So like many graduate students, I don’t have time to sit and watch t.v.  Actually, I can’t afford to pay a cable bill which makes it much easier.  However this week, President Obama delivered his State of the Union address.  Within minutes of it ending, I received a call from my sister and then another from my dad.  I went on Facebook (which tends to be my current source of news – I know right!) and began to see tons of my friends posting about the address.  So I was intrigued.  The next morning, I woke to The Chronicle of Higher Education email outlining the important pieces concerning Higher Education.  So I thought I would take some time to go online and read the speech.

Overall, I enjoyed the speech – I think President Obama is a phenomenal speaker and often speaks about things that interest me as a citizen.  As I read, it became clear that the political and social climate is ripe for social entrepreneurs to innovatively think about how the U.S. is run.  Some of the areas that I noted throughout the speech include:

v  Retraining workers to fill positions that currently have unskilled labor in the U.S.

v  One stop website for the unemployed to make connections between positions and training programs

v  Need to rethink public education and the No Child Left Behind policies

v  Redesigning the teaching profession and the reward system

v  Tuition, accessibility, affordability and completion of higher education

As a student studying higher education, I found interesting his comment “States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets. And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down” (Obama, 2012).   In my Policy Studies class, we read about the Virginia Restructuring Act and how three state universities sought additional autonomy in order to control their own tuition and fees.  The negotiations between the state and universities reminded me of the “fatal embrace” described by Goldsmith (2010) in The Power of Social Innovation.  For the three universities in Virginia, their desire to have better control over revenue and tuition price setting left them and all state universities with tighter regulations.  However, I truly hope the Obama administration is setting the political atmosphere for states to adequately support higher education and that social change agents will sincerely think of new, innovative ways to serve students and their communities.