http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/27/commission

June 27, 2006

A Stinging First Draft

For railroads and steel manufacturers, the best days are past. Do American colleges and universities face the same fate?

That’s the grim prospect laid out in a draft report released Monday by the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which the panel’s chairman, Charles Miller, in a hastily written e-mail note that accompanied the document’s release, described as “very rough.”

“History is littered with examples of industries that, at their peril, failed to respond to — or even to notice — changes in the world around them,” the report said, adding: “Our year-long examination of the challenges facing higher education has brought us to the uneasy conclusion that the sector’s past attainments have led it to unseemly complacency about the future.”

The 27-page preliminary report — which is enough a work in progress that it lacks a conclusion — largely delivers the back of its hand to American higher education, which it describes as offering “equal parts meritocracy and mediocrity.”

After a fleeting opening mention of higher education as “one of [the nation’s] greatest success stories,” the report lays out dozens of mostly critical findings, including

Insufficient access to higher education for many Americans, caused by inadequate student preparation, poor alignment between high school and college standards, and informational and financial barriers.
“The seemingly inexorable increase in college costs,” driven by “colleges’ and universities’ failure to seek institutional efficiencies and by their disregard for improving productivity,” and a system of higher education finance that is “increasingly dysfunctional, inefficient, and inadequate.”
“Evidence that the quality of student learning at U.S. colleges and universities is inadequate and, in some cases, declining.”
A “woeful lack” of publicly available and rigorously accurate information about colleges, most of which “make no serious effort to examine their effectiveness on the most important measure of all: how much students learn.”

Those and other findings, the draft report suggests, require a set of “imaginative solutions that are not just incremental but that rethink numerous aspects of today’s higher education system in substantial ways.”

It recommends dozens of changes, including:

Expanding access to college by “sealing the leaks in the educational pipeline,” better aligning K-12 and higher education standards and curriculums, and reforming colleges of education.
Overhauling the “entire financial aid system” in ways that would increase the availability of need-based aid and eliminate the complex federal financial aid form. Although it talks about a “streamlined” system, the draft, as written, stops short of calling for radically reducing the number of federal grant and loan programs, although some commissioners favor that.
Improving colleges’ productivity by insisting that they better control costs and prices ("college tuition should not rise faster than family incomes") and encouraging competition from “new competitors to traditional four-year institutions,” notably “community colleges and private for-profit providers,” which can be accomplished by “reducing barriers to the transfer of credit between institutions.”
Encouraging states to require that public institutions measure their students’ learning through a potpourri of tests and surveys, and directing colleges to “make aggregate summary results of all postsecondary learning measures ... publicly available in a consumer-friendly form.”
Developing a “unit record” system ("with appropriate privacy safeguards") to allow for the tracking of student performance across their academic careers.
Creating a “national accreditation framework,” though the draft does not specify whether this should be in addition to or in place of the current system of regional accreditation.

As recently as Friday, Miller, the chairman, and the commission’s staff had not been planning on releasing the draft report to the public, maintaining that federal law allowed the commission to keep its written work private until it completed work on a final report. But over the weekend, after a partial draft that circulated among the panel’s members provoked a significant outcry about its harshly critical tone, Miller said that the commission would release a draft, which was written by a small cadre of professional writers and consultants to the chairman.

In the e-mail accompanying the release of the draft late Monday, Miller said: “It is expected that this version will undergo significant changes and edits over the course of our discussions. As also expected, since we represent a very diverse group of stakeholders, the draft report represents a multitude of opinions.”

He added: “This marks the beginning of the commission’s most difficult phase of work. Continuing the process we began at our last meeting in May, the results of that discussion have been used by staff to produce this draft report for review, comment and debate by the commission. This is a work in progress and the lively debate we anticipate will result in a strong report to the Secretary and the nation.”

Samara Yudof, a spokeswoman for Margaret Spellings, the education secretary, said: “Secretary Spellings appointed an independent commission to ignite a robust, healthy debate about the future of higher education in America. Further, she specifically sought commissioners with wide-ranging backgrounds and opinions to launch this national dialogue. The Secretary has not read the draft but looks forward to reviewing the report this fall when the commission finishes its work and puts forward final recommendations.”

Several members of the panel said they would save their comments about the new draft until the commission meets to review and revise the report in Washington on Wednesday. (Even though that meeting will include a majority of the commission’s members, the get-together will be closed to the public because the members will gather in small quorum-less groups, which commission leaders say allow them to skirt federal open meetings law.)

Other commissioners, however, offered a range of views about the draft report, though virtually all of them said they believed the document seemed to go out of its way to rough up higher education.

Robert W. Mendenhall, president of Western Governors University, cautioned that the report had to be seen as a first draft, and joked that his own first drafts need a whole lot of work. “It’s a whole lot easier to edit than to create,” he said. Even so, Mendenhall said, “most if not all of the commissioners believe it is in need of significant revision, and that the tone of it is more negative toward the academy than it needs to be.”

Sara Martinez Tucker, president and chief executive officer of the Hispanic Scholarship Foundation, who like Mendenhall is widely seen as being neither a critic of traditional higher education (like Miller) nor a lockstep defender of the academy, agreed with Mendenhall that the document was “too pointed” in its criticism of higher education.

But from a substantive standpoint, she said, the draft largely reflected the ideas that subcommittees of commissioners had offered during their months of work. As she worked over the document with a highlighter and compared it to reports from the panel’s various subcommittees, she said, “most of my comments are the way we’re saying it, not what we’re saying.”

The most skeptical view of the draft report came from Robert Zemsky, an education professor and head of the Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania, who is a thoughtful observer of higher education but largely a supporter of it. “The most distressing thing to me is that it’s just mean-spirited,” Zemsky said of the report. “Critiques can be very effective, but mean-spirited critiques just don’t go anywhere.”

— Doug Lederman

Comments

I suppose the colleges and universities are used to less than direct criticism. I don’t see anything rough or unseemly in the points made. Most of them seem to be on target. It will probably get worse before it gets better. Measured by what most students learn in the first four years of college, actually I think the state of higher education is more deplorable than the report indicates. The lack of a consistent core curriculum even in the most presigious universities in America is appalling. And that was not even mentioned in the report. You would think all the commisioners were from the marketing faculty. But that is another story. . . .

Emile Piscitelli, Professor, at 6:25 am EDT on June 27, 2006

Preliminary report on state of higher ed

It is difficult to comment on a work in progress especially when all one has to work with are bullet items rather than more lengthy explanations. But a few thoughts come to mind.

The report finds three areas problematic:

1. K-12 education is uneven and indadequate.

2. There is no effort to control costs. Tuition has been rising at twice the rate of inflation at my school for the past 23 years.

3. Lack of any reliable feedback on how much students are actually learning and an accompanying fear that graduation standards are declining.

The statement of problems seems pretty obvious but the real question is the remedies.

In the short run there is not a great deal that colleges can do about the problems of K-12 education. It can raise requirements such as requiring three or four years of mathematics, a year of chemistry, physics and biology, three years of a foreign language as well as four years of English, and similar requirements in social studies. But it has no way to ensure that those courses will be adequately taught or that the student outcomes have been sufficiently verified.

In the long run it can insist on higher standards for content knowledge for education majors, particularly for future middle-school and high school teachers.

But it can’t really deal with the social and political problems that create the vast descrepencies in student preparation.

A lot can be done to cut costs starting with the outrageous growth in executive salaries, numbers of administrators and by looking at what is really essential in staffing. Then it can look at teaching loads, numbers of students per class, load reductions for administrative duties and so on. It might also be more ruthless about requiring faculty who do no research to teach more classes. Some of these increases in faculty teaching responsibilities could be made up for by reductions in committee work, most of which is utterly worthless. Untold hours are devoted to the development of strategic plans, learning goals, and endless meetings about everything that goes on in the university. Campus bureaucracy takes on a life of its own at the administrative, faculty and staff level and there is virtually no pressure to cut back.

Technology is another area that eats up huge amounts of money and from an educational point of view it is unclear how much student learning has improved by using power point presentations and putting all of the assignments on-line. In fact, students may learn a lot more if they simply have to show up on time to find out what is going on in their classes and the teacher uses a blackboard for visual presentations. Fancy audio visual equipment may be good public relations but for the most part it may simply be a lot of high priced toys.

Measuring assessment is a complicated matter. It depends on the goals of the institution. Do you want to assure students have learned the contents of their courses or do you want to make sure that students remember what they have learned when on the day they graduate.

Whichever goal is deemed important I believe it is best to start at the level of individual courses. At schools where faculty members have vastly different standards, common exams with common grading make a great deal of sense. In fact, without such procedures, it is hard to see how more comprehensive measures of testing such as exit exams can be implemented intelligently.

Finally, no study of higher education can be taken seriously without addressing the use of student evaluations in judging teaching performance and the effectiveness of particular courses. What is the overall impact on academic standards of consumer sovereignty in the evaluation of teaching. This is not a question of whether it is fair or unfair to individual teachers but whether or not the process inevitably leads to lower expectations. There is no more divisive issue in higher education than this one but as universities increasingly rely on the numerical scores from evaluations to make decisions on hiring, promotions, and merit pay, its impact on standards can’t be ignored.

Jonathan Cohen, at 6:50 am EDT on June 27, 2006

Evaluations? Assessment?

” .. no study of higher education can be taken seriously without addressing the use of student evaluations ..”

Pardon me — what about the assessments and evaluations of those who HIRE college students and graduates? Here are some of the headlines —

* Top schools/top grads — generally adequate.

* Next 10% — questionable. Administer own tests — do not rely on college transcripts. Personal interviews to check on work ethic, attitude, interpersonal, well-being. Google applicants, including on facebook.com.

* Mid-60% — interview only under special circumstances (personal referral from known source). Increased testing and interviewing.

L.L., at 7:15 am EDT on June 27, 2006

comparison?

The bullet points in the draft statement remind me very much of reports about the healthcare industry—continually rising costs, the need for greater efficiency, better accountability, and better relations with the clients. If the comparision holds, the commission’s real task and the government’s real task is to make the reforms work. Then they can take on healthcare, right?

KEL, at 8:25 am EDT on June 27, 2006

nothing higher ed can do?

I disagree...I believe there is a great deal that higher education can do to influence the K-12 sector. A few ideas:

1. The state colleges/system and the dept. of edudation in a given state can align rigorous curriculum standards to graduate from publich school with those needed for admission to the state institutions.

2. Similarly, the dept. of education in that same state can leverage partnerships with private education to do the same, which will in turn have an affect on the private high schools — hopefully leading to change on that side.

3. Colleges around a state should be supplying any high school they receive students from information on how those students are succeeding (or not) academically. This will quickly point out high schools that are not offering (or requiring) curriculums that are rigorour enough. This is starting to happen in some states, but is still to rare.

There are many more examples, these are just a few that could be immediately implemented. This is no longer a pipe-dream. University presidents and state education personnel (DOE’s, principals, superintendents) need to own up to their respsonsibilities to make change happen and stop just talking about it.

C.D., at 8:40 am EDT on June 27, 2006

Those Who Can’t, Teach.

America is in the business of being in business. The idea behind higher education is to prepare young men and women to enter the workforce as productive workers. Whether technology, medicine, law, military, law enforcement, or private sector, the field into which a graduate enters is still run as a business. The problem with higher education is that academic institutions, generally speaking, hire faculty members with inflated credentials – PhD in particular. Those in the business world will attest to the fact that real life experience counts a heck of a lot more than a piece of paper. This is the gap between higher education and real world must be filled.

College professors teach theories; real world with real problems require real solutions. Educators with real world experience will far better prepare students than some overpaid PhD holder that has never spend a day in the real world.

JCA “Bubba”, at 8:45 am EDT on June 27, 2006

mean-spirited

There is nothing mean-spirited in this early release. The specifics of the implementation that will undoubtedly gore oxen will elicit mean-spirited labels. Grounded in centuries of custom and complacent with its special status within the economy, institutions, board members, faculty and administrators have much to lose in responding to demands for financial restraint, productivity and accountability. “If the call is for my institution or constituency to change, then you are mean-spirited” will be widely heard.

Pat Leonard, at 8:50 am EDT on June 27, 2006

How utterly impoverished!!

“America is in the business of being in business. The idea behind higher education is to prepare young men and women to enter the workforce as productive workers. Whether technology, medicine, law, military, law enforcement, or private sector, the field into which a graduate enters is still run as a business.”

What an utterly impoverished and banal perspective on both our society and our system of higher education. NO!!! America is not in the business of being in business. America is in the business of cultivating a free and democratic society in which individual citizens can develop to their full potential as human beings. Yes, in order for that to happen, higher education must provide students with skills that are marketable in the workplace, but it cannot, must not limit itself to so paltry an objective. Higher education must be in the business of producing what Thomas Jeffferson called an educated citizenry, something he recognized as the only sure guarantor of our liberties. This means people with a broad education, flexible minds, the capacity to think critically and independently, and to construct arguments in both verbal and written form. No, American higher education is not producing this, but that does not mean that this should not be its purpose and goal. Let the business community pay for the specific training it needs. Let our taxes pay for something richer, more worthwhile, more in keeping with the central principles upon which our country was founded.

Ricardo, at 9:30 am EDT on June 27, 2006

Politically motivated rabble-rousing

Let me start by saying this is just a draft...The biggest problem with this draft is that the data they quote to support their arguments is weak at best; at worst it is political spin put on selectively chosen data to support the points they came into the commission wanting to make. The other big problem is trying to blame K-12 education for problems in higher education. Is the commission studying K-12 education or higher education? They say that it is a problem with higher education that students don’t come in prepared...what are higher education institutions supposed to do about this? Some of their recommendations are easy to agree with — who doesn’t want increased access and affordability for all students? I am dismayed that the draft recommends that all institutions require students to complete the NSSE, the CLA, and the MAAP, then report these results publically NCLB style. These are unproven measures of student learning that would only confuse the issue even more! Increased testing didn’t work for “saving” K-12 education — why would it work for higher ed? We’ll see how much of this gets changed when the final draft is released on August 1st.

Jeremy, at 10:05 am EDT on June 27, 2006

Assessment

The irony is that the response to this push for “assessment” and “accountability” is to generate more wasteful, expensive administrative positions and committee work. We now have an Office of Assessment with a staff of bureaucrats and support staff and spend time contriving “instruments” for assessment at their behest on the assumption that if we “police outselves” we can avoid being crushed by outside assessers.

Of course there’s fat in the system but in my experience when there are campaigns to eliminate waste it isn’t the really big ticket items—unnecessary bureaucracy and administrators salaries or perks—that get cut but minor benefits for minor players, like me. The real goal is to proletarianize faculty positions. “Hey, you jerks just work 9 hours a week. We’re gonna fix it so that you punch the clock at 8 am like the rest of us and teach 5 classes a semester. We’re gonna get rid of tenure so that bums like you actually have to perform. We’re gonna get rid of all those worthless classes like philosophy, see to it that English teachers are teaching grammar and spelling, and get college Back to Basics.” Etc.

LogicGuru, at 10:05 am EDT on June 27, 2006