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 of law, medicine, dental medicine, veterinary medicine, business, and engineering, in particular, those agencies regularly exercise the real power they know they have. On the other hand, for undergraduate education writ large accreditation remains a hodgepodge of regional agencies that talk tough but in the end don’t make enough of a difference. The inevitable result is that the kind of accountability the market exacts becomes ever more important.
Given these circumstances, there remain just two avenues for making undergraduate education accountable to someone else or something other than those attributes the market currently rewards. One could join with Lloyd Thacker and his Educational Conservancy to create a consumer movement that understands and has the means and stamina to make educational values more of a factor in the college-choice process. Such a movement would be akin to the kind of consumers’ movement that changed the cars Americans bought and, in the process, made Consumer Reports a national buying guide. That kind of process, however, takes time and so frustrates the reformers who expect to change higher education now and forever.
Product regulation represents the other path to a different kind of accountability. Governments do have the power to regulate products whether they help pay the cost of acquiring them or not. Here it helps to imagine what a higher education FDA might look like — a subject I will take up on Tuesday.
