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Draft Report From Federal Panel on Higher Education Takes Aim at Academe
A draft report released on Monday by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education calls for overhauling the federal student-aid and accreditation systems, easing the process of transferring credits between institutions, and using testing to measure the "value added" by a college education.
The report, which the panel will consider during a closed meeting on Wednesday, also endorses the creation of a national "unit record" system, which would use students' Social Security numbers or another identifier to track the educational progress of every college student in the United States.
Few of the recommendations come as a surprise -- most have been raised in commission meetings, in memoranda issued by chairman Charles Miller, and in a series of issue papers that began trickling out of the Education Department in April. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings created the commission last September to devise a "comprehensive national strategy" on higher-education's future.
Still, several commission members are unhappy with both the substance and the tone of the preliminary report, which was written by an outside writer with assistance from commission staff members. Some say it favors the views of the consultants who drafted the commission's issue papers over the opinions of the commissioners themselves.
"This really reflects what the consultants put in the papers and what they would like the commission to say," said James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "It doesn't have any relationship to the kind of deliberations we had at the May meeting," when members began sifting through potential recommendations in an effort to reach an initial consensus.
Mr. Duderstadt said the draft report neglects several of the issues that formed the framework for the panel, including how to keep America competitive in the global economy, the role of technology in higher education, and the changing demographics of American society.
Another commission member, Charlene R. Nunley, who is president of Montgomery College, a two-year institution in Maryland, said the report overlooks the role community colleges play in educating Americans.
Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, who also serves on the commission, said the report doesn't say enough about the underrepresentation of minorities in higher education.
Ms. Haycock said she wasn't surprised that many commissioners were "less than thrilled" with the report. The problem, she said, "is that folks tried to write a report around a consensus that we never stopped to have."
But other commission members, like Richard K. Vedder, an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics at Ohio University, said the report represents "a good starting point" for panel discussion. And Sara Martinez Tucker, president and chief executive of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, said she was "very pleased with the completeness of it."
Ms. Tucker said she created a matrix of all the ideas that came out of the commission's task forces, cross-referenced it against the report, and found that only three of her colleagues' suggestions were missing.
"Some of the ideas may be buried, or not as prominent as people would want, but they're in there. You just have to look," she said, noting that the unit-record proposal -- her No. 2 priority -- isn't mentioned until Page 22 of the 27-page report.
Other panel members are troubled by the tone of the report, which begins by noting that American higher education "has become one of our greatest success stories" but quickly turns to "the less inspiring realities of college life in our nation": the enrollment gap between rich and poor, high use of remedial courses, rising costs, and a failure to prepare American workers for a changing global economy.
The report goes on to describe colleges as "risk-averse, frequently self-satisfied, and unduly expensive," and to blame rising tuitions on colleges' "failure to seek institutional efficiencies and by their disregard for improving productivity."
Robert W. Mendenhall, president of Western Governors University, an online, nonprofit institution, called the report "overly negative and overly focused on the academy as the culprit."
And Ms. Tucker said she worried that the report's get-tough tone could backfire, alienating, rather than engaging and inspiring, academe.
Mr. Miller defended the draft, noting that Secretary Spellings had called on the commission not to be "shy or mealy-mouthed." In an interview on Monday, he said panel members' repeated calls for "moderate" language have left him feeling "almost like I'm being censored."
Mr. Miller also stood by his decision to have the panel's outside writer produce a complete draft, rather than an outline or set of recommendations, as was initially planned. Several panel members who received the full report last week said they had been surprised by the abrupt change in plans.
He called the idea of offering recommendations before documenting the problem "an Alice in Wonderland idea: 'answers first, questions later.'"
"My way is the honest way, the direct way," he said.
Mr. Miller added that he had considered having a subgroup of the committee draft the report, as some commissioners had suggested, but that he had concluded that it would be "more democratic and more effective" to have an outsider write the report, and then have commission members weigh in.
Some panel members agree on that point. "This gives us something to shoot at and poke holes at," said Mr. Mendenhall. "It's easier to edit something than create it."
Wednesday's closed meeting at the Education Department will offer commissioners an opportunity to do just that. RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE COMMISSION'S DRAFT REPORT
The draft report issued on Monday by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education contains recommendations in four key areas: access, affordability, quality and innovation, and accountability. Following are highlights in each area. When the recommendation addresses a specific party, that is noted in parentheses.
Access
- Review and revise standards for transfer of credit among higher-education institutions to improve quality and reduce the amount of time it takes students to reach their educational goal (states and institutions).
- Overhaul K-12 teacher preparation with particular emphasis on reforming colleges of education.
- Address nonacademic barriers to college access by developing partnerships among schools, colleges, and the private sector to provide early and ongoing college-awareness activities, academic support, and college-planning and financial-aid-application assistance.
Affordability
- Overhaul the entire student-financial-aid system in favor of substantial increases in need-based aid. Consolidate programs and restructure the system to increase access and retention and decrease debt burden.
- Significantly increase federal funding of need-based financial aid, subject to simplification and restructuring of the system. Give priority to need-based financial aid (state and local governments, private institutions, businesses, and private contributors).
- Replace the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as Fafsa, with a postcard-size application form, and analyze student need through the federal tax system.
- Create a "bottom line" for college performance that measures institutional costs and performance, and enables parents and policy makers to see institutional results in terms of academic quality, productivity, and efficiency.
- Provide financial incentives to institutions to lower costs through technological advances (federal and state policy makers).
- Reduce barriers to transfer of credit and unnecessary accrediting constraints on new institutions.
Quality and Innovation
- Establish a federal fund to provide incentives for effective teaching and use of the latest research in rapidly growing areas such as neuroscience, cognitive science, and organizational science.
- Do more to support and harness the power of distance learning.
- Develop a national plan to keep the United States at the forefront of the knowledge revolution (secretary of education).
- Establish a nationwide pilot program for Lifelong Learning Accounts (individual asset accounts to finance education and training), to allow workers to continuously upgrade their skills while increasing their earnings. The accounts would be financed through tax incentives to individuals and employees.
- Establish a National Innovation Partnership that provides federal matching funds to states to encourage innovations in program formatting, delivery, and transfer of credit.
- Develop a comprehensive plan for better integration of policy, planning, and accountability among postsecondary education, adult education, and vocational education (secretary of education).
Accountability
- Require institutions to measure student learning using measures such as the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, as well as the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (states). Provide incentives for states, higher-education associations, systems, and institutions to develop outcomes-focused accountability systems (federal government).
- Make results of such measures available to students and report them publicly in the aggregate. They should also be included on transcripts and in national databases of accountability data. Institutions should make aggregate results publicly available in a consumer-friendly form.
- Administer the National Assessment of Adult Literacy every five years, instead of 10 (Education Department).
- Require the National Center for Education Statistics to prepare timely annual public reports on college revenues and expenditures, including analysis of the major changes from year to year, at the sector and state levels (secretary of education).
- Develop a national student unit-record tracking system to follow the progress of each student in the country, with appropriate privacy safeguards.
- Create a consumer-friendly information database on higher education that includes a search engine that allows parents, policy makers, and others to weigh and rank institutions based on variables of their choosing (Department of Education).
- Establish a national accreditation framework that contains a set of comparable performance measures on learning outcomes appropriate to degree levels and institutional missions, and that is suitable for accreditation, public reporting, and consumer profiles; that does not prescribe specific input and process standards; and that requires institutions to report progress relative to their national and international peers.
- Make accreditation more transparent as a condition of accreditation. Make the findings of reviews easily accessible to the public, and increase the proportion of public representatives in the governance of accrediting organizations and members of review teams from outside higher education.