Recently, I invited PSU alumni to become more vocal advocates for their alma mater. I also asked them to share stories of what they were up to. Nearly 700 have responded so far, and their accounts of life after college have been a pleasure to read.

Our alumni are doing very well. They have started businesses, they’re teaching, they’re getting doctorates, they’re helping people with disabilities, they’re making movies, captaining ships and piloting airplanes.

They work for Nike, Intel, Boeing, Google, Sony, Nikon, Cambia Health, city of Portland, Washington County, Multnomah County, the FBI, the White House and the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe tribe, to name just a handful. The list underscores the myriad opportunities out there for graduates, and just how valuable a Portland State degree has become.

They are a creative bunch.

“I recently retired from the motion picture business,” wrote one. “I’m now a professional fused glass artist.” He went on to note that one of his pieces had been acquired by the Colburn School of Music in Los Angeles.

“I hope you will be hearing about my novel in the future,” wrote another. Another is “revitalizing and preserving indigenous languages.”

Former PSU President Natale Sicuro wrote to say he is enjoying retirement and golf in Palm Desert, Calif. Another alum wrote that she has returned to Oregon after living in Greece and volunteering with the Mediterranean Association to Save the Sea Turtles.

I’ll close with one of my favorites:

“I am currently the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Operations for the Seattle Storm, one of 12 WNBA teams in the world. Our purpose is to prove that achievement has no gender. We seek to not only show the world what’s possible but to change what’s possible. I am a PSU grad, and I am fearless.”

A classic line from political campaigns is: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? As we enter a new year, let’s apply that to Portland State. Are we better off now than we were a year ago? Two years ago?

The answer, without doubt, is yes. And one of the main reasons is our newfound autonomy, embodied in our Board of Trustees.

Start with PSU’s finances. Under the old system, we and the other public universities fell under the governance of the Oregon University System and were not allowed to lobby state lawmakers for better funding once the governor produced a budget. During the 2015 legislative session, however, those restrictions did not apply. This allowed all of us – presidents, board members, faculty, staff and students from all seven universities – to persuade the budget-writers to provide $700 million in state funding for the seven public universities. That figure is significantly higher than the governor’s recommendation, and it ended many years of state disinvestment in higher education.

This dividend alone far exceeds the costs of independence. It is just one example of how our ability to self-govern has strengthened PSU.

The board – volunteers appointed by the governor – made some tough decisions in its first 18 months: a tuition increase and sworn campus police among them. While there have been some protests and acrimony about these issues, in the past there would not even have been a PSU-specific forum for debate. This board is uniquely committed to ensuring the long-term success of PSU.

With greater independence comes greater responsibility, which is one reason PSU supporters and the Board of Trustees are discussing a possible Metro-area measure to raise revenue for scholarships and other student support. This discussion would not have been possible under the old system of governance. The board also was closely involved in designing our new five-year strategic plan, which focuses on student success, excellence, equity, community engagement, and innovation.

Last but not least, board members have been personally extraordinarily generous to PSU. Their lifetime giving totals $36.2 million, which has gone to student scholarships, faculty endowments and capital projects.
There’s no doubt in my mind–autonomy and having our own Board have made PSU much better off than we were before.

As some news outlets have reported, Portland State University is considering an initiative that would ask voters in the tri-county area to approve a local revenue measure to make college more affordable. I would like to add some context and explain why we’re looking into this idea.

Let’s start with the Oregon Legislature. For the first time in years, lawmakers increased funding for higher education rather than make cuts. Yet the state allocation for 2015-17 remains well below what public universities received in 2007-09. PSU needs a long-term solution to avoid future cuts and tuition increases. We simply can’t pin our future financial stability on a hope that the state will invest enough in higher education.

As Oregon’s main urban university, PSU embraces a unique access mission – we offer an excellent college education to a broad cross-section of mostly Oregonians. PSU students have more financial needs than their counterparts at the University of Oregon or Oregon State University. Two-thirds of PSU’s 29,000 students qualify for financial aid. Nearly half of last year’s graduates qualified for Pell Grants because of their low incomes. Only one in five students who qualify actually receive state Opportunity Grants. More than 40 percent of our freshmen last year were students of color.

Our exploration of a possible revenue measure – most likely some sort of small business payroll tax – stems from our desire to offer more scholarships, and hire advisors and faculty to boost the region’s highly educated workforce. We’re calling it the College Affordability and Student Success Initiative. It is one of a variety of solutions we are working on to ease the cost of college and help students graduate with smaller debt loads. Among them:

• Persuade the Legislature to increase funding during the February session.
• Increase our efforts to encourage philanthropic giving.
• Launch new reTHINK initiatives that encourage efficiencies and cost-effective ways to offer courses.
• Offer additional support to help students graduate more quickly and with less debt.

We haven’t made a decision yet on whether to go forward with a possible ballot measure, and we won’t move forward without authorization from our Board of Trustees. But this is an idea well worth pursuing. I will keep you informed on new developments.

Recently I visited Vietnam, with side trips to Malaysia and Indonesia, to identify recruitment and training opportunities for PSU. We’ve been quite involved in Vietnam for some time, primarily through the training program for engineers that Intel sponsored for several years, and work by the Center for Public Service to train public officials. (I have to admit that I still marvel at the historical irony of a U.S. university training Vietnamese communist party officials in governance, citizen participation, and budgeting!)

Vietnam is an amazingly impressive country, with a great entrepreneurial spirit and rapidly growing infrastructure and employment base. However, 80 percent of the population is still employed in agriculture and the challenges the country will face as it industrializes are huge. A key area of need is higher education, and PSU already is working with Vietnamese universities to enhance their capacity. Additionally, about 90 Vietnamese students are studying here in Portland.

My visit was part of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of normalized U.S.-Vietnam relations — a series of events that our Center for Public Service in the Hatfield School is helping organize, at the request of the U.S. State Department. We held a conference on emergency preparedness in Hoi An, in Quang Nam province in the center of the country, and we co-sponsored a conference on higher education in Hanoi. We also visited about half a dozen universities and signed several memoranda of understanding, intended to increase faculty exchange and create programs that will bring more Vietnamese students to PSU.

Malaysia and Indonesia both present great opportunities for student recruitment, but our relations there are at an earlier stage. We have a great ally, though, in Melanie Billings-Yon, wife of the U.S. Ambassador to Malaysia. Melanie is a PSU alum and adjunct professor in the School of Business Administration!

These three countries present enormous opportunities for PSU to internationalize our education and research. Their students will expose ours to different cultures and fascinating development challenges, while joint faculty work can contribute to ‘letting knowledge serve the world’. We will continue to strengthen these relationships.

Photo: Wim and Alice Wiewel touring Southeast Asia