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A Speech to the CASE
Annual Assembly, San Diego, July 12, 2004
I am delighted to be here with you today. It is wonderful
to be in California, where I spent a great deal of my career. California
has shaped much of my understanding and appreciation of roles
and responsibilities in higher education. In the current
budget climate, it’s hard all over but particularly
challenging in California. It has never been more urgent
to define our measures of success and to communicate our
value -- and our values.
Two years ago, I moved from
the University of California at Berkeley, where I had served
in the administration for over a dozen years, to Smith College.
The experience of working in such different institutions
has given me an unusual perspective on American higher education. The contrasts are striking:
West Coast and East Coast, a co-ed school and a women’s
school, a research university and a liberal arts college,
public and private. It’s from these vantage points
that I make my remarks today.
Accountability has become a
buzzword in higher education. A
quick search of recent headlines in The Chronicle of Higher
Education reveals how frequently the word appears: “New
Commission Debates Accountability,” “Lawmakers
Call for More Accountability from Accreditation System,” “Colorado’s
Governor Demands Accountability Over Sex-Party Allegations,” “Accountability
and Openness at Iowa Foundation,” “Liebermann
Calls for More Accountability From Colleges,” “Guidelines
Are Developed to Help Colleges Follow Provisions of Financial-Accountability
Law.”
The word is used so often, and
in so many different contexts, that it is worth reflecting
on its meaning. To be accountable
is to be answerable, responsible, but the word accountability
conveys more than personal or institutional responsibility. It
means, literally, the obligation to render an account, in
other words, to present evidence that responsibilities have
been fulfilled. The word carries the implication of
liability, of being subject to some consequence if the appropriate
account is not rendered. The Oxford English Dictionary
identifies the first usage of the term at the end of the
eighteenth century; nineteenth-century usages often have
a governmental context. John Stuart Mill, for example,
writes of “pushing to its utmost extent the accountability
of governments to the people.” There is an implicit
contract in the concept of accountability, of responsibilities
discharged to a larger or higher entity.
When
people use the term accountability today, the context is
often suspicious and accusatory. Political and corporate
scandals always issue-in demands for accountability. The
New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” of May
24, 2004, provides an example that I could duplicate from
the front page of most days’ newspapers. The
subject of the column is the prison abuse scandal in Iraq. The
column ends with a quotation from an editorial about Abu
Ghraib in the Army Times, the weekly trade journal of the
uniformed military: “’This was not just a failure
of leadership at the local command level. This was
a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability
here is essential -- even if that means relieving top
leaders from duty in a time of war.’”
To
read all the headlines about accountability in higher education,
one might conclude that colleges and universities were failing
to meet their responsibilities in major ways. Yet The
Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Americans’ confidence
in higher education is extremely strong. For two years
in a row, The Chronicle has conducted an extensive national
poll of public opinion on higher education. They have
found that the public’s trust in institutions of higher
education ranks near the top among all kinds of institutions;
in the most recent poll, nearly 93 percent of respondents
agreed that higher education institutions are among the most
valuable resources in the United States. Why then all
these calls for accountability?
The
answer lies, paradoxically, in the high value that the public
attributes to higher education. Never before in history
has a college education seemed more important to the prospect
of economic well-being. The lifetime income differential
attributed to college education has been rising. According
to a Business-Higher Education Forum paper on accountability,
a male college graduate’s first job in 1973 typically
paid 33 percent more than that of a male high school graduate;
today, the difference has grown to 81 percent. But
the cost of college has grown significantly, too. When
people see a good, a product, as at once critically important
and expensive, they become concerned about who has access
to it, how it is distributed, and why it costs what it does.
Indeed, legislative calls for greater accountability from
higher education focus principally on these three issues.
The controversy about affirmative action in admissions is
fundamentally a controversy about access; the congressional
debate about accountability standards in higher education
is fundamentally a controversy about cost. The value of higher
education is not in dispute; rather, the increasing sense
of its value is firing the debate.
We
in higher education have in many ways misjudged the issue.
Those within the academy urging greater responsiveness to
governmental calls for accountability have focused on measuring
learning outcomes. There is nothing wrong with this -- except
that it misses the point. Learning outcomes are very
much an issue in the debate about accountability in K-12
education, but they enter into debates about higher education
through a somewhat misleading analogy with K-12 schooling.
When members of the government or the media or the general
public call for greater accountability from our colleges
and universities, they are rarely complaining that students
are not learning enough. At heart they are concerned about
which students have access to learning, at what price, and
whether -- and
when -- they graduate. They want to know about students’ ultimate
success in the job market, not how much they’ve learned
about literature, astronomy, or anthropology.
Many members
of the academy bristle at what they see as inappropriate
interference with their work in these calls for accountability.
After all, our universities and colleges are replete with
levels and systems of measurement. We rate applicants for
admission. We grade students’ performance
in every course they take. We evaluate faculty members
for tenure and promotion. We review books and articles
for publication, grants for funding. We assess departments
and programs. We accredit professional degree programs,
colleges, and universities. We believe that we are
scrupulously accountable to ourselves, and we are affronted
by any claim that we are not adequate to this task.
But being
accountable to ourselves is insufficient; it does not fulfill
the contract that accountability implies. As the Business-Higher
Education Forum observes, “For
accountability to occur, evidence about performance must
be defined in the context of institutional and social goals
that reflect a public agenda.” Let me repeat
that: “… institutional and social goals that
reflect a public agenda.” Central to the public’s
agenda -- the public’s trust -- is access and
affordability; accountability in higher education is inseparable
from those goals.
If accountability is our end,
then the means to that end, I would argue, lies in an ethic
of greater transparency. Transparency in our business practices
and in our governance; transparency in our admission and
aid policies and, most importantly, in our communications.
This comes more easily to some of us, feels more threatening
to others, but ultimately holds the key to a fundamental
social trust -- and to
American higher education’s long-term success.
In
order to develop greater transparency, fuller and clearer
communication, we must determine to whom we are accountable
and what we are accountable for. These questions are
complex ones because colleges and universities have multiple
constituencies. In his book, The University: An Owner’s
Manual, distinguished Harvard Dean Henry Rosovsky posits
a useful concept of ownership. He argues that we should
think of “my college,” or “my university,” not
in the way we say “my car” or “my house,” but,
in the larger sense, in which we imagine “my country.” Rosovsky
distinguishes between principal owners and part-owners. The
principal owners are the faculty, students, and administrators.
They are internal to the institution. Although they sometimes
use the language of accountability -- particularly the
faculty in regard to the administration -- the conversation
about accountability is not, for the most part, an internal
one. Rather, calls for accountability come from external
constituencies. We can think of these constituencies -- or
in Rosovsky’s terminology, “part-owners” -- as
a series of concentric circles.
First there are the external
groups with responsibility for governance -- boards of
trustees, governors, or regents. The question of accountability
is a complex one for these groups, for they both effect and
demand accountability of the institution in their trust.
Public boards operate very differently from private boards
in regard to this responsibility, but more on this later.
Widening
the circle yet further, we have donors asking accountability
for the use of their gifts and alumni invested in the value
of their degrees and the distinctive character of their college
experiences. There are parents. There are levels
of government -- local, state and federal -- each with
a different set of concerns. And finally, but not least,
there is the general public, both as consumers and as concerned
citizens, as well as the public’s voice, mirror, and
watchdog, the news media.
Although it is tempting for
institutions of higher education to draw a circle and claim
that any individual or body standing outside of it has no
right to demand accountability, it has become undeniably
clear that we ignore our part-owners at our peril. Indeed
the attention that all of us give to public relations shows
that we recognize this fact. Henry Rosovsky observes that
the right to know is deeply ingrained in our national tradition,
particularly with regard to public figures and public entities.
Colleges and universities, whether public or private, are
viewed as public property; that view reflects the centrality
of our institutions today. It carries with it the burden -- and
the responsibility -- to
be accountable.
My
experiences at Berkeley, and now at Smith, have given me
a vivid demonstration of how differently accountability operates
in the public and private spheres. If we go back to
the metaphor of concentric circles of part-owners, we see
that private colleges are most concerned with their donors
and their alumni. Except in the case of federal research
contracts, or relationships with local municipalities, private
colleges tend to engage government as members of a collective,
through higher education associations that lobby the government
about policy. In contrast, public colleges and universities
operate in the context of an implicit -- and often explicit -- contract
with the state and its citizens. While this contractual
understanding drives discussion of accountability, the discussion
is complicated by different understandings of institutional
mission.
Let me give you an example.
Upon moving to Smith, I was impressed to discover how much
consensus there was among the college’s major constituencies
about its mission. Alumnae, donors, parents, the board of
trustees, faculty, students, staff -- all basically agree
about the mission of the college, even while they sometimes
disagree about specific actions and policies in regard to
it. Public institutions do not enjoy the same consensus.
If you ask faculty, students, staff, boards of regents, legislators,
and the general public to define the institutional mission
of the University of California or the University of Arizona
or the University of Colorado, you will get strikingly different
answers. In part, such differences result from the
greater complexity of the institutions themselves, but in
part they result from conflicting ideas about the institutions.
Is their guiding purpose to provide affordable college education
for all qualified students from the state? To expand
educational access to disadvantaged populations? To
develop top-ranked graduate programs? To provide the
best possible environment for faculty research? To
stimulate high-tech economic development in their area or
state? To serve the public? All of the above?
The
contrast between the governing boards of private and public
institutions reflects the difference in their constituencies.
Private boards often have many alumni among their members;
they see their function as furthering the mission of the
college. In the course of the search process for the presidency
of Smith, I asked a member of the search committee how she
saw the function of the board of trustees; she gave me an
answer that was music to a candidate’s ears. The purpose
of the board, she said was to help the president succeed.
I may be wrong, but I do not think that the chair of the
University of California Board of Regents would see his job
in the same way. Public boards are located ambiguously between
the institution of higher education for which they are responsible
and the state in which they serve. It is often unclear
whose interests they hold higher. Are they there to
serve the institution, governing it so that it can achieve
its full potential, or are they there to represent the state
and its claims? A meeting of college and university
leaders that I attended about a year ago concluded that one
of the most serious problems confronting higher education
was the poor quality of public boards. In part, this
problem results from the methods states use to choose board
members, methods that do not necessarily result in
the selection of those best qualified to serve, but it also
results, I believe, from lack of clarity about whose interests
the board represents in its stewardship.
Public
institutions are subject to much higher standards of disclosure
than privates. Admission criteria, salaries, budget information,
whether publics like it or not, are all subject to public
disclosure. This may set me apart from many of my private-college
colleagues, but I believe that this is healthy. Indeed,
I believe that it is critical.
If
our constituencies are multiple and complex, our obligations
are equally so. First, of course, is our obligation
to financial accountability or accountability in our use
of resources. The highest responsibility of a governing board
is fiduciary. Reflecting changes in accounting
and auditing standards and practices in the corporate world,
colleges and universities are moving to comply with provisions
of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. But that’s just the
beginning, a baseline of trust. Our institutions are
accountable for the use of resources in many other ways.
We are accountable to granting authorities for compliance
with the provisions of grants and contracts, whether grants
come from the federal government, from foundations, or from
corporations. We are accountable to the federal government
for compliance with financial aid provisions. We are accountable
to donors for the designated use of their gifts. Happily,
this system of financial accountability for specific uses
of granted funds works extremely well for the most part.
When abuses occur, as in the case of misuse of funds from
a federal research grant, or the failure of a college or
university to apply a gift to the designated use, there is
general agreement about the principles involved -- even
when there is disagreement about specific circumstances and
understandings.
A
more interesting issue -- and one that is controversial
within the academy -- concerns the boundaries that colleges
and universities should impose upon conditions of gifts and
grants. Two areas are particularly vexed: first, the
relationship of colleges and universities to corporations
and, second, our relationship to donors who seek to advance
a political agenda through a gift. Two recent books -- Derek
Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization
of Higher Education and David Kirp’s Shakespeare, Einstein,
and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education -- raise
serious questions about the increasing weight of commercial
financial incentives in higher education. As colleges
and universities, many of them increasingly strapped for
funds, look in new places for resources, they must confront
the question of the conditions under which resources are
granted. Research funding from corporations shapes
research agendas, leading to fears that objectivity -- a
central and prized value in the academy -- might be compromised.
Some
of you might recall a particularly interesting example of
this problem at Berkeley. During the time that I served in
the administration, the campus struggled with evaluating
a particularly interesting and innovative gift for research
from the Novartis Corporation. Berkeley’s College
of Natural Resources reached an agreement with Novartis for
$25 million in research support over a five-year period in
return for Novartis having the first opportunity to patent
a percentage of discoveries made in faculty labs. The
percentage was determined by the proportion that Novartis
funding represented of total college research funding; only
faculty signing the contract participated. There were
no strings attached to the money; this was not sponsored
research. However, a committee, upon which a Novartis
scientist sat, oversaw the allocation of the funds. To
many in the College of Natural Resources, this contract seemed
like the goose that laid the golden egg. They saw only
benefit; the risk, they felt, was all with Novartis, which
was gambling on the relevance and productivity of the research
conducted by the faculty. There were no guarantees
that anything would pan out. Many outside the college
saw grave risk, a pressure upon research agendas to shift
in directions rewarding to Novartis. The university
resolved this debate in a typical manner -- by labeling
the grant a pilot and by commissioning a study of it. In
the end, Novartis did not renew the agreement, finding that
it did not sufficiently reward its investment.
I tell this
story because I think it is an interesting case study in
accountability. Under what conditions does accepting an
obligation to be accountable to a grantor undermine a higher
standard of accountability? That higher standard is the objectivity
and intellectual independence of the research enterprise.
I do not believe that it was violated in the Novartis agreement,
but I can readily imagine instances in which it could be.
The issue often arises in regard to gifts. I am sure that
many in this audience have worked with donors who wanted
not only to give a chair to their institution but to name
the holder of the chair as well. I imagine that a number
of you have worked with governments or with advocacy organizations
for particular national or ethnic groups who have wanted
to define the perspective taken by a center or a program.
A few years ago several colleges and universities failed
to define conditions acceptable to them for gifts from
the Turkish government, gifts designed to support Turkish
studies. During negotiations for such a gift at Berkeley,
there were difficult conversations not only with Turkish
donors but with the Armenian community, members of which
felt that accepting such a gift would violate their trust.
Incidents like these raise the question of appropriate accountability.
When
does incurring an obligation to a particular constituency
violate a higher accountability? Most of us would agree
on the answer to this question in the abstract -- we’d
say, “when it compromises the academic integrity and
independence of the institution.” But specific
issues can be far more complex and vexed. Colleges
and universities do a great deal of sponsored research for
federal agencies and for corporations with specific objectives
and commercial by-products; donors give many gifts for specific
objectives and purposes. Ultimately, the best test
of appropriate accountability lies in a return to institutional
mission and purpose. As I often said at the University
of California: when money walks in the door, it becomes public
money, and we are accountable for it on those terms. Similarly,
at private colleges and universities, all gifts become resources
of the institution itself; their use must express our mission
and purpose.
One
of the greatest contrasts I have found in moving from a
public to a private institution has been the greater openness
of the discussion of budget and finance in public institutions.
Because state universities and colleges receive public
appropriations, budget information is not only subject to
public scrutiny; it is almost always reported and commented
upon in the press. It may be uncomfortable, but, in many
ways, this transparency is beneficial to the institution.
No one within the institution has trouble believing that
budget problems are real or that trade-offs need careful
consideration.
Public and legislative demands
for accountability in higher education center importantly
on issues of cost. The Business-Higher Education Forum’s analysis, to which
I referred before, points out that “the rising cost
of college has become one of the more potent galvanizing
forces about accountability in higher education.” Although
the McKeon Act -- a Congressional effort to legislate
tuition at publics and privates -- did not succeed, it
is undeniable that the fuel behind it, public concern over
the cost and value of college, remains a significant force
that we will ignore at our peril. While the current
version of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act
eliminates the sanctions in the original McKeon bill, it
maintains all of the reporting requirements, including a
particularly extensive set of requirements for schools exceeding
a defined affordability index. We cannot respond convincingly
to the concern reflected in legislation like this if we do
not discuss cost issues more candidly among ourselves.
Colleges
must have more forthright discussions about cost and pricing.
And such discussions cannot simply defend the status quo.
Instead, we must be willing to ask the hard question of whether
we can do our business differently in fundamental ways. Are
there cost standards on which we can agree? What services
should we provide our students, and which might we eliminate?
Can we achieve efficiencies through more extensive reliance
on consortia? Can we share libraries? Services? Faculty and
departments? Smith is part of a consortium of private colleges
and a public university -- one of the oldest
such consortia in the country -- in which many of these
conversations are ongoing. Many would agree that their effect
is not simply greater economy but enhanced quality.
The pressures
to reduce costs in higher education will only increase
over the next decade. Nationwide, enrollments are projected
to grow by about 2.5 million students by the year 2015. Not
only will the college population continue to grow; the
need for financial aid will increase at an even higher rate.
State governments, the federal government, and the general
public will share an urgent concern with access, affordability,
cost control, and productivity. As costs rise, our institutions
will also find themselves under financial pressure from
the increasing percentage that financial aid will compose
of our operating budgets. Both to address our own financial
pressures and to respond to external concern about the
expense of college, we in colleges and universities must
begin more candid and transparent discussions of cost and
price. Otherwise we will lose public trust on this critical
issue and run the risk of regulatory legislation that, while
it might increase productivity, would likely do so at the
expense of quality.
Before I leave the issue of
financial accountability, I need to say a word about endowment
management. Changes in investment opportunities -- the emergence of alternative
investments like hedge funds and private equity -- have
led a number of colleges and universities to question whether
traditional ways of managing their investments are as productive
as they might be. Seeking to increase returns, schools
with larger endowments have developed their own investments
offices, supplementing or supplanting the traditional work
of investment committees of boards of trustees. The
salaries and bonuses that such investment professionals command
seem to some constituencies grossly disproportionate to college
costs. A front-page story in the June 4, 2004, New
York Times reported the anger of a Harvard alumnus at the
money paid the five most highly compensated members of the
Harvard Management Company, two of whom made more than $35
million last year. The alumnus in question, who had
previously given $4 million to the university, complained, “The
managers of the endowment took home enough money last year
to send 4000 students to Harvard for a year.” At
the time of this writing, he was trying to organize alums
to withhold their donations, demanding -- you guessed
it -- greater accountability. His use of the term
is instructive for he is not simply asking Harvard to render
an account, but to render an account that satisfies him that
financial management compensation bears a just relationship
to college tuition costs.
While the use of
resources is perhaps the most important area in which the
many constituencies of colleges and universities expect accountability,
another increasingly important area of public scrutiny is
the admission process. The reason is similar. Admission to
college and university is a valuable good, seeming to offer
a passport to professional employment, affinity networks,
and economic security. Parents have an important investment
in admissions; so do governments concerned with opportunity
and with equity. The conflict about affirmative action in
admissions is fundamentally a conflict about equity and access.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education survey about public
attitudes toward college that reflected so high a degree
of confidence in higher education, respondents expressed
dissatisfaction with what they perceived as excess in three
areas -- athletics,
legacy admissions, and college costs. Significantly,
more respondents -- 75 percent -- disapproved of giving
admission preference to sons and daughters of alumni than
disapproved of giving preference to minority applicants -- 45
percent.
Admissions policies and procedures
in public universities, particularly selective public universities,
have been subject to detailed public scrutiny for more than
a decade. Concern about affirmative action in admissions
was the single most important factor motivating the development
and passage of California’s Proposition 209 and was the subject, of
course, of the two University of Michigan cases decided a
year ago by the Supreme Court. The extraordinary effort
that Michigan undertook to study the impact of its policies
on all students and to defend their educational value didn’t
simply influence the court’s decision; it raised appreciably
the level of public discourse about admissions, bringing
greater clarity and understanding to a vexed and important
subject.
Colleges and universities can
benefit a great deal from a public educated about admissions.
Particularly in today’s overheated climate in which parents and their
sons and daughters often experience excessive anxiety about
getting into a small group of highly selective schools, colleges
and universities need to talk more openly about their admissions
policies and practices or they will face increasing distrust. The
concern that the Chronicle’s survey reflects about
legacy admissions and the concern many have voiced about
admissions preferences for athletes are symptoms of a growing
disquiet. Public trust in the basic fairness of admissions
is critical for the higher education community. Greater
openness will help us achieve it.
At the same time, we also
need to turn down the competitive volume. The president of
a major liberal arts college was quoted about a year ago
in Time magazine, boasting that only four schools beat his
in “head to head,” competition
for students, that they were close to an even split with
a few others, and that “everyone else was in the rear-view
mirror.” Attitudes like these are not helpful. Although
we all want our students to feel that they are uniquely fortunate
in their admission to our college or university, we will
be better served as a higher education community if students
and their parents understand that, in fact, many good choices
exist for each student. Colleges and universities are
more similar than they are different. If we are honest
with ourselves, we must concede that size and location differentiate
us more strongly than unique programmatic advantage. What
students get from a college education depends most importantly
on what they put into it. The sense of unique and loyal
affiliation that many alumni feel for their college takes
shape in the course of their undergraduate experience like
a kind of imprinting. By a curious backward projection,
they assume they could not have had the same extraordinary
experience at any other college, but, in fact, it’s
very likely that they would have formed a similar loyalty.
As
colleges compete with one another for students, for resources,
and for prestige, they rely increasingly on marketing techniques.
There is a risk in these techniques of eroding credibility.
Wanting to attract minority students, for example, some
of us may include pictures in our admissions materials, leading
students to think our colleges are more diverse than in
fact they are. Those of us from residential private colleges
may rely extensively on metaphors of connection and belonging,
leading students to expect a more family-like community
than we offer. By trying too exclusively to sell our institutions
rather than represent them, we fail in educating the public.
As a higher education community, we need to work together
to help parents and their sons and daughters to become
more educated consumers of our products. This will require
more transparency.
I’ve already talked about the controversy about admissions
and the need for greater transparency in our description
of admissions policies and practices. The next major
issue that I believe will emerge as a subject of public scrutiny
is financial aid. As college costs rise, and as increasing
numbers of students receive aid, both consumers and the government
will insist upon disclosure of aid policies and practices.
As a higher education community, we must anticipate this
issue. Colleges and universities have been cautious in regard
to discussions among themselves about financial aid since
the 1991 antitrust lawsuit against the so-called “overlap
group” of 23 selective colleges. While the set
of restrictions that colleges adopted as a consequence of
the suit may serve individual consumers well in encouraging
colleges to compete with each other in the financial aid
packages they offer, it has not served higher education well
as a whole in regard to the very issue with which the public
is most concerned -- cost. It obscures financial aid packaging
in a way that keeps consumers from understanding why they
pay what they pay, and it encourages colleges to compete
for top students in a bidding war that takes resources away
from the most needy. The time has come for a more open discussion
of financial aid. To begin this public conversation,
we must be more open among ourselves, pressing on the boundaries
of what may be too cautious an interpretation of federal
antitrust restrictions.
A third area in which we can
profit from more candid discussion is the assessment of quality,
in the sense of the comparative value of a college’s or university’s academic
program. Colleges’ and universities’ own
assessment of quality is largely an internal matter, conducted
through the peer review process of accrediting bodies. There
is little attempt to communicate the results of this process
externally in anything but the most summary terms. Accreditation
is therefore less effective than it might be in providing
assurance of public accountability. As a consequence, we
are now seeing a clumsy attempt on the part of the federal
government to insert itself into the accrediting process
in the higher education reauthorization act. A more public
accrediting process might forestall such misguided attempts.
For
its assessment of comparative quality, the public depends
upon commercially motivated rankings by publications like
U.S. News and World Report or any of a large number of
college guides. I will not spend much time describing what
is wrong with these rankings from the point of view of
the higher education community because I am sure you are
familiar with the arguments. If only the relative quality
of institutions could change as quickly as that of sports
teams. Institutional change is a long process. Furthermore,
it is misleading to represent the relative strengths of a
very diverse set of institutions with a single ordinal ranking
as if they were dishwashers or mid-size sedans. Yet attacks
on U.S. News and World Report and similar rankings miss
the point that they are filling a vacuum. Can higher
education itself, or some trusted partner like a foundation,
or higher education association, create a template for
a data bank that would enable public constituencies to compare
institutional characteristics and measures of performance?
State
college and university systems often develop comparative
measures of performance of schools within their systems;
when I was at the University of California, I relied extensively
upon comparative data provided by the Office of the President
as a useful benchmark in assessing Berkeley’s performance
in a large range of categories. However, such data
enables one to make comparisons only within a single system,
and much of it is publicly available only upon request. The
ranking of graduate programs by the National Council on Research
provides a national, public, and highly reputable measure
of quality, but one that involves only graduate programs.
There
would be many challenges in such a project -- deciding
which indicators to use, making sure the data was comparable. We
also would have to figure out a way to assess the progress
of students toward a degree as they move among institutions. The
Business-Higher Education Forum describes a trend they call
the deinstitutionalization of higher education, by which
they mean the increasing tendency of students to take courses
from several institutions before graduating. Today,
60 percent of undergraduates attend more than one institution
in the course of earning their degree, and 40 percent of
students who transfer do so across state lines. Our
traditional measures of productivity -- graduation rates,
time to degree -- do not capture such students and therefore
underestimate the contribution made by institutions that
students attend en route to graduation. As pressure
mounts to increase degree production, we have to make sure
we are measuring it right.
A national data bank would help
us do so by accomplishing several things. It would provide
the foundation for a more educated public discussion of
measures of quality in higher education, it would help students
and their parents make good choices, and it would deflect
legislative initiatives to impose misguided accountability
requirements.
Data, of course, tells only
part of the story. We also need to lead a fuller public discussion
of what constitutes quality in higher education, why it costs
what it does, and the trade-offs involved. Ideally, we should
make a partner of the media in this conversation. And to
conduct it credibly and well, we need to be willing to let
down our spin. Because we all want to use the media to forward
our individual institutional agendas, we can sometimes
be less candid than we might be about issues in higher education
where candor might serve the entire community well.
With
funding from the Ford Foundation, a new national commission
is grappling with issues of accountability in higher education.
Not surprisingly, one of the divisive issues among members
of the commission is whether colleges and universities
should set their own standards or be answerable to standards
set by legislatures. No one in higher education welcomes
further government regulation; the current bill reauthorizing
the higher education act includes a number of clumsy and
misguided measures.
Many trends in higher education
will increase demands for accountability. As the cost and
value of higher education rise, as the growth in student
population strains capacity, as students move more frequently
among institutions, as colleges diversify their income streams,
pressure for regulation will increase. In order to avoid
costly and intrusive regulation, we need to make our internal
systems of assessment more transparent to the public. Once
you enter a climate dominated by demands for accountability,
you have already experienced an erosion of public trust.
As educators, we need to build on the confidence that the
public has in our institutions. We will all benefit from
a more educated public. In order to develop such a public,
we must communicate more openly about the issues of greatest
public concern -- cost,
pricing, and value, and admissions, financial aid, as well
as access. This, in many cases, will not be easy. We are
out of habit with candor, but it has never been more critical
or more urgent.
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