State Higher-Education Accountability Systems

In the last few years, there’s been a lot of discussion here in Washington about higher education accountability. But given that states remain the primary regulators and funders of public higher education, accountability issues will mostly play out in statehouses, not the halls of Congress. Since the early 1990s, nearly all states have established some sort of process for gathering information about institutional results. As a result, potentially valuable practices have been developed whereby states gather all kinds of interesting data about elements of higher education, including student learning results, retention, completion, student engagement, institutional efficiency, economic impact, research output, socioeconomic equity, community involvement, and more. But no state is really hitting on all cylinders, and states continue to struggle in figuring out how to translate that information into meaningful incentives for improvement. This is the subject of a new report published yesterday by Education Sector, where I work. (See coverage and reader comments in the Chronicle here.)