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 of the country’s priciest institutions. What reformers like Lloyd Thacker and others want is for the market to be shaped by other, decidedly more educational values. And I agree — it would be great if parents and students made how, as well as how much students learn, key market values. But to say that is not the case today is not tantamount to saying higher education is not accountable.
What we need to be able to imagine, then, is an education enterprise that is held accountable in the marketplace to educational values. The means to that end is not greater accountability (what ever that might mean) but an educational reform movement — for the most part centered in the nation’s middle and secondary schools — that inculcates educational values of the kind that Thacker has promoted. Get students and their parents to want something different, and my guess is that institutions will respond precisely because it will be in their interest to do so — and that is tantamount to saying that it is the market for educational services that will hold colleges and universities accountable for supplying the educational products students and parents want and are willing to pay for.
