Q&A with GW’s Steven Knapp

George Washington University President Steven Knapp spoke to The Hill about graduate education trends and his own personal experience earning post-bachelor’s degrees. He became the 16th president of the university in August 2007.

Q: What originally fueled your choice to pursue graduate level and doctorate degrees?
I really wanted to become an English teacher. I never thought I would go into administration. It actually never occurred to me when I was in graduate school. ... As these things happen, when I was at [University of California-Berkeley], I was assigned to various administrative roles and committees and things and got interested in that, and what I really found was that I was interested in such a wide range of fields that by being in the administration I was connected with things outside of my particular discipline, and so as I became more and more interested in what other people were doing around the university, I started taking on more and more administrative responsibilities, which is what I think led to them thinking of me as a candidate for the deanship at [Johns] Hopkins.

Q: What qualities of the university originally drew you to GW?
My wife and I decided we wanted to move back to the East Coast. We’re originally from the East Coast. I was offered the position of dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. … I got to know a little about what was happening in D.C. and I saw GW had grown pretty rapidly a couple of decades from what had been in the past a part-time school to a fully residential university. … I saw GW coming into its own as a university that can play that role in the nation’s capital.

Q: In the current economy, many students are being forced to work full-time while they pursue a degree. How is GW working to accommodate those students?
Well, we do have a pretty good program for ... students who come back for professional reasons and to refresh their education and so on. We have a program designed for professional athletes, the STARMBA program. That program is of course up and running and going through its second year now, [and] we recently created a new program in Jewish cultural art.

Q: What sort of trends have you noticed regarding graduate education in the past five years?
At the master’s level, there is a lot of movement in the direction of degrees that are responsive to complex problems and opportunities that are characteristic to complex problems of the world we live in. … Cybersecurity is not a type of program that would’ve existed when I was a student. … More and more these degrees are not so much oriented towards a discipline but more oriented towards professional opportunities in addressing the complex problems we face.

Q: Education is expensive. Are students getting a good return on their investment?
There’s been a lot of debate about it. If you look at the numbers you’re still going to have a higher earning capacity over the course of a lifetime with a college degree than without it.

College is increasingly becoming a necessity in part because the type of technical training that used to be provided in some high school systems has gone by the wayside. … There’s now talk about restoring some of that so that we’re not so totally dependent on everyone going to college …

People are often surprised by this, but universities like ours, private nonprofit universities, are a small piece of the national picture. We cover about 20 percent of students. Most students attend public institutions, state universities and state colleges that are public institutions. We’re a relatively small piece of the whole pie.

The kind of education we provide we really try to emphasize the kind of life capacities, capabilities and skills that make it possible for students to keep learning throughout their lifetimes.

Q: What do you want to hear from the presidential candidates in terms of third-level education during the remainder of the campaign?
I think that one of the real questions is whether the nation is going to continue to invest in the kind of research essential to our economic future and the kind of innovation keeping us competitive as a nation. …

We have this curious anomaly where a lot of our advanced education, particularly in sciences and engineering, is being provided to students from abroad, who because of immigration policy, they are expelled from countries as soon as they get their degrees. They go back home and build companies competitive with us rather than being allowed to stay here and contribute their talents to the development of the U.S. economy. I think I’m not alone among university presidents or business leaders in saying we really need to take a look at that policy, we’re sort of shooting ourselves in the foot by providing training we can’t take advantage of because of our immigration policies. … A lot of people have suggested when somebody who gets an advanced degree in a particularly critical field ought to be given a green card along with their diploma, so that they can stay here and contribute to our economy.”

I’m also concerned about cutbacks in education funding at the state level for grades K through 12, as well as what’s happening in colleges and universities. Most students are educated in public institutions and those institutions are seeing in some cases pretty drastic reductions in funding by states.