John Steinbeck, Victor Hugo, JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling, George Orwell, Harper Lee. What do these award-winning authors have in common?
Hold that thought – we’ll come back to that.
Time is such a funny thing. Five years ago this month, the U.S. began vaccinating for COVID-19. Looking back half a decade later, it’s difficult to remember the enormous sense of relief that brought. We had never produced an RNA vaccine before, and back in early 2020, if you’d asked those of us who studied infectious diseases about the future, I think our answers would have been pretty bleak. I know my wildest dreams didn’t imagine that we’d have as safe and effective a vaccine as we did in just a year. The mortality rate for COVID dropped 47% in the second year of the pandemic compared to the first; and the mortality rate was extremely uneven during that first year (pre-vaccines), as front-line caregivers survived the pandemic’s onslaught and found their footing.
The pandemic response is a ridiculous success story in some ways. And yet, it was a ridiculous failure in others. Vaccine uptake patterns have taught us much about the limits of trust in our public health system, and about the importance of local, trusted sources of information, and about the power of disinformation. Debates continue even now about whether the decisions made at various stages were the right ones.
But whatever story of the pandemic one wishes to tell, it reads differently today because we know the ending. Think of your favorite book. Now think of the first time you read it. Not knowing the ending changed dramatically how the early portions were experienced.
I’ve thought about that lately, as higher education finds itself in a period of change and some uncertainty. The national conversation around higher ed has shifted fairly dramatically from where it was when I started as the president of CSU Fort Collins in 2008. A survey back in 2010 found that 96% of Democrats and 99% of Republicans expected their children to go to college. And at that time, 70% of high school graduates did – up from 38% four decades earlier. Contrast that with today, when only 25% of Republicans and 53% of Democrats say they are pro-college, and nearly 50% of all parents in the U.S. tell us they don’t actually want their children to go to college.
There are a lot of reasons for this shift – from increasing costs to increasing (and often misleading) rhetoric about the value of a degree. I’ve written about this before. I could argue strenuously, and do, that college continues to be the single best investment people can make in themselves – and I can cite all sorts of factual data to support that. I could argue, and do, that an educated population has driven our nation’s economic prosperity since the Space Race – and that future prosperity hinges on continuing to educate our young people fully and well. I’d also acknowledge that while higher education in the U.S. over the last 50 years has largely been a ridiculous success, there have also been ridiculous failures that we need to learn from and address.
But as much as I might argue all these points, the fact is that higher education finds itself in a different place than it was 10 years ago – fiscally, culturally, and in terms of public perception. And as with COVID, it’s not possible to know how this story will play out over the next year and the next decade. What we do know is that all of us – parents, students, faculty, taxpayers – are looking at this shift from our own individual angles, and that even from our different perspectives, most of us are wondering how we get back to a place where a college degree feels both affordable, achievable, and of real, solid value for the average American.
This brings me back to the question I posed at the beginning. What Steinbeck, Hugo, Tolkien, Rowling, Orwell, and Lee have in common is that they all wrote around the theme of an individual, common person making a difference in the face of immense forces that should be far beyond the ability of one individual to affect. They asked the question: What do we do when we don’t know what to do? Well, we do what we can. We do our best. We do. We strive. We fight. We exemplify the human spirit that comes screaming from the womb into the world and leaves it hoping to have made a difference.
It’s what we did during the pandemic, when we had far more questions than answers. And it’s what our faculty and students do every day on our CSU campuses. They don’t have the power to set budgets or make political decisions, but they show up every day to educate our students to be intellectually and professionally competitive with their peers around the globe – to act ethically, think critically, and know enough about history and philosophy to be able to contribute to our country and society in meaningful ways. They do the impactful research – research that saves lives, keeps our children healthy, that translates into new industries, good jobs, and thriving communities. They get out on the ground through Extension, the Agricultural Experiment Stations, and the Colorado State Forest Service, helping solve real problems.
It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done.
And collectively, that work every day becomes part of the story of American higher education that we continue to write. It’s a story written through the lives of every student who comes to our campuses with dreams to pursue. It’s a story that gains new momentum at every commencement ceremony happening around our state this month. And it’s a story I believe will be even richer, stronger, and more inspiring when we look back at this time 50 years from now.
Have a wonderful holiday season and a happy New Year! I’ll be back to trouble your inboxes in January.
– tony
Tony Frank, Chancellor
CSU System
This message was included in Chancellor Frank’s December 2025 newsletter. Subscribe to the Chancellor’s monthly letter.