I am back from two weeks in France and the Netherlands, where I spent part of the time bicycling into the wind — a 20-mile-per-hour headwind whose constancy loomed ever larger in my imagination. My survival solution was to spend as much energy as I could afford working through what I have come to see as a wondrous puzzle: Why should an enterprise devoted to rationality, clear thinking, and precise exposition spend so much of its time arguing about a set of words that have literally lost their meanings?

The words I have in mind belong to a set I have come to call the four horsemen of higher-education reform: access, accountability, affordability, and quality. In her charge to her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Margaret Spellings asked us to provide guidance on how to ensure that our American higher-education system celebrated those four qualities. I now realize that I ...

The absence of sustained demand and a viable link to educational reform only partially explain higher education’s tepid response to electronically mediated learning. The rest of the story involves the nature of the World Wide Web and its limitations as a platform for learning.

From the outset the Web has been a utility for connecting people with people and people with things. Think Amazon.com or Netflix.com, or any of the dozens of sites you use to make airline and hotel reservations. MySpace, Facebook, even YouTube are sites that primarily allow you to see other people’s postings — and then encourages you to share your own experiences. Facebook probably says it best when it describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” Blogs distribute ideas. Wikipedia is a collection of definitions and short essays collectively posted. The Web is primarily...

In the years since Bill Massy and I published Thwarted Intervention, I have come to better understand higher education’s tepid embrace of the new learning technologies. My “aha” moment occurred at the San Diego meeting of the Spellings Commission in February 2006. Before us were three technology experts. Each had come to plead for more money to support the development of open-source educational software. More exasperated than usual, I mused during the comment period that what the technologists needed was not more money, but more customers. The genesis of my observation was the finding in Thwarted Innovation that there was no demand for e-learning software, particularly on the part of faculty, and hence no market.

It turned out that the most senior of our witnesses was even more exasperated. He was not interested in hearing that customer demand might be required to...

Last Tuesday I suggested it would be an interesting parlor game to speculate whether a Bologna-like template might have resulted in more reform of U.S. higher education than resulted from the work of the Spellings Commission.

In any event, here is my imaginary scenario which substitutes a “Spellings Process” for a “Spellings Commission.”

Phase 1: April 2005 – March 2006. Newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings launches a multi-year process focusing on the future of American higher education. The two primary goals she wants the process to focus on are expanding access to higher education and insuring that an American college education remains affordable. During this initial year she quietly meets with a wide variety of college and university leaders, the leaders of higher education’s national associations, and a goodly number of policy wonks. By mid year she...

This May the European Union will begin planning for a second decade of purposeful higher education reform. Dubbed the Bologna Process in honor of the Italian city where, in 1999, the Ministers of Education from 29 European countries defined a common reform agenda, the Bologna Process has gone a long way towards creating commonality and interchangeability among and between Europe’s competing systems of higher education. What began slowly, almost haltingly is now being celebrated as a remarkable achievement in multi-national cooperation and reform — leading me, at least, to ask, “What did the Europeans know that those of us who served on the Spellings Commission did not?”

At least four characteristics of the Bologna Process are worth noting in answer to that question.

First it was conceived at the outset as a multi-year process. No need to hurry. No need to try to...

Part slogan, part dare, too often employed by policy wonks who would remake higher education in their own image, the call to make colleges and universities more accountable has become a standard item in the reformer’s catalog of how to fix higher education. Before we give away the store, however, we ought to ask “Accountable for what?” and “Accountable to whom?” These are real questions that would-be reformers too often gloss over. Instead, they settled for claiming that higher education is not accountable or that higher education needs to be more accountable.

Here is a stab at making sense of the rhetoric. In the first place, higher education is currently accountable to a market that rewards tradition, prestige, reputation, and, to a certain extent, chutzpah. Whether we like it or not, these are the attributes that sell not only issues of U.S. News, but places in the freshman...

Two years ago I would have said that American higher education had a rational financing plan — one that was increasingly being emulated across Europe and Asia. Given that public treasuries could no longer afford to provide full subsidies to all learners in an age of massification, it made sense to instead provide equitable financing (a.k.a. student loans) which would allow benefiting students to pay for their higher educations over an extended period of time.

To be sure there were problems. Taking out loans only made sense if one earned a degree. The students who policy makers most wanted to help were often averse to loans, while financially better-off families understood that borrowing at favorable rates in an expanding economy was a form of arbitrage they could more than afford. The more-than-abundant supply of loans also allowed families to shop up and, not so surprisingly,...

The news last week should remind us of why it is all too easy to parody higher education. An august group, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, announced that there was not enough consistent and validated research telling us how best to fix math education in the K-12 arena. It is the same old answer. We will be glad to help just as soon as we get enough research under our belt to know what to do. In the field of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education it is also an answer that is wearing thin with those who believe dramatic improvement is actually possible — provided higher education faculty, in particular, take full advantage of what has been learned over the last decade about how students learn. The National...

For too long, discussion of access to higher education has been dominated by a belief that what is required is more public money for student aid. The problem is that we have been there, doing that for a quarter of a century with at best uncertain results.

Despite massive infusions of federal student aid which have clearly helped increase higher education participation rates, what has not increased is the proportion of those who start and then succeed in their studies. My conclusion? In the long term, college success rates will not improve until middle and high schools prove more adept at getting students ready for college. My preference, then, is to spend more money, not on financial aid, but on improved K-12 schooling.

Even if my preference was made policy tomorrow, it would take a decade of sustained effort to improve the college success rate unless something was also done to ...

Contributing to Brainstorm has turned out to be a learning experience — in no small part because I am learning what does and does not draw comments. Tuesday’s posting about guns has, as of this posting, drawn 17 comments. My musings on markets and change strategies draw hardly any at all. There’s got to be a lesson there somewhere. Right?