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The following is a response to Alexander McCormick's article, “Here's Looking at You: Transparency, Institutional Self-Presentation, and the Public Interest,” in the November/December 2010 issue of Change.
I am Ed Klonoski, president of Charter Oak State College in Connecticut and the current chair of the executive committee that manages Transparency by Design (TbD). The TbD project was created by the Presidents' Forum of Excelsior College, is supported by the Lumina Foundation for Education, and operates in partnership with the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET).
I would like to thank Change and Alex McCormick for carefully reviewing these college accountability efforts. All of us pursuing clearer and more transparent systems owe a debt to both Change and McCormick.
That is why I want to continue the conversation by commenting on several passages from the analysis of Transparency by Design (TbD).
Passage 1 reads as follows:
TbD describes itself as “a consortium of regionally-accredited, adult-serving distance higher education institutions.” Participating institutions run the gamut of control (private for-profit, private not-for-profit, and public) and degree level (two-year, four-year, and exclusively graduate). A precise definition of TbD's eligibility pool is neither provided nor readily inferred. (p. 3)
In fact, our criteria for institutional eligibility are available on our website: an institution must possess regional accreditation; serve adult students; and operate some programs “at a distance,” which includes online, hybrid, competency-based, and flexible learning options. According to the US Dept. of Ed's website, <http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/Search.aspx?6d6f64653d31267264743d31322f33302f3230313020353a30363a303420504d>, there are 2961 regionally accredited institutions in the US. Based on 2006–2007 data, the latest available from the National Center for Educational Statistics (<http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=80>) on the percentage of institutions offering credit-granting distance education courses (65 percent), approximately 1925 institutions are eligible for TbD membership.
Passage 2:
TbD and VSA report student responses to a small subset of questions from the NSSE survey − 15 for TbD and 23 for VSA out of roughly 85 questions about the student experience. They also report results for seniors only, thereby excluding potentially important information about the first-year experience at the participating institutions.
As Transparency by Design is focused on adult learners, we chose to use a subset of the NSSE questions most relevant to their learning experiences. And we chose to give a snapshot of “seniors” (or graduating undergraduate students) because many adult students do not start and finish their degrees at the same institution, and many of our programs that serve adults do not have first-time, full-time freshman to include in the NSSE sample. At another time we should explore the fact that IPEDS numbers exclude more than half of collegiate learners by focusing on only first-time, full-time degree seekers.
Transparency by Design is a voluntary system of accountability, and our primary focus is on providing students with data to help them be informed consumers of higher education. We are less concerned with the first-year experience and more concerned with program outcomes, which we feel are of primary interest to prospective adult students.
Passage 3:
TbD does not provide any reference-group information, but it does report institution size and characteristics of enrolled students. (p. 4)
The institutional profiles on College Choices for Adults do provide institutional missions and academic models. We believe that other categorizations, such as Carnegie status, are not significant to our students.
Passage 4:
When the percentage summary approach is selected, a reasonable expectation would be to make the basis for collapsing responses readily available to users, so that we are informed and knowledgeable about what the numbers represent. At present neither TbD nor VSA provide this information. (p. 5)
McCormick is correct, and we have adjusted this on the College Choices for Adults by adding information to the definitions for these data items.
Passage 5:
Only TbD has a rudimentary comparison feature that produces a side-by-side display of results for a specified pair [my emphasis] of institutions. (p. 5)
This is a small point of pride for us (and the web development team), and the comparison function on the College Choices for Adults website has been expanded to allow students to choose up to three institutions to compare. The user interface has been improved as well. I should point out that the comparisons are not “specified” by the site; instead, students choose which institutions or programs they would like to compare.
Passage 6:
A similar logic applies to TbD, albeit for a far smaller and more narrowly defined group of institutions. While TbD might be dismissed for its small size and hodgepodge of institutional types, it represents an aggressive move by a group of institutions that struggle for legitimacy against mainstream higher education (and also against the largest institution that serves their self-proclaimed market niche – the University of Phoenix – which is notably absent from the group). It seems clear that they are using the initiative to make a strong statement about their members' commitment to transparency – one that might invite questions about the information that mainstream institutions make available.
We appreciate McCormick's characterization of us “aggressive,” which we take as a compliment. But our membership requirements are more broadly based than he supposes (see the comments on Passage 1). Our membership numbers are not larger because many institutions struggle to make the commitment to publishing our one set of required data – program-level learning outcomes, measures of those outcomes, and recent results of those measures.
While that difficulty has slowed institutional adoption, it is at the heart of what makes TbD valuable in the transparency arena. We accept the challenge of encouraging institutions to make a commitment to measuring program outcomes and reporting them to the general public. In that spirit, we again express our appreciation for the attention you have offered to our efforts, and we provide these comments in that same spirit.
(TbD's website, College Choices for Adults, can be found at <www.collegechoiceforadults.org>.)
-Ed Klonoski
President, Charter Oak State College
New Britain, CT
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