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In his recent Inside Higher Ed article titled "Tough Love for
Colleges," Doug Lederman (2005) wrote [bracketed by lines "LLLLLLL .
. . ."; my inserts at ". . . .[insert]. . . ."]:
LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
The first meeting of the Secretary of Education's Commission on the
Future of Higher Education, in October, left many of those in
attendance with the overwhelming impression that crafting consensus
about the panel's direction would be difficult, given the great
diversity of its members' interests and concerns and the wide variety
in the views they expressed.
Thursday's second meeting, in Nashville, revealed more consensus and
gave some early indications of some of the panel's possible
recommendations - and it was a brutal few hours for college
officials. David L. Warren, president of the National Association of
Independent Colleges and Universities, called it a "scorching
critique," as most of the speakers described the ways in which the
American higher education system is failing, even as the group
acknowledged that it remains "the best in the world."
The widely held view that American higher education is unparalleled
may be a curse, suggested Charles Miller, the commission's chairman
and former head of the University of Texas System Board of Regents,
because of the "complacency" that may have set in among college
leaders.
Miller sought to shake that complacency from his very first
statements at Thursday's meeting - and he even got a head start on
that. A profile of him . . . .[Jayson (2005)]. . . . that appeared
in Thursday's edition of "USA Today" quoted Miller as calling it
"highly probable" that the commission would recommend instituting
some kind of national testing to measure college students' learning,
along the lines of what's done in elementary and secondary education.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Access is becoming more difficult, [Miller] said; college prices
"inexorably rise faster than other prices or incomes, as does the
cost to "those asked to fund higher education: federal taxpayers,
state taxpayers, employers, contributors and suppliers." Emphasis on
research and other priorities make "teaching and learning almost
incidental, and higher education "provides inadequate information in
overly complex forms with little transparency about prices and costs
or about many other key measures of value added or received."
Bottom line, Miller said: "We are not getting what we want and need."
Participants in the afternoon's first panel, "The State of Higher
Education Today," continued in that vein. Russ Whitehurst . . . .[
<http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ies/director.html>]. . . .,
director of the Institute for Education Services . . . .
[<http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ies/index.html?exp=0>]. . . .
at the U.S. Education Department, used data from the agency and a
recent report
. . . .[OECD (2005)]. . . . by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development to lay out a statistical portrait that
was not pretty.
The cost of a higher education in the United States is 250 percent
higher than the international average, and 60 percent higher than
Denmark, which ranks second. Yet the rate of postsecondary enrollment
(academic or vocational) in the U.S. is 63 percent, below the average
of 69 percent. (And the figures are much worse, he noted, for black
and Hispanic Americans.)
"If we measure affordability by outcomes, then we have a problem,"
Whitehurst said. He suggested that a forthcoming report on adult
education from his agency would reinforce that sense.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Amid much bashing of rankings by U.S. News & World Report. . . .
[USNWR (2005)]. . . . , momentum also seemed to build on the panel
for finding other ways to measure, and report to the public, on
colleges' performance, particularly in the realm of finances and
student "outcomes." How such reporting would unfold - and whether it
would be compelled, by making it contingent on the receipt of federal
financial aid, for instance - were questions left for another day,
although Miller, the panel's chairman, said such requirements were
not out of the question.
LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
See also:
1. The comments by Higher Ed readers at the end of Lederman's (2005)
article (you may wish to add one).
2. Shavelson & Huang's (2003) article "Responding Responsibly to the
Frenzy to Assess Learning in Higher Education."
3. Richard Hirsh's (2005) Atlantic Monthly article "What Does College
Teach? Hirsch wrote: ". . . in an era when the importance of a
college diploma is increasing while public support for universities
is diminishing, . . . assessment is desperately needed. The real
question is who will control it.
Legislators are prepared to force the issue: Congress raised the
question of quality during its recent hearings on the reauthorization
of the Higher Education Act; all regional accrediting agencies and
more than forty states now require evidence of student learning from
their colleges and universities; and pressure is rising to extend a
No Child Left Behind-style testing regime. . .[USDE (2005)]. . . to
higher education. To date academe has offered little in response,
apart from resistance in the name of intellectual freedom and faculty
autonomy. These are legitimate professional prerogatives; but unless
the academy is willing to assess learning in more rigorous ways, the
cry for enforced accountability will become louder, and government
intervention will become more likely."
Hirsh, R.H. 2005. "What Does College Teach? It's time to put an end
to 'faith-based' acceptance of higher education's quality," Atlantic
Monthly 296(4): 140-143, November; freely online to (a) subscribers
of the Atlantic Monthly at
<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/measuring-college-quality>,
and (b) (with hot-linked academic references) to educators at
<http://tinyurl.com/9nqon> (scroll to the APPENDIX).
Jaschik, S. 2005. "Big Brother's Transcript Database," Inside Higher
Ed, 9 December, online at
<http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/03/23/unit>. Jaschik wrote: "The
Education Department has released a plan that would create a national
database of student records - with students identified by Social
Security numbers. The proposed system would contain more information
about students than anything currently available and could be used to
track the progress of the increasing number of college students who
receive their educations at multiple institutions. But education
groups - with varying degrees of intensity - worry that the database
would violate students' privacy. . . . ."
OECD. 2005. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,
"OECD calls for broader access to post-school education and
training," 13 September, online at <http://tinyurl.com/aettr>.
Jayson, S. 2005. "Charles Miller invests himself; Reformer turns
focus to higher education" USA Today 8 December, 8 December, p. D8.
Freely online to subscribers at <http://tinyurl.com/b36af>. For
non-subscribers a useless "Abstract" is freely available at the same
URL and the full text may be purchased for $3.95. [NOTE: The link
<http://tinyurl.com/98m33> as given by Lederman (2005) to the USA
Today profile of Miller seems to work (for me) only sporadically and
connects to a short piece "Testing for college students?".
Shavelson, R.J. & L. Huang. 2003. "Responding Responsibly To the
Frenzy to Assess Learning in Higher Education," Change Magazine,
January/February; online at <http://tinyurl.com/7foof>.
Unfortunately, the crucial "Chart 1" is omitted from this copy.
USNWR. 2005. U.S. News & World Report Staff, "US News & World Report
Ultimate College Guide 2006." Sourcebooks, Inc. Amazon.com information
at <http://tinyurl.com/bdrwq>.