No Undergraduate Left Behind?

The federal government contributes roughly the same share of the total revenues of elementary/secondary as  of postsecondary education in the U.S.—somewhere near 10% in the recent past, pushed at least temporarily higher (especially in elementary/secondary education) by the current economic and budgetary conditions in the nation.

Yet the ambitions of the initiatives and the rhetoric of federal involvement have traced quite different paths over the last quarter century at these different levels of the system. As David Cohen and Susan Moffitt’s important new book, The Ordeal of Equality (Harvard University Press), shows, the federal government has persistently raised the demands it places on K-12 schools and has over time moved its declared ambitions from providing funding for schools serving disadvantaged students to improving the quality, even of “transforming,” American education. As Cohen and Moffitt argue, this increased ambition has not been accompanied by similar increases in the capacity, either at the federal or at local levels, to meet these higher demands. The result has been frustration and policy failure, answered so far by further increases in ambition and in demands on a system that is not well-equipped to respond.

So far, at least, the federal role in higher education has not followed a similar trend. The basic goals of federal spending in support of higher education have been (1) to assist needy students in paying for whatever colleges are out there and (2) purchasing the services of university researchers to undertake studies the federal government thinks are worth doing. The feds largely treat postsecondary education institutions as vendors and treat themselves as clients, or perhaps as agents providing money to clients for them to purchase services. 

Limited quality assurance is provided through the accreditation system and other eligibility rules for student aid and substantial efforts are devoted to auditing the financial practices of universities receiving federal research funds. There are sporadic attempts to press institutions further toward improving quality under the banner of “accountability,” but institutions still hold primary responsibility for the quality of their own services. We certainly don’t hear much about the federal government claiming responsibility for “transforming” higher education, nor are there regulations that approach in any way the “bite” of a program like No Child Left Behind.

It’s possible that this is beginning to change. The recent emphasis being put on college completion points toward expecting federal investments to produce success, and not just access. It is not hard to imagine the federal government sliding toward taking greater responsibility for assuring that colleges produce more completions and becoming more prescriptive in striving to make that happen. Similar issues would then arise about the capacity of the feds and of the colleges to respond effectively to these demands, possibly resulting in increased intrusiveness, further frustration, and so on. Whether this will happen, and if so with what effect, is at this point hard to say.

Big questions arise: Why have the trends in these two parts of the education system been so different in the past (if our characterization is correct)? Will the paths in fact start to converge in the future? If so, is there a good way to make the process in postsecondary education less productive of frustration and more productive of results than has been the case in K-12?