September-October 2007

The heat is on. After a year of public hearings and not-so-private debate, the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education last year proposed six sweeping recommendations to improve “the less than inspiring realities of postsecondary education” in the United States (see A Test of Leadership, Resources). One key recommendation was creation of a “consumer-friendly information database” on issues such as cost, price, and student success, to enable prospective students to compare colleges and universities in order to make informed decisions about where to attend college. According to Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who formed the commission, the goal is to provide answers to the kinds of questions typically asked when consumers make major purchases: How much does it cost? What are the financing options? How does the “product” perform compared to others like it? 

Reasonable people may disagree about whether something akin to a J.D. Powers automobile “rating” system can do justice to the multidimensional performance of postsecondary institutions and their students. But what is all but certain is that some form of a common reporting template will be coming soon to an institution near you.   

Public reporting about various aspects of institutional performance is long overdue. But as with any new initiative, the technology can get ahead of the public’s capacity to use it responsibly and productively. To maximize the benefits and minimize the possible mischief of making public heretofore unreported information about student and institutional performance, I offer some observations about the appropriate and inappropriate uses of a common reporting template that makes institutional-performance data public. 

How We Got Here
Some brief background may be helpful. The National Commission on the Future of Higher Education met six times between October 2005 and August 2006, conducted two public hearings, commissioned several papers, and invited testimony on selected topics. One recurring theme in its deliberations was higher education’s aversion to transparency and accountability.

Anticipating some stern words from the commission, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) released a discussion paper at the commission’s April 2006 public hearing entitled “Improving Student Learning in Higher Education Through Better Accountability and Assessment.” The NASULGC paper set forth some principles for a “Voluntary System of Accountability” (VSA)—an effort to provide timely, accurate, institution-specific information about costs, learning, and other educational outcomes via a common reporting format—which the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) subsequently endorsed. (For a description of the VSA, go to http://www.nasulgc.org/vsa-8-31-06.pdf) A presidential advisory committee and six task forces and working groups made up of representatives from NASULGC and AASCU member institutions immediately began to design the accountability system.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Independent College and Universities is also developing a template that will allow its member schools to present comparable information—as is the Association of American Universities, which announced that its members will identify performance indicators to be reported publicly at some future point. While the Education Department’s  National Center for Education Statistics considered expanding its College Opportunities Online Locator (COOL) Web site to include institutional-performance indicators, the associations’ timely initiatives make this less likely.

Now that colleges and universities are on the verge of becoming more transparent about their results, what’s the worry? Well, to balance the demands of public interest and institutional autonomy, we need to determine the legitimate applications of common-reporting templates and ameliorate to the extent possible any problematic aspects of making data public. It is especially important to discourage unacceptable uses of information.

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