in our state.
We must fight for and wage a vigorous defense of higher education. Learning, the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of truth is the practice of freedom. We cannot afford to let our robust and diverse ecosystem of colleges and universities atrophy or disappear. We have made and are continuing to make progress on these issues. However, we must continue what is working, while also demanding more. We must demand investment in our students, our colleges, and our universities in Illinois. We must demand and hold Illinois state leaders accountable for doing their part because this is among the most worthwhile investments with the highest return. Our state has the opportunity to lead the nation in demonstrating how to do this. Because higher education and our college students need our support now more than ever. It is essential to our individual and collective well-being. It is difficult work, but we have the obligation and the privilege to address these now.
At PCC, we have seen the power of our actions, our voices, and our research. Our advocacy works. The resources and support we have deployed at the campus level works. This year, after hearing from us for the past several years, the state of Illinois is investing more in the Monetary Award Program (MAP) than it ever has—more than $710 million total. However, even still, last year (2024) was the first year since 2003 that the maximum MAP grant covered even half of university students’ tuition and fees.
We have seen the power of collective action. We have joined forces with courageous, tireless, resilient, phenomenal leaders and equity practitioners who have worked to implement data-informed solutions to address what isn’t working at the campus level. I am so grateful to have learned from and with them, to call them colleagues and friends and stand shoulder to shoulder with them as advocates for students and equity. Effective solutions to our most pressing issues must begin and end at the campus level, even as they flow through bold leaders in Springfield, the ultimate measure of their impact is in how they actually address the challenges we see in the data and hear directly from students.
We have done many things, but we know we can do more and PCC will continue to lead the way.
Implementing effective solutions and reversing these trends is the work of many people over many years. But meaningful progress has been and will continue to be made from year to year – from policy to practice, from the state legislature to the governor’s office, from the advocacy organizations to the faculty, staff, and administrators, from the state agencies to campus implementation. But it needs all of our attention. We cannot put it on hold and wait for a better time, when the state coffers are more flush or when the issues are less controversial. These are investments in our future. These are investments in our people. These are the necessary investments of resources, time, and effort that will determine the future vibrancy of this state long after any of our leaders are still in office. They require bold, audacious action. They require courage because they are not always convenient or politically rewarded. But they are deeply consequential for those who are, would, or will grow up or make a life in Illinois.
The eyes of the nation are on Illinois. What will we do here? Stand back and be quiet, waiting for the storm to pass? Withhold the necessary investments for another generation? Let our institutions be diminished or taken away, our students harmed? No, we cannot. The state has the chance to lead and PCC will continue to insist that we do so. We hope you will join us in this fight.