There is a lot of talk in Juneau about higher education. The talk centers around making it affordable and keeping Alaska talent in Alaska. It appears that nobody in Juneau really gets it.

One of the most successful educational programs Alaska has is WWAMI which brings physicians back home to Alaska.

Over 30 years it has been successful in keeping 61% of graduates within the involved states. 50% of the graduates have gone into primary care specialties which is particularly important for Alaska.

Alaska does not have the population or the resources to easily build a medical school. It does not have the resources to provide education in many fields.

The University of Alaska system deserves respect but to compare it to most other state systems is laughable. That makes talk of free education for the best and brightest Alaska students an unfair comparison to other states' programs.

Why would a student at the top of their class go to a Tier 3 school? There may be an occasional program which is attractive but there are literally hundreds of superior colleges and universities.

Like it or not, future income is important to many students. Mid career salary for a UAA graduate is just over $73K while a Harvard graduate makes $126K. UAA ranks low in this category compared to other state universities as well.

These things matter to students. It is time to look for better solutions.

The best way to fix the problem would be to make the state system more attractive to local talent. That means not only better facilities but attracting the highest quality faculty. This provides the basis for building a strong system.

It is not clear how realistic it would be to attract the best and brightest to become University of Alaska faculty. It can definitely start with facilities.

It can also include long term commitments and funding to programs for new faculty. Most academics want to know they will never have to worry they will ever become unfunded.

Lucrative salary contracts can work and that is how many University of California schools did it in the past bringing in former Ivy League professors. Then again, as hard as it is for Alaskans to admit, Anchorage and Fairbanks do not have the same draw as San Diego even if the salary is in the stratosphere.

The state has the ability to fund an endowment for the UA system that could be comparable to any school in the country. That would ensure that the system could do the things it needs to become a top tier institution. It might actually make UA schools desirable to the top students in the state at some future date.

The question becomes will UAA or UAF ever develop an engineer like MIT or Texas A&M? Will they ever build a lawyer like Harvard or Yale? Will they ever give students the income potential of the top schools? It may not matter where somebody goes to school to an extent but denying the importance entirely is dishonest.

The best thing for Alaska might be to take advantage of the schools that already exist.

It starts with projecting out what the state needs whether that is physicians, physicists, chemists, engineers, or even university faculty. Alaska should then offer merit based scholarships for Alaskan students to pursue those fields at high quality institutions.

The catch is that the scholarship would be tied to the student coming back to practice in their profession back home in Alaska for a period of time. Right now, Permanent Fund data show that only about a third of students that leave ever come back.

If Alaska is going to do something it needs to happen now. Over the next few decades the oil money will stop. We will need homegrown talent to be around to help diversify the economy and move the state forward.

It is painfully obvious that the lack of a quality workforce plagues the state. In every industry most of the highly trained individuals came from elsewhere. Offering free tuition at UAA in its present form is not going to solve the problem.

The truth can be ignored here and all of this can just be described as a large insult to Alaska and the UA system. That might be a populist feel good way to go but it will not solve the problem.