Underinvesting in the Future

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By DOUGLAS C. BENNETT

The single most important issue facing higher education today is the problem of access: Not enough Americans are completing a college education — often for financial reasons. Thus, the best recommendation in the dog's breakfast of a report from the Spellings commission is a call for "a significant increase in need-based financial aid."

Presumably that increase would come from a combination of federal, state, and private sources, although the commission does not say. But it does say a number of worrying things that suggest that the federal share of the increase would come from "restructuring" federal financial-aid programs. That could mean no net new money. If so, can the commission members really be serious about increasing access?

In their conclusion, they list "global competitive pressures" and "restraints on public finance" as two of the most important challenges facing American higher education. A number of other countries are doing better at providing access to a college education. That's part of what the commission means by "global competitive pressures," but it fails to note that those countries' governments provide a significantly larger share of the financing of higher education. We won't tackle the issue of access without additional federal resources.

The commission also calls for postsecondary institutions to use a value-added approach to "measure and report meaningful student learning outcomes." I wholeheartedly agree. But the most serious omission in the report is its lack of clarity about what that assessment should look like. Other than a few remarks about improving literacy, the report has little to say about what the goals of a college education should be. Surely we expect more than this. And in harping on the need to compare one institution with others, the commission comes dangerously close to implying that a one-size-fits-all measure should be used. The diversity of our institutions' missions and of our students calls for a diversity of measures — not some Washington-imposed single test.

Developing sophisticated assessments of learning across many goals will take serious and sustained effort. We have some promising new initiatives — the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Collegiate Learning Assessment — but we need additional and more-sophisticated tools. Who will develop them? The commission calls on "the philanthropic community and other third party organizations." In other words, again, no financial support from the federal government is recommended. This is a commission report that wants to improve higher education on the cheap.

The commission also undercuts its recommendation to meaningfully assess student-learning outcomes by repeatedly calling for development and diffusion of technology-based, more efficient (cheaper!) educational methods — without apparently having any evidence that technology-based instruction achieves quality at lower cost. Let's first figure out how to assess value-added learning.

The worst recommendation? The renewed call for a unit-record data system, one in which all college students would be forced to participate, whether or not they receive federal financial aid. That already has been rejected — rightly — by the Congress and the public as an inappropriate assault on privacy.

Douglas C. Bennett is the president of Earlham College.