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Given the importance of the upcoming Presidential election, not only to the nation as a whole but to higher education, Change solicited a set of letters to the President-elect from a group of higher-education leaders: Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings; Molly Broad, president of the American Council on Education; Sir John Daniel, president of the Commonwealth of Learning and former vice-chancellor (CEO) of the UK Open University; Johnnetta Cole, former president of Spelman College; Richael Young, an undergraduate from the College of San Mateo; Gerald Graff, president of the Modern Language Association; and Robert Connor, president of the Teagle Foundation. From their various perspectives, each offers a view of the critical issues facing higher education in the coming four years and suggests what role the next President, as well as we, might play in addressing them. The letters are followed by a longer statement from the heads of the coordinating and governing boards in the states (known collectively as the SHEEOs) that addresses the same questions.
—Margaret A. Miller
To the next President of the United States:
In recent decades, the price of college has risen far faster than family income, inflation, even health care. Today, you can buy a fully loaded Honda Civic for less than the average cost of one year at a four-year private college.
When 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs require postsecondary education, it’s unacceptable that 90 percent of low-income students fail to earn a degree by the time they reach their mid-twenties—especially as our country diversifies and becomes a majority-minority nation.
But until very recently, few were talking about the dramatic rise in tuition or the sad disparity in opportunity. The bipartisan Higher Education Commission I created three years ago shed new light on the issues of affordability, accountability, and access.
First, access. We all know that students will not succeed in college if they lack the necessary educational foundation. We must increase access to higher education by better aligning K-12 curricula with college and workforce standards. This is a no-brainer.
We must also provide better and more convenient postsecondary opportunities for adults and other nontraditional students. Thirty-two million Americans who started a college education have never finished. Our community colleges have taken the lead in providing these opportunities on the students’ terms. The rest of higher education must emulate their convenience, adaptability, and affordability.
Which brings me back to cost. Even if students are academically prepared for college, they often cannot pay for it or are so burdened with debt that it haunts their future. Financial barriers are keeping nearly two million low- and middle-income qualified high school graduates from attending college. Five years ago, the average debt load approached $20,000 for a bachelor’s degree recipient. It’s worse today.
At the federal level, we are doing our part. We have increased the availability of free need-based scholarships to help students pay for college. Student Pell grantees in 2008 will benefit from the largest increase in their annual award in 30 years.
States and institutions must also play a role by increasing efficiency and productivity to reduce tuition. Only when institutions address the root causes of rising costs will more people enjoy greater access to the American Dream.
Next, we must simplify and streamline our broken, Byzantine financial aid system. It’s as if we are trying to keep people out of college, not welcome them in. I urged a dramatic overhaul, but Congress has failed to act.
Finally, in choosing a college, students and families need much more information than they currently have. They expect answers to questions such as, Will I graduate within four years? Will I get a job in the field I majored in? Am I going to have the skills I need to succeed? Decisions about postsecondary education are among the most important and costly that individuals make. They deserve to know what they’re getting.
To remain competitive in the global economy, we must help at least 20 million more Americans earn a college degree or postsecondary certificate by 2025. I hope you will declare that by 2012, we will be at least halfway toward achieving this goal.
Godspeed.
—Margaret Spellings
U.S. Secretary of Education
To the next President of the United States:
As you begin your term, our country faces a clear set of national and international challenges. I write on behalf of the leaders of more than 3,000 colleges and universities to convey our shared sense of urgency and purpose in the face of these challenges and our commitment to help you find constructive solutions.
You and your administration will face four main challenges as you lead our country in the coming years:
• Preserving peace and security in an increasingly interdependent world,
• Revitalizing and sustaining a strong economy,
• Expanding educational opportunity, and
• Maintaining America’s research and innovation edge.
Some of America’s greatest strengths come from the historic partnership between higher education and government that has lasted for more than six decades. Since World War II, that partnership, reinforced by the private sector, has opened the doors of opportunity for millions of veterans and other needy students, built the finest scientific enterprise in history, and improved the skills of the work force.
As the country prepares to enter a new decade, we must reinvigorate that partnership. Over-regulation and a lack of sustained funding in key areas have frayed it, and your leadership is essential to its repair. Our colleges and universities have always responded to such leadership. They will do so again during your administration.
In this letter, I present an agenda for you and for higher education that will draw forth the best our institutions can offer the nation. I hope you will make this agenda your own. Our greatest presidents have known that America’s progress depends on a fully engaged community of learning.
Preserving Peace and Security in an Increasingly Interdependent World
Finding ways to protect our national interests while promoting regional and international cooperation is a task of preeminent importance for the United States. In a world now threatened by terror, where people and nations are increasingly divided by military, political, economic, religious, and racial strife, it is imperative that we diminish the risk of wider conflict while maintaining the security of the nation.
For nearly a century, America’s colleges and universities, resisting a tradition of isolationism deeply ingrained in our nation’s history, have emphasized the study of foreign cultures. During this period, higher education has also played a central role in developing public understanding of economic, defense, and foreign policy issues; in preparing diplomats and other experts in foreign and military affairs; and in providing critical analysis for national decision-making.
To help formulate the nation’s foreign policy and defend our interests abroad, every modern president has drawn heavily on the resource of higher education. I ask now that you:
• Support the strengthening of programs dedicated to international studies and research—including area studies centers and teaching at all levels about foreign countries and cultures.
• Encourage exchanges that enable Americans to study and teach abroad and students and scholars from other countries to attend American institutions.
• Expand the teaching and study of foreign languages in our schools, colleges, and universities.
• Increase the investment by the Department of Defense to lead the world in research that will help develop the technologies and strategies needed to protect the nation from a broad range of security threats.
Revitalizing and Sustaining a Strong Economy
We currently face a time of economic uncertainty, marked by wide swings in the stock market, soaring energy prices, mounting budget and trade deficits, shrinking economic growth rates, and the loss of important markets to foreign competitors.
As major sources of discovery, innovation, and invention, colleges and universities can help lead in the renewal of our advanced, knowledge-based economy. To do so effectively, we in higher education must translate discoveries into useful products by creating relationships with industry that will supplement basic scientific and economic research. At the same time, we must also increase our efforts to see that we are producing highly skilled graduates for the work force of the next decade—this includes partnerships with the nation’s schools to see that all students are well prepared for the rigors of college.
There are a number of ways you could facilitate higher education’s efforts on behalf of the economy, among them:
• Undertake new and dramatically expanded initiatives to provide educational access to high-school dropouts, displaced workers, and returning military personnel.
• Respond to the nation’s need for more scientists and engineers by expanding federal support for graduate and undergraduate student financial assistance in these fields, as well as funding for faculty research.
• Initiate programs to add to the supply and improve the training of teachers at all levels, particularly mathematics at the K-12 level and in high-technology and applied fields in the life and physical sciences.
• Reinforce existing national programs for short-term employment training by providing tuition assistance for dislocated and displaced workers at community colleges.
Expand Educational Opportunity
For more than four decades, the partnership between higher education and government proved a powerful engine for expanding educational opportunity. Financial aid programs—supported by the federal government, state governments, and institutions—have opened doors to millions of students, transforming and revitalizing our colleges and universities and diversifying the leadership of our society.
Over the last decade, however, we have seen the re-emergence of barriers that threaten the progress made in equalizing opportunity. We have seen dramatic fluctuations in state and federal support. Rising tuitions, growing student-debt burdens, persistent participation gaps, increased dropout rates—these are all signs of a decline in access to higher education. Such ominous trends come at a time when the knowledge economy demands an ever more highly skilled workforce.
We must strengthen the access partnership to expand opportunities at all levels of our educational system. To that end, I ask that you do the following:
• Intensify federal efforts to support disadvantaged students in completing school and pursuing a college education.
• Increase funds for grant assistance to needy students, particularly the Pell Grant Program.
• Enhance tax incentives to boost college access and expand tax-free alternatives that allow parents and families to save systematically for their children’s education.
Maintain America’s Research and Innovation Edge
While Americans have long enjoyed a high standard of living relative to other nations, our country continues to struggle with serious challenges, including environmental deterioration, crumbling urban infrastructures, uncertain energy supplies, inadequate healthcare delivery, poverty, hunger, and disease.
In the past, academic and research expertise at America’s colleges and universities has provided the solutions that have led to dramatic breakthroughs in healthcare, environmental protection, transportation, nutrition, and food production. Not only does university research solve problems—the process itself, by engaging both undergraduate and graduate students, helps educate the next generation of scientists for even greater discovery.
But America’s research and innovation prowess faces growing challenges from abroad, especially from emerging nations such as China and India. To maintain our global leadership, we must revitalize our research and innovation capacity. To do that, we must:
• Continue to increase funding for basic research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and other agencies.
• Increase funding in areas of national need, including energy self-sufficiency, climate change, environmental studies, and homeland security.
• Strengthen the system of technology transfer in order to encourage the transformation of cutting-edge basic research into commercial products and medical advances that benefit society.
We in higher education look forward to working with you to advance this agenda and enhance the important partnerships among our colleges and universities, the federal government, and the private sector. Together we can meet the challenges of the next decade and make great strides in providing the solutions to change society and the world.
—Molly Corbett Broad
President
American Council on Education
To the next President of the United States:
I write as a friendly foreigner to urge that you act to strengthen and sustain higher education in the United States. You might ask: Why, with the stack of pressing issues on your desk, should you worry about higher education, where there is only a limited role for the federal government?
In his book The Post-American World, the editor of Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria, shows that although the U.S. is not declining, other countries are rising and challenging its preeminence in many fields. A long-term change in America’s relative position was always predictable, but, because of the previous administration’s inept economic management and callous diplomatic incompetence, the shift is happening more quickly than anyone expected. In this environment, America must nourish its strengths. Two of these, which complement each other well, are higher education and the armed forces. I offer you no advice on the military, except to suggest that you trade your predecessor’s motto, “In arms we trust,” for a more effective blend of hard and soft power.
The tremendous worldwide influence of U.S. higher education gives the country an abundant source of soft power. It is not only America’s research universities that the world envies. Your real treasure is the diversity of a system that gives opportunities for tertiary education and training to a large proportion of the population from all socioeconomic groups. Other countries are keen to emulate U.S. higher education, using your model of the community college, your mix of public and private institutions, and your huge array of available programs.
How can you, then, as President, strengthen the system and enhance its international influence? I suggest action on three fronts.
Step 1, which will no doubt inspire your stance in international affairs generally, is to show that America supports multi-lateral approaches and can work effectively within them. At a time when Americans are touchy about the apparent decline in their international influence, this will take guts—but your courage will be well repaid, not only in goodwill, but in real influence. Although UNESCO might seem an odd place to start, it gives you a platform to show—in education, culture, communications, and science—that the era of “my way or the highway”-style diplomacy is over. As a recent article in the German magazine Der Spiegel noted: “With this attitude the U.S. often finds itself as isolated as only North Korea and Myanmar are in other forums... . Sometimes it seems that America only rejoined UNESCO to blow up the whole organisation from the inside.”
In a world where demand for higher education is booming, where the international movement of students will triple in a decade, and where e-learning is challenging the notion of borders, America has nothing to fear and everything to gain by leading the development of international rules of interaction. Where the previous administration fanned the embers of xenophobia and paranoia, you must lead the world’s most multicultural nation to engage confidently with other countries—a much more natural
stance.
Step 2 is to work from the good principle, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Just as other countries begin to accept that universities perform better autonomously, with a light touch from the state, America is moving in the opposite direction through attempts in Congress to suck the accreditation system more deeply into the federal ambit. This will do damage. The current regional and national systems of accreditation may not be perfect, but the federal government should push to correct their perceived weaknesses rather than launch a hostile takeover.
For example, robust action—including legislation—by your administration to suppress degree mills would be very welcome. These bogus operations, and the equally phony accreditation mills behind which they hide, undermine the credibility of U.S. accreditation and have a negative influence on higher education worldwide. Through the Bologna process, Europeans are trying to raise the quality and standards of higher education across 46 countries in Europe. They face an uphill struggle because of the hodgepodge of national legislation. The U.S., already well ahead on this front, should now lead the international community in freezing these fraudulent and dangerous scams out of their safe havens around the globe. A war on degree mills is winnable, presents no risk of collateral damage, and would earn America international plaudits.
Step 3 is to achieve a better balance between the recruitment of foreign talent for the U.S. economy and the strengthening of universities in developing countries. Under current trends, including the external dimension of the Bologna process, more students are becoming global nomads. This increase in mobility is a force for peace. However, poorer countries lament the loss of their brightest people through brain-drains to the U.S. and Europe. Thirty percent of Africa’s tertiary-trained professionals live outside the continent, which loses about 20,000 professionals annually. Because the U.S. economy needs a steady influx of trained workers, it is in America’s interest to strengthen universities in developing countries as well as to promote mobility. It could do this by encouraging U.S. universities to help local universities in poorer countries develop solid Ph.D. programs in situ, which would allow more people to train as researchers without going abroad. Substantially increasing the number of doctorates awarded in these countries would provide a pool of highly qualified people to contribute to their national development without decreasing the overall availability of talent to the U.S.
This would be an excellent and much-appreciated form of soft power. What better way for America to extend its long-term influence for good than by nurturing the universities across the world whose graduates will create the future? To adapt the well-known Chinese proverb: if you educate foreigners in the U.S., they will benefit for a lifetime; if you nurture foreign universities, the benefits will extend to future generations.
—Sir John Daniel
President and Chief Executive Officer
Commonwealth of Learning
Former Vice-Chancellor, UK Open University
To the next President of the United States:
As I began to write this letter, I thought about the words of one of my sheroes, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, a daughter of slaves who went on to found one of our nation’s historically black colleges, known today as Bethune Cookman University. Dr. Bethune said, “Education is the prime need of the hour.” What was true during her time is no less so today. Among our nation’s critical issues, education occupies a special place, and I urge you to make it one of your highest domestic priorities.
Education should be viewed as a seamless process that begins early in a child’s life and continues through primary and secondary schooling and into the tertiary or college level, and then into a post-baccalaureate stage. However, as someone who has served for many years as a college professor and president, I want to focus my comments on higher education.
To have or not to have a college education has definitive consequences. College graduates earn on average twice as much as high school graduates their first year out of college and throughout their careers. That impact ripples through the entire economy and society. Because college graduates earn more, their families enjoy greater economic security. They pay the taxes that support better schools, hospitals, and cultural institutions. And every community needs more teachers, physicians and other college-educated professionals. Research indicates, moreover, that college graduates are more likely to play active roles in the civic life of their communities—and I am proud to say that graduates of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) tend to be especially active in community and civic affairs.
The importance of a college education has national dimensions as well. We are no longer living in an industrial economy that needs a low-skilled workforce to operate equipment on routinized production lines. Ours is a knowledge-based, highly technological economy. And that economy requires a workforce with sophisticated skills. Jobs follow well-educated pools of labor. So we must prepare our students today—all of our students—for a more demanding job market, whether they go to college or not.
Given that I have had the honor to serve as president of the only two historically black colleges for women in our nation, Spelman College in Atlanta and Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, you will not be surprised that I urge you to give very special attention to the education of people of color. By 2050, these populations will be nearly fifty percent of our nation’s total population. Yet in 2005, African Americans represented only fifteen and Hispanic Americans only ten percent of the students enrolled in college. Both groups’ academic performance is further weakened by lagging graduation rates. They are 20 percent of those in college but less than 12 percent of college graduates.
Mr. President, I also urge you to do everything you can to eliminate the financial barriers to a good education. There was a time in our country when young people could work their way through college. Those days are behind us. College tuitions are so high that they cannot be covered by full-time adult jobs, much less student employment. This is why I hope you will give priority to helping students, especially low- and moderate-income students, pay for the good college education they need. I also hope you will support efforts to restore the purchasing power of Pell Grants, the largest national education assistance program. Please see if elite institutions with endowments measured in the billions can be persuaded to use some of the income from those endowments to further the education of students who cannot afford the full cost of college.
Finally, Mr. President, please make sure that our nation gives America’s HBCUs the support they have earned. Today, as in years past, these institutions provide an educational home to many students who have been shortchanged by the public schools but flourish in the small-college environments and social support systems HBCUs provide for their students. In an age of escalating tuitions, theirs are substantially lower than those of comparable institutions, and they have higher average graduation rates than the average African-American graduation rates of majority institutions. HBCUs have served their students and their country well. They deserve your support.
We must invest as a nation in proven educational approaches and foster an atmosphere in which new ideas can be tested and, if they work, expanded. In that spirit, the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoken a few months before he was inaugurated, offer sound counsel: “The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. Take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
—Johnnetta B. Cole
President emerita
Spelman College and
Bennett College for Women
To the next President of the United States:
No one hears the story of why it takes a student six years to graduate from college. You do not hear about the student body president and promising leader who had to drop out of school mid-semester because of a family tragedy, and you won't hear that he has returned to school. But virtually any community college student has some such inspiring story to tell.
A community college has the most diverse student body of any postsecondary institution. Each student comes in with a different background, a different hope for the future, and a different reason for why a community college is the mechanism for getting there. There is the forty-year-old woman who has come back to finish the college education she started twenty years ago; there is the recent high school graduate whose family cannot afford to send him to a four-year college; there is the thirty-five-year-old man who was recently laid off from work; there is the high school student taking college classes in order to fulfill high school requirements; there is the fifty-four-year-old man who is there for the sole purpose of personal enrichment; there is the high school dropout who has no choice but to begin at a community college; there is the single mother looking to get a two-year degree in order to make a better life for herself and her children.
But this diverse group does have something in common: most struggle with juggling school and work and family, typically staying awake till the wee hours of the morning studying because the kids were up late or they had to take an extra shift. You have never seen perseverance like this before.
So what is my story? I started at community college my sophomore year of high school. I had been home schooled; my family and I had lost confidence in our local public high schools and did not have the money to send me to a private school. Home schooling offered me flexibility and inspired creativity, but it did not allow for interaction and dialogue with my peers and teachers. In order to satisfy that need, I took my first college class at College of San Mateo at the age of fourteen.
I fell in love with my college and quickly involved myself in its clubs and activities. When I graduated from high school, I was elected co-president of the College of San Mateo’s honor society and student trustee of its district board, a position in which I had the opportunity to represent the 40,000 students who enroll in our tri-college district each year. Just this month I was elected president of the Student Senate for the California Community Colleges, which makes me the official voice for 2.6 million students. Since I first came to College of San Mateo I have changed from girl to young woman, from naïve follower to passionate leader, and from ordinary volunteer to aspiring visionary.
My story is not the only one of unexpected—and unlikely—achievement and success. Rather, I am one of millions whose life was changed drastically by my community college.
The benefits of a college education become more apparent in my life each day. All of the skills that my professors have taught me—to write, listen, speak, manage my time, share ideas, do research, and think critically—I use daily. College has prepared me to take full advantage of the opportunities I have, including an internship this summer in Washington, D.C., with a California congresswoman. More than anything, I have been given my voice at community college and now can give voice to others.
Community colleges are charged with being all things to all people. This is to the benefit of the diverse student body, but it is a great challenge for the college. Community colleges provide more than any other educational institution—programs and services for first-generation college students, veterans, the disabled, honors students, athletes, and more—yet they are funded the least per student. They have made it their trade to squeeze dimes out of nickels and make miracles a daily reality.
But our nation’s lack of commitment to the community colleges’ mission of providing accessible, affordable, high-quality education to at-risk students is leaving those colleges less able to reach out and support the people who need it most. Our country needs to make it a national priority to restore and enhance funding for community colleges and to increase the financial assistance available to their students. Our nation will reap the long-term benefits—a diverse, educated, and civically engaged population—that will make our investment worthwhile. Please give our students and colleges the support they need in order to enable students to find their voices, as I have found mine.
—Richael Young
Student
College of San Mateo
To the next President of the United States:
The worldwide preeminence of American higher education over the last half-century is due in large part to the generous federal and state financial support that poured into universities after World War II. Government investment in university research was richly repaid, since it contributed greatly to America’s postwar productivity and affluence. At the same time, the expansion of universities, which opened their doors for the first time to new social groups, vastly increased the opportunity and upward mobility of American citizens.
The American dream, in short, has been closely linked to the health of the American campus. That health is now seriously endangered by the steady withdrawal of public financial support from higher education, a trend that started in the 1970s and has reached crisis proportions with the economic downturn that has lingered since 2001. State and federal support as a percentage of public universities’ budgets today is a fraction of what it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
No institution can lose so much of its support without serious consequences, and the impact on public universities has been devastating. The loss of governmental support has contributed to the dramatic increase in college tuition, which reverses the earlier gains in economic opportunity for the many who now can no longer afford college. The lost support also explains a less widely publicized trend: the shrinking of the permanent faculty as campuses rely increasingly on poorly paid part-time instructors, who at some institutions now comprise over 70 percent of the instructional staff.
It is urgent, then, that as President-elect you lead a national initiative to reinvest in higher education, which means reinvesting in America’s future and in a true chance at equal opportunity for all.
If you lead such an initiative, a number of promising recent trends suggest that you can count on us in colleges and universities to hold up our part of the bargain. Over the last decades there has been an unprecedented surge of interest in teaching on American college campuses, particularly undergraduate teaching. This focus on teaching is driven by an attempt to reach all students, not only the elite minority, and to hold ourselves to higher performance standards than those of the past. As part of this effort, higher education has been moving beyond the old conflict between research and teaching toward a new realization that the research we conduct in libraries and laboratories has tremendous untapped potential to enrich undergraduate teaching.
Another good reason for reinvesting in higher education is the national effort underway to bridge the gulf between the university and the schools. To a greater extent than ever, universities are focusing on teacher education and on partnerships with primary and secondary schools in order to create a seamless, continuous path from pre-K to college. Creating such a continuity is critical, because few things harm American students’ chances to attend college or to succeed there more than the disconnect between high school and college, which takes a special toll on students from low-income families. Though much remains to be done, we can realistically envision a day when the university and the high school represent one culture rather than separate and estranged ones.
One direction I urge you to avoid, however, in helping us build bridges between the university and the high schools would be to extend to higher education the concept of accountability that has been applied to primary and secondary schools under the No Child Left Behind Act. It is certainly legitimate to hold universities accountable for the education we provide, but the measures used to evaluate students’ performance and our own need to be constructive rather than punitive, and broadly rather than narrowly conceived. Whether in high school or college, the measure of a good education is its development of broad critical-thinking capacities, not the kinds of skills and information that can be reduced to scores on multiple-choice tests.
To grasp this point is also to recognize that humanities education is as crucial to national well-being as is training in the sciences and mathematics. That this recognition has waned in recent decades is suggested by the fact that funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has fallen from about S400 million in 1979 (adjusted for inflation) to $140 million today. But more than ever, we need humanistically educated scientists, engineers, and doctors, as well as public officials and other citizens, who are not only technically proficient but capable of seeing the world in ways that challenge local and parochial perspectives. Our nation’s recent history might have been very different, both in our domestic economic policies and our military adventures abroad, had the American electorate been better trained in the critical habits of mind taught by the humanities and in the wider perspective gained from the study of the languages and cultures of the world.
So, I repeat: the health of the nation depends on the strength of higher education and its close continuity with the schools. If ever there were a time to reinvest in higher education, that time is now.
—Gerald Graff
President
Modern Language Association of America
To the next President of the United States:
I believe that higher education will become a testing ground for the philosophy of government that your administration will follow. In particular, in the next administration’s dealings with higher education, it will be presented with an opportunity to break out of the sterile antithesis between government mandates and the unfettered operation of the market. Insofar as the federal government allows colleges and universities freedom and flexibility in how they carry out and evaluate their work, it will be creating a model that could apply in many other areas over the next few years.
The previous administration pushed accreditors to set standards for collegiate learning, and its Commission on the Future of Higher Education strongly recommended methods for evaluating that learning. Under Congressional and other pressure, it backed away from such an intrusion of federal regulation into higher education. Secretary of Education Spellings was right, I believe, to point to the urgent need to improve student learning but wise to finally recognize the importance of maintaining American higher education’s distinctive independence and autonomy. Her decision put responsibility for the systematic improvement of student learning squarely in the court of colleges and universities.
Will colleges and universities meet that responsibility? The immediate response has been positive and should be built upon. Many institutions, encouraged by accreditors, are now making efforts to introduce processes of continuous improvement in student learning. In addition, leaders of two national organizations have set forth broad principles and recommended specific actions in a widely circulated statement New Leadership for Student Learning and Accountability (http://www.chea.org/pdf/2008.01.30_New_Leadership_Statement.pdf, or http://www.teaglefoundation.org/learning/pdf/20080130_newleadership.pdf). The statement insists on ambitious goals for student learning, transparency, and rigorous assessment—in short, a genuinely educational form of accountability. Many institutions and organizations are now recognizing the importance of these principles and taking action to put them into practice.
For this momentum to reach an even higher level, I suggest a White House Conference on Success in College. Access, equity, and affordability will surely be part of the conference’s agenda, but its work must not stop there. What happens after students arrive at college is as important as getting in. That is why it is crucial that the conference spotlight the need for processes of continuous, systematic improvement in student learning at every college and university in the country.
The leaders of these institutions need to hear that message from you and to know that they will be expected at subsequent White House conferences to show what they are achieving. Better than anyone else, you can convey how important it is for our country that students develop the knowledge, the creativity, and the perspective—the long-term values and habits of mind—that will enable them to adapt and succeed in a rapidly changing world. Your vision of America can make it clear that significant progress in cultivating those capacities in college students needs to be demonstrated soon.
How is such progress to be shown? Not, I suggest, through increased federal regulations or mandated exams. Instead, I hope you will make it your business to ensure that the market can work. That entails giving students and their parents ready access to information about how learning is assessed and enhanced at each institution. They need this; they also need a clear indicator if whether each institution is implementing widely agreed-upon best practices or just coasting on its reputation.
An analogy: The national need for more environmentally friendly buildings is being met in part by contractors, architects, and builders who are stepping up to meet the silver, gold, or platinum LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards of the United States Green Building Council (http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CategoryID=19). A LEED seal of approval lets the buyer of a house, office, or other building easily determine whether it meets these rigorous standards. Similar voluntary compliance has also worked well in high-tech areas through the ISO 9000 standards (http://www.iso.org/iso/home.htm). No one has to meet the standards, but those who do benefit from the recognition they confer and the assurance of excellence they provide to purchasers.
It is time, I believe, for higher education to develop a comparable system, based on standards it itself articulates—standards that recognize America’s great diversity of institutional types, mission, and demographics but demonstrate that each participating institution is doing everything it can to help every American college student attain the highest possible level of achievement.
The development of such a voluntary but rigorous system of accountability will take leadership—precisely the kind of leadership that we know you will bring to this and to many other crucial areas during your presidency.
—W. Robert Connor
President
The Teagle Foundation