March 30, 2007 | Volume 4, Issue 1
Accessibility, Affordability, and Accountability in Higher Education
Higher education in the United States has come under scrutiny in recent years. The Dean of Libraries at CMU discusses the main issues at play in accountability in higher education.
These three A’s represent the new watchwords for reforming higher education, as laid out by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ Report on the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Anecdotally, Ms. Spellings’ attempts to find data about how much her daughter might learn at different colleges and universities led to the establishment of the Commission with its focus on issues of accountability. But worldwide, the once impeccable reputation of U.S. higher education has been in decline throughout the last decade. The most recent Measuring Up: The National Report Card on Higher Education, the work of a policy collaborative funded by Pew Charitable Trusts, noted these issues with U.S. higher education:
- It now ranks in the bottom half in most international comparisons because other nations have approached higher education with a greater sense of urgency
- It ranks only seventh worldwide in the percentage of potential students enrolled in or completing college
- It falls behind significantly in issues of access and affordability.1
While policy and practice issues such as accessibility and affordability will be discussed briefly, most of this article will focus on the issue of accountability: How can a university demonstrate to a parent, or business, or trustee, or taxpayer that students are learning? My purpose is not to provide an answer but to outline the issue’s dimensions.
Background
In September 2005, Spellings charged the nineteen-member Commission on the Future of Higher Education with examining vital issues central to a quality higher education. Accessibility, affordability, accountability, and quality were all discussed in a series of public meetings and hearings across the country. Late in 2006, the Commission presented the secretary with a set of six recommendations to improve the status quo:
- Improve student academic preparation and make financial aid available to more students.
- Simplify the entire student financial aid system.
- Create a “robust culture of accountability and transparency,” aided by new systems of data measurement and publicly available comparable college information on student learning an development.
- Embrace continuous innovation and quality improvement.
- Focus on math, science, and foreign language as critical to America’s global competitiveness.
- Develop a strategy for lifelong learning.2
These recommendations are much less controversial than early reports suggested they might be.
The first consultant-created report draft outraged some members, who described it as “hostile, confrontational, and even nasty.3” The report was rewritten in such a way that all but one member of the Commission eventually signed it. Spellings responded promptly with an action plan asking for long overdue reform. Many of her ideas from the action plan are discussed briefly in the sections that follow on accessibility, affordability, and accountability.
Accessibility
A chief barrier to access to higher education was inadequate preparation. The Commission found that access to higher education varied among ethnic groups. For adults aged 25–29, those having bachelor’s degrees were:
| Asian Asian | 61.6% | |
| Caucasian Americans | 34.2% | |
| African Americans | 17.2% | |
| Hispanic Americans | 10%4 |
The action plan states “While about 34 percent of white adults have obtained bachelor’s degrees by age 25–29, the same was true for just 18 percent of African American adults and 10 percent of Hispanic adults in the same age cohort.5” Research back through the footnotes to add Asian Americans to this list found that the source document has different figures from above and the longer report itself has other versions of the figures.6
Overall, 60% of the U.S. population between ages 25 and 64 has no postsecondary education credential. Further, 40% of students who do enter college must take at least one remedial education course at a cost of over $1 billion yearly. The broader impact of these numbers is that adult literacy is a barrier to national competitiveness and individual opportunity as noted in the national report card. Changes in the areas of both policy and practice will be needed in order to improve the higher education report card.
Affordability
The cost of higher education has risen much more rapidly than the Consumer Price Index (CPI): from 1984 to 2005, the CPI rose from 100 to 188 while the Higher Education Purchasing Index rose from 104.8 to 239.5.7 In a recent article, James Maher, provost at the University of Pittsburgh, noted that the market basket for the CPI differs significantly from that of the Higher Education Price Index, with the latter having a four-fold heavier factor tied to the cost of recruiting, supporting, and retaining research professors. While those faculty are concentrated in research universities, such as Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, the reputation of those faculty allows all faculty salaries nationally to rise. Maher says the Higher Education Price Index is ”...three-fourths salaries, and those salaries are heavily located in the higher-paid professions for which families expect universities to prepare their children.8” Other higher education cost factors include the attendant benefits, often including tuition, the rapidly rising cost of scholarly journals, and the cost of the campus environment itself.
Interestingly, Secretary Spellings’ proposals all revolve around policy mechanisms for helping students understand, anticipate, and cope with the cost of higher education. As tuition and other higher education costs have risen in the last ten years, median student debt levels have risen 51% (to $15,500 for public and $19,400 for private institutions). The Commission noted that these rising costs and worrisome debt burdens further discouraged students from attempting to access higher education.
The seriousness of these two factors is magnified by the importance that education plays in positioning the U.S. to continue to be competitive in a global marketplace. In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman calls the erosion of the U.S.‘s science and engineering base, the source of American innovation and the American rising standard of living, “a quiet crisis.9” The U.S.‘s ability to innovate new products, services, and companies has long been the source of its success. Yet, the shrinking numbers of students graduating in these fields in the U.S. means that Asian universities are producing eight times as many engineers and scientists.10 These numbers, combined with a gap in ambition and in sheer numbers of graduates, will threaten the U.S. economy.11
Accountability
Accreditation While school boards, municipalities, states, and the federal government each play a role in governing the K-12 educational system, in practice, the U.S. Higher Education system continues to exist in a system of self-governance. Six regional commissions—Northeast, Middle States Commission on Higher Education, New England Association of Schools and Colleges, North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and Western Association of Schools and Colleges—accredit a wide variety of institutions from two-year colleges to osteopathic colleges to rabbinical seminaries to Ivy League universities. Colleges pay dues to these associations and reviews are done by peer volunteers, including Carnegie Mellon’s president, provost, dean of students, dean of University Libraries, and others. For most of these institutions, advertising their accredited status allows them to attract students. Federal funding from National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Defense requires accreditation, as does access to federal student loans. This basic accreditation is so widespread that the public takes it for granted. Only rarely do the names of struggling colleges appear in the Chronicle of Higher Education with an ‘accreditation under review’ or ‘accreditation suspended’ notice.
In addition, many fields have their own accrediting bodies—so that the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon’s college of engineering, is both accredited by Middle States Commission on Higher Education as a part of the university and, also, each of its departments is accredited by Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Similarly, architecture, music, and business have their own discipline accreditations. Discipline scholarly societies manage accreditation groups, and each has a different approach to quality assurance and standards.
In the same way that refereeing ensures the quality of articles in a peer-reviewed journal, these different bodies not only keep quality high but also attempt to shape the future of the discipline. ABET, in particular, has required a rigorous program of learning outcomes and has made engineering the leader on most college campuses in new ideas to demonstrate the efficacy of the education offered. Learning outcomes are exactly the mechanism that the Commission recommends to ensure accountability in higher education.
In addition to discipline proficiency, the Commission surfaced issues around different facets of the general education: “Many students who earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing and thinking skills we expect of college graduates.” The Commission found that measurable literacy among college graduates had actually declined in the last decade.12 In reviewing general education, accrediting bodies look not only at the number of courses required but also at core competencies—in written and oral communication, scientific and quantitative reasoning, information literacy, and technological competency.
Measuring The Commission found that “parents and students have no solid evidence, comparable across institutions of how much students learn in colleges and whether they learn more at one college than another.” Higher education greatly fears the imposition of a set of standardized tests, such as those used in the No Child Left Behind program. Yet, the existing system of measuring institutions by financial and resource input, rather than by student learning outcomes, does need attention. Forty states already have existing, privacy-protected higher education information systems. Having some comparability among those systems and perhaps being able to link among them might provide much-needed information for consumers. Secretary Spellings proposes to explore incentives for states and institutions that collect and report student learning outcomes.
Nevertheless, the act of measuring can have the unintended consequence of drawing attention to the elements being measured at the expense of the broader desired outcome—more learning by students. In “Theories of Measurement and Dysfunction in Organizations,” Robert D. Austin gives an example: “Primary and secondary teachers being evaluated via pupils’ performance on standardized tests tailor their instruction to the content of the tests. The resulting education of students is often narrower than is considered desirable by community and education leaders.13” Austin provides several other examples, including Soviet factories where production quotas fostered abuse of machines, Sears automobile service centers where sales commissions encouraged employees to charge customers for unneeded repairs, and quarterly profits or stock values that encourage short-term over long-term objectives.14
Assessment of Learning Outcomes Carnegie Mellon belongs to and is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Middle States uses fourteen standards in its examination of schools for their ten-year reaccreditation. The fourteenth standard is assessment of student learning. All institutions are asked to discuss how their programs meet this rubric: “Assessment of student learning demonstrates that, at graduation, or other appropriate points, the institution’s students have knowledge, skills, and competencies consistent with institutional and appropriate higher education goals.15” The Commission believes that students learn more effectively when they understand what they are expected to learn. Each of the other thirteen standards also has a fundamental element that focuses on assessment.
Appropriate learning outcomes for the skill of information literacy would include students being able:
- to figure out the nature and extent of needed information
- to access information effectively and efficiently
- to evaluate critically the sources and content of information
- to use information towards a specific purpose, such as writing an article or paper, and
- to understand the economic, legal, policy and social issues related to information16
As a part of a general education, all students—from art to computer science, to engineering, to statistics—would have to demonstrate these capabilities. For a policy school like the Heinz School, some learning outcomes might include:
- To apply basic problem solving skills along with financial management knowledge to develop recommendations related to the financial issues confronted by non-profit organizations
- To conduct and present sound research on urban issues
- To evaluate critically the effectiveness of agencies and programs on the environment17
Middle States provides considerable latitude around how a university approaches meeting this standard. They recommend that the approaches adopted be useful, cost-effective, reasonably accurate and truthful, planned, organized, systematized, and sustained. Essentially, they want to see this become a part of a feedback loop: The outcomes are put in place; the faculty member checks to see how well students are meeting them; and the faculty improve their courses based on that student input. In a well organized system of learning outcomes, the college’s goals can be mapped down into the individual courses offered.
Carnegie Mellon is planning for an accreditation visit in 2008, and we are one of the first large institutions to be reviewed under the new 2006 guidelines. The two academic areas to be reviewed for excellence will be general education and assessment of student learning. We are most fortunate to have an engineering school that has been doing learning outcomes as a part of its ABET accreditation for the last six years, and the university will be giving Middle States a plan about how that approach can be adopted elsewhere in the university.
Some articles have been written about creating a single test that can be used to demonstrate student learning, especially in the areas characterized as general education. Three issues have been raised about that approach: First is the fear that, once a test is developed, faculty will begin to teach towards success on the test, rather than success in learning the material, as Austin observed. Second is that the No Child Left Behind program uses standardized tests and that results of that program have not yet been clearly demonstrated. Third, faculty fear that outcomes assessment is just another fad and that the significant work necessary to rewrite syllabi into outcomes language, check on the results with students, and then iterate it will not be useful long term.
One dean at Carnegie Mellon recently commented that the single short term measure of effectiveness is whether or not the student gets a good job and the similar long term measure is how successful students are in their jobs. While this view coincides with that of Friedman and others on the key role that education plays in national competitiveness, some would argue that being successful in the workplace is but one measure of the value of bachelor’s degree. Other values include an appreciation of diversity, a commitment to good citizenship, and a fostering of curiosity and a quest for lifelong learning. Well-educated individuals are not just good workers, they are also good human beings.
Final Ruminations
The National Report Card on Higher Education, Friedman’s The World is Flat, and a panoply of other books, articles, and stories in the press are very convincing both about the critical nature of higher education to U.S. competitiveness and its need for immediate improvement. Issues around access, especially the figure about the prevalent need for remediation and its cost, are also compelling. The larger issue of competing worldwide in the higher education arena requires policy and practice changes around access and affordability.
While measuring can have a confining effect on quality initiatives, higher education cannot expect to have public confidence and to receive public funding if it cannot demonstrate its effectiveness. The risks around adopting a single testing instrument that would work across so many disciplines in so many institutions are great. The commitments needed to institute university-wide a refined practice of learning outcomes are also significant. Yet, the policy of asking higher education to oversee its own programs does seem wiser than making a leap to government regulation and testing. Higher education must discover how it can provide the kind of information that citizens and policy makers need without agreeing to standardized testing. In order to maintain its eminence, higher education must get all the As.
1 Gordon. K. Davies, citing the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, Measuring Up 2006: The National Report Card on Higher Education (San Jose, CA: 2006), in Setting a Public Agenda for Higher Education in the States: Lessons Learned from the National Collaborative for Higher Education Policy (published by The Education Commission of the United States, The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, December 2006): 2.
2 U.S. Department of Education. “Highlights of the Final Report of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education: A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education” (September 2006). Available: http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/pre-pub-report-highlights.html [February 13, 2007].
3 Kelly Field. “The Spellings Report: Uncertainty Greets Report on Colleges by U.S. Panel: Commission makes proposals on aid and accountability, but will real changes result?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Government & Education section (September 1, 2006). Available to subscribers: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i02/02a00101.htm
4 U.S. Department of Education. “Action Plan for Higher Education: Improving Accessibility, Affordability and Accountability” (September 26, 2006). Available: http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/actionplan-factsheet.html [February 13, 2007].
5 Ibid.
6 U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau. “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2003: Population Characteristics” (P20–550, issued June 2004).
7 Brenda Dingley. “U.S. Periodical Prices: 2005” (Table 9), in the U. S. Periodical Price Index 2005, 9.
8 James Maher. “The Research University and Scholarly Publishing: The View from the Provost’s Office,” ARL Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions from ARL, CNI, and SPARC #249 (December 2006): 1.
9 Thomas L. Friedman. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 253.
10 Friedman, 257.
11 Friedman, 250–275.
12 U.S, Department of Education. “Secretary Spellings’ Action Plan on Higher Education: ‘MYTH vs. FACT” (September 29, 2006). Available: http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/actionplan-myths.html [February 13, 2007].
13 Robert Daniel Austin. Theories of Measurement and Dysfunction in Organizations, a dissertation submitted to the Department of Social and Decision Sciences for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management and Decision Sciences (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University, 1994), 14.
14 Ibid.
15 Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Characteristics of Excellence in Higher Education: Eligibility Requirements and Standards for Accreditation (2006): 63.
16 Middle States Commission, 42.
17 Linda Suskie. Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide (Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc., 2004), 80.