Pondering Higher-Education Accountability

Let’s say you’re a governor or a legislator or a member of Congress or you run a large charitable foundation or you’re just generally interested in American higher education, and you have some kind of agenda or goal you want to pursue. Maybe you’re concerned about access for low-income students. Maybe you want graduation rates to be higher. Maybe you wish more people were getting degrees in math and science. Or something else entirely. Whatever it is, you wish things were different, that colleges and universities would collectively be more focused and diligent and effective at pursuing whatever goal you care about most. What should you do?
You could write a manifesto or letter to the editor generally exhorting the higher education sector to improve. “This is important!” you would say. “Our future depends on it!” But I think you’d be disappointed. Things are the way they are for a reason. Simple appeals to the better angels of our nature flatter the appealer, but they tend not to change the world all by themselves.
Alternatively, you could be heavy-handed and pursue an aggressive regulatory strategy. If colleges aren’t doing something you want them to do, or are doing something you don’t want them to do, work the political process and pass a law to make them change, whether they like it or not. This path will also disappoint, I think. First because it’s hard to accomplish — colleges and universities are famously good at working the political system, particularly when they’re playing defense — and second because it’s inappropriate. American higher education is decentralized and diverse and that’s been a winning combination for a long time. The government isn’t nearly smart enough to successfully tell thousands of institutions with distinct missions and student bodies how to do their jobs.
What’s left? In the end, incentives and not much else. If you want colleges to be different, make them want to be different. Higher education institutions are generally run by smart, accomplished people who wake up every morning with a lot on their plate. What’s the most important thing for them? What will they move heaven and earth to do? Make that thing your thing. Change incentives, and the world will follow.
That brings us to accountability. It’s an elastic word that means very different things to different people. As such, I think accountability is best defined broadly, as any process that (A) gathers information about success, and (B) uses that information in a way that will plausibly lead to more success. By that definition, formal No Child Left Behind-style regulatory schemes qualify as accountability, but so do college rankings, budgeting policies that tie funding to performance measures, or simply making information more transparent and accessible to consumers and the public at large.
There’s been a lot of talk about higher education accountability in Washington over the last few years. But for the foreseeable future, state governments will continue to provide the vast majority of direct public support for higher education, as well as hold the primary levers of regulatory power. Nearly all states have some sort of arrangement that they call an “accountability system.” But they vary broadly, as policies tend to when each state gets to make choices on its own.
Over the last year, my colleague Chad Aldeman and I have been investigating state higher education accountability policies. Last December we published an overview of best practices among the states, looking at what kind of information states are gathering and how they use that information to create new incentives. Earlier this week, we published report cards for each state. (See the interactive map below).
The good news is that for nearly every measure that matters, some state somewhere is doing something interesting. The bad news is that nobody has really put together a comprehensive, multi-dimensional accountability system that properly respects the breadth of institutional missions and creates strong incentives for improvement. Until that happens, it’s likely that whatever your hopes for higher education are, they’re bound to fall short of what you believe could and should be accomplished.