Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, May 7, 1990                   TAG: 9005070137
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES HIGHER EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A DECADE OF FEDERAL AMBIVALENCE TOWARD EDUCATION

That must change, John Casteen III, University of Virginia's new president, said on Sunday.

U.S. educators and politicians, facing an increasingly diverse society, need to redouble their commitment to including minorities in the country's high schools and colleges.

"This is not a decade for backing away from equal opportunity and affirmative action . . . not a decade for saying [the problems of] minority inner city students are beyond the scope of the education system," he said.

Currently president of the University of Connecticut, Casteen was in Roanoke to address the 25th anniversary conference of the Potomac and Chesapeake Association of College Admissions Counselors. He will become UVa's seventh president on Aug. 1.

The reforms won in the past decade - in public funding for education, in academic programs - are not enough to ensure the success of U.S. education in the next century.

Casteen lamented the vacillation of federal educational policy over the past 10 years, characterizing former Education Secretary William Bennett as someone who "spent four years fighting anyone, anywhere at anytime."

Bennett's predecessor, Terrel Bell, spent much of his four-year term trying to save the Head Start program and Pell grants for would-be college students from the federal budget ax.

But by 1984, Casteen said, federal investment in student aid had dropped from previous levels, though more money was available to aspiring students through federal loans, state aid and financial aid packages from specific schools.

"By the end of the decade we were saying to minority students in many parts of the country that if they could borrow $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 . . . they could take advantage of what America has to offer," he said.

High-cost loans discourage prospective students, especially lower-income minorities, from even considering education beyond high school, he said.

U.S. educators looking to the 21st century need to answer four questions, Casteen suggested:

Who goes to college? How will they pay for it? How can the quality of education be assured? And, who will speak for education?

A former dean of admissions at UVa, Casteen urged the audience to focus on what he called "the core of the enterprise."

Students of every stripe need to be motivated, enabled, challenged and loved in high school or they will never make the transition to college, he said.

And failure to better educate a greater and more diverse number of Americans will cause a national catastrophe by 2000, he warned, one that will overshadow dramatically the hand-wringing in the 1980s over slipping academic standards.