Feb. 10, 2017
Kevin Carey wrote for Inside Higher Ed remembering Stan Jones, the late founder and president of Complete College America:
Stan Jones, founder and president of Complete College America, died this week. He spent his life helping needy students get an education.
I first met Stan in the mid-1990s, right out of graduate school, as an entry-level analyst at the Indiana State Budget Agency. The job involved keeping track of how various government agencies were spending their money. Most of the time, it was boring. The Legislature appropriated funds for something, and the relevant agency did that, more or less.
The exception was the Commission for Higher Education, which had historically left the state’s colleges and universities alone. Stan had recently been put in charge, and he had different ideas. Not-boring ideas. He was creating new committees and initiatives, inventing policies, cutting deals. It was not clear who had given him the authority to do any of those things. Some of them didn’t even seem to be about higher education.
So, every month or two, I found myself making the short walk from my cubicle in Indiana’s beautiful 19th-century statehouse to Stan’s office up the street, to ask some variation of: What, exactly, are you doing, and why are we just hearing about it now?