The subject is the interplay between cost and quality. Richard Vedder’s work, both before he joined and as a member of the Spellings Commission, focused on how American colleges and universities spend their monies and on the cost drivers that make American higher education so expensive without returning a commensurate quality premium. It’s the research that made Vedder among the best known and widely read of the nation’s efficiency pundits. Charles Miller, the chairman of the commission, regularly points out that American colleges and universities really don’t have a bottom line, and hence productivity and efficiency gains constantly elude them — though that observation is more true of the highly selective, most costly institutions than of the bulk of the colleges and universities responsible for educating most undergraduates. Taken together these arguments suggest that as a nation, we a…

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The country bumpkin among the four horsemen of reform is quality — a term so bereft of practical meaning today that it is now commonplace to talk about high quality, higher quality, and highest quality as a means of distinguishing among nearly equal claims to excellence.

No one is against quality. Almost everyone is ready to concede that American higher education, whatever its faults and shortcomings, is the envy of the rest of the world and in that sense truly world class, perhaps even in a class by itself. Not so fast, says Jonathan Grayer, the former Newsweek marketing executive Washington Post picked to run its Kaplan subsidiary and who was in many ways the most interesting as well as the most unusual member of the Spellings Commission. Grayer’s role was principally to explain and where necessary defend the interests of the growing for-proftit educational sector. But…

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The numbers that trouble me the most are those that document how educational access has not translated into educational success. While the percent of Americans with a college education has increased for all groups, the gap between minority and majority experiences has persisted largely unchanged. Given that a college degree is now the principal portal to middle-class status it is not acceptable that one’s ethnicity, in particular, remains a tag predicting likely success at reaching that destination. The problem, however, is not one of access — or at least the kind of access that is achieved by the removing of barriers be they legal, cultural, psychological, or financial. Providing equal educational opportunity — what I have taken to calling “access to success” — requires a different mind set and a willingness to invest public funds in programs other than federal student aid.

I have…

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For more than 50 years unfettered access to a college education has been the stated goal of most higher-education policy. Everyone who wanted a college education, who had prepared themselves to earn the degree and had exhibited the discipline and stick-to-it-ness necessary to succeed deserved a chance. A person’s race or ethnicity or gender, his or her financial circumstances, political or religious beliefs, or physical incapacities could not be allowed to matter.

The term itself — access — reflected a deeply held belief that unfettered participation in the nation’s higher-education system required the elimination of those very real barriers that had historically limited participation to the advantaged few.

The first barriers to fall were products of racial and religious discrimination — outright legislated segregation in the one case and, in the other, a more subtle but no less…

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Exactly how to make a college education more affordable is among the most intractable of the dilemmas facing higher education. Initially those who worried most about a college education’s affordability focused on public institutions and the fact that their increasing prices were directly related to per-student reductions in public appropriations by the nation’s 50 states. It seems unlikely, however, that the states will dramatically increase their support for higher education. What the states have discovered, in good times and bad, is that students and their families will pay more for their college educations, thus allowing the states to promote other spending priorities including the lowering of taxes.

More recently its has been the outrageousness of the tuitions of the nation’s most selective institutions that has drawn the media’s and policy makers’ ire. The problem is that these…

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One of my stranger assignments as a member of the Spellings Commission was to co-chair, with Rich Vedder, the Affordability Task Force. Here truly was a punishment to fit the crime, since I had already made clear that I was finding the Commission’s discussion of affordability both linguistically confusing and politically risky.

To begin with, the argument that an American college education was becoming more unaffordable rested on the assumption that students and families were still expected to pay for college out of current earnings and savings. In fact, a college education had long since become something that one purchased over time, most often at interest rates that were sufficiently attractive that even families that could afford to pay their “parental contribution” out of pocket chose instead to borrow. Savvy middle-class families had long since discovered that it was smarter to…

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The second of my four horsemen of reform — the quest for an affordable higher education — is for me the most problematic. This much is clear, however: an American college education has become ever more expensive. Some would say, with fair justification, paying for a college education in this country is now obscenely expensive. But ever-higher prices in higher education are nothing new. For more than a half century the average price, even the average net price, of a year in college has been increasing faster than the underlying rate of inflation, except during the decade of the 1970s when the average prices colleges and universities charged merely kept pace with double-digit inflation.

Those who push the affordability agenda parse the problem differently, having concluded that an American higher education is either now or about to become unaffordable. As Measuring Up 2004 boldly…

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I am often surprised and occasionally dismayed by the comments our Brainstorm postings generate. But I never respond, knowing that to do so only invites more of the same. Some of the comments occasioned by Stan Katz’s celebration of Karen Arenson, however, need a response. What and how Arenson accomplished what she did are too important to be marginalized by nonsense.

What ever her background and personal proclivities, Arenson is no elitist. Her best work was devoted to the educational landscape of New York City, with its mélange of institutions of every stripe and persuasion. Her stories informed as well entertained, shocked as well as moved us. Collectively they formed a tapestry whose warp and woof were the accomplishments, failures, and inanities of the institutions to which she paid such exquisite attention.

Like every really good journalists she covered stories rather than…

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Discussions of the need for increased accountability in higher education are mostly mindless. There is a presumption on the part of what I have come to call the “accountability police” that colleges and universities today are not accountable — paired with a reluctance to specify by whom and for what colleges and universities ought to be held accountable. There is just a sense that a college education today is too expensive and not worth the money given that college students are not learning enough. Finally there is the assumption that if the public had more data, accrediting agencies more power, and state governments more gumption the nation’s colleges and universities could finally be held accountable.

I keep trying to make sense of this argument. My current gambit is to imagine an accountability process that actually tests the quality of higher educational products — both courses an…

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Being accountable ranks right up there with being nice and responsible. Not being accountable is the same as being selfish or out-of-control or irresponsible. Simply raising the subject is enough to put higher education on the defensive and its principal institutions on edge.

The implication is that higher education is not accountable to anything or anybody outside the academy itself — a charge that simply won’t hold water. What the critics who pursue the accountability agenda really mean is “higher education is not accountable to me!” What they don’t like is that colleges and universities are instead accountable to a market that favors selectivity, brand names, national visibility, winning sports teams, and, in the case of the nation’s medallion universities, major research portfolios.

Professional programs are also accountable to their cognizant accrediting agencies. In the fields …

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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…

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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…

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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 spur…

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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…

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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 fix everything is a …

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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 classes …

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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,…

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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 Science Foundation, for one, is beginning to ask, Why won’t faculty use the research to change how they teach? Another question worth asking.

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 …

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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?