An Education on Higher Education for the Next President

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The Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, has cited affordable college tuition as one of his key goals if elected. John McCain, the Republican candidate, has said that he wants to simplify the federal student-aid process and give parents better information about colleges. What else should be on the candidates' agendas when it comes to higher education? We asked several higher-education leaders for their views:

LESLIE H. GARNER JR., president of Cornell College, in Mt. Vernon, Iowa: With the presidential election fast approaching, it is time to reflect on the debate thus far. Across the nation, voters have prepared well for the candidates. They have asked difficult questions and have not been willing to entertain superficial answers. Issues matter. Yet while there has been serious discussion of serious issues, higher education has not been one of those issues.

Higher education should be a priority for the next administration. How can those of us at colleges and universities ensure that it has a higher profile with the two candidates?

First, we must stress the importance of higher education to sustaining democracy, enhancing the quality of national and international life, investing in the future of our economy, and expanding individual opportunity. Higher education should be a critical part of the message of hope.

Second, we must be prepared to deal with the issues of cost, access, and affordability. I was reminded of that on the eve of Super Tuesday, when a columnist for the Chicago Tribune said she wished that important issues — like the altogether too-high cost of college — would appear on the agenda. The issue of rising college costs is in and of itself complicated. We must continue to tell the story in clear and concise terms, trying to explain our growing institutional commitment to student aid and our commitment to helping families afford higher education.

Third, we must emphasize those issues that unite us. We share a commitment to access and student aid. We should be proud of the diversity among our institutions. It is a source of strength and innovation. Diversity in institutional structure and mission is an important asset if the nation is to respond effectively to the many learning needs of a diverse population.

Fourth, we must speak the rhetoric of partnership. It was the partnership among parents, students, institutions, government at all levels, business, and philanthropic institutions that made possible the impressive expansion of higher-education opportunities in the middle of the last century. Sadly, that partnership has become fragmented, and the future requires that it be restored. In restoring it, we in higher education must reiterate our commitment to play our part on a range of issues, including, but certainly not limited to, issues related to cost.

The Together We Can plan — developed by the National Association of Independent College and University State Executives and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities — provides a framework for thinking about such a partnership. It outlines roles for each of the partners in preparing students for college and in supporting students so that they can be successful in college (http://www.icwashington.org/public_policy/together_we_can.pdf).

Many of the policy makers who will populate the next administration are now working in or close to the presidential campaigns. We should be taking the messages of hope and partnership to them and to the two presidential candidates, explaining what we can do and suggesting what the next administration should do to make sure that our students are the best-educated in the world.

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JONATHAN ALAN KING, a professor of molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Sean Decatur, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Oberlin College: The new president should reject much of what the Bush administration laid out in the report from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, especially the thrust to introduce standardized testing as a measure of college-level education. The implementation of that proposal would pose serious risks to the quality of science-and-technology education at colleges and universities.

The two of us teach and carry out research on the properties of proteins related to human illnesses, including lens cataracts and Alzheimer's. Progress depends on advances in many disciplines: physical chemistry, molecular biology, computer science, and others. Indeed, all the technological advances that have raised the standard of living in the past century have depended on an extraordinary diversity of scientific, engineering, and mathematical disciplines. Consider the cellphone. The design of the chips depended on advances by solid-state physicists and electrical engineers. The manufacture of the chips required processes developed by inorganic chemists, coordination chemists, and materials scientists. The longer-lived batteries arose from progress by metallurgical engineers and electrochemists. The improved encoding of the signals emerged from the work of mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists. The dispersion of the heat generated and the internal electrical insulation was the result of progress by polymer chemists and fabrication engineers.

The scientific diversity required for progress increases by an order of magnitude if we consider biomedical devices that depend on many areas of biomedical science, biochemistry, physiology, and neuroscience. Similarly, understanding and predicting climate change requires progress in geochemistry, fluid dynamics, astronomy, atmospheric chemistry, political economy, and other highly diverse fields.

The challenge in training the next generation of scientists and engineers is to develop students' abilities to cross traditional boundaries and integrate data and knowledge from different sources in new ways. The necessary skills are not the mastery of lists of procedures, but higher-order skills, like the ability to see patterns among complex data, to recognize inconsistencies and inadequacies in theories and models, and to construct models that incorporate diverse observations. It also depends on researchers' understanding the need to work cooperatively, taking advantage of the skills of others and sharing information and procedures.

Both of us teach undergraduate laboratory courses that are designed to develop our students' abilities to pose questions and solve problems on the path to discovery. Of course, the students need to master experimental procedures and protocols. However, more important, and much more difficult to impart, is the ability to recognize what the key questions are, even more than the answers, which may not yet be available. Inquiry-based instruction produces productive scientists and engineers by placing the scientific method — experiments, data gathering, observation, and interpretation — at the heart of instruction. Such post-Sputnik, hands-on science-education policies provided the foundation for the extraordinary American scientific and technological advances of the past 50 years.

Standardized testing undermines the development and assessment of such teaching and learning. It replaces direct experience, observation, and performance with drill-and-kill instructional methodologies. Extending the standardized testing now permeating schools through the No Child Left Behind Act — almost exclusively multiple-choice, paper-and-pencil tests — to provide national "accountability" for colleges and universities will narrow and limit the content of every discipline tested. Faculty members will be forced to teach to the test, to avoid being labeled as failing to meet the "standards." That will hamstring instruction and snuff out innovation. The history of progress in science is filled with examples in which the accepted and established core of knowledge was wrong, and true advances depended on breaking out of accepted doctrine.

We recognize that science-and-technology programs at many institutions need to be strengthened. But the road to raising standards is to increase overall investment in higher education — not to spend precious funds on standardized assessments. Extending standardized testing to colleges and universities will take our nation backward and undermine our scientific and technological creativity. The next president must ensure that that does not occur.

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MARY S. SPANGLER, chancellor of the Houston Community College system: The next president must focus national attention on the continued development of community colleges, which provide open admission to almost 50 percent of the college students in this country. The sector is the only place where a skilled work force can be efficiently, economically, and quickly trained to meet the full range of skill sets essential for our nation to remain globally competitive. Some important areas include:

College readiness. It is generally acknowledged that as many as 70 percent of high-school graduates are seriously underprepared to do college-level work and fail to persist in achieving their goals. A systematic approach to teaching basic skills, like reading and math, at all educational levels is long overdue. The president should take the lead in endorsing a national alignment of curricula across those core disciplines.

Interdisciplinary curricula in the sciences. Community colleges must become more aggressive in educating students in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math. They must infuse science-based training across the curriculum. Presidential support is needed for increased government investment in STEM education, especially in community colleges.

Dual-enrollment programs. The next president should promote programs in which students combine the last two years of high school with the first two years of community college into a three-year experience. That pathway simultaneously results in a high-school diploma, a two-year associate degree, and the opportunity to move on to a four-year institution — further reducing the financial burden on parents and taxpayers.

A broadened global perspective. Community-college students' exposure to international experiences is essential, and the Salzburg Global Seminar's International Study Program for community colleges is a good model. A one-week, intense study-abroad experience focused on the responsibilities of citizenship in a global environment is a life-changing opportunity for students with jobs, families, and limited resources. The next president might consider greater support for such programs, as well as language development, especially since they improve homeland security and help create global citizens.

Increased engagement with the corporate sector. Community colleges train 50 percent of new nurses and the majority of other new health-care workers. The colleges must encourage and develop partnerships with businesses that hire workers in those professions as well as many others. Unfortunately, too few major corporations leverage their training dollars by working with community colleges. Presidential leadership is needed to stimulate corporate America to engage with our institutions.

Partnerships and consortia. Rather than duplicating costly facilities, nine colleges in southeast Michigan have created a single point of entry to the specialized resources — facilities, curriculum, training, staff — for the entire region and beyond in the area of homeland-security training. Presidential leadership would help the creation of such regional and even national consortia.

Adequate resources for institutions and students. The typical student who attends community college must work part time to afford increasing tuition and fees, pay for child care and transportation, and purchase the tools for learning. To the extent taxpayers and the federal and state governments are limited in their willingness or ability to keep pace with the increases in costs — thus shifting the burden to the students — access for all qualified students is reduced.

This is not to say that community-college leaders should not also work toward efficiencies and entrepreneurialism in attracting resources. But, at the same time, federal and state governing bodies should review their formulas for community-college support as well as their student-aid policies. Given our nation's work-force needs, and compared with the alternative social destruction that might occur for those who have little hope, investments in access to community college for students can have significant returns.

(These comments are adapted from Letters to the Next President, published this year by the Korn/Ferry Institute.)

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M. LEE PELTON, president of Willamette University: Access, affordability, and accountability — alliterative headliners — seem very much on the minds of the public and Congress, who increasingly view those three areas as the cornerstone of America's higher-education future. They are most notably represented in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in mid-August.

But many of us in higher education find it ironic that just as the state and federal governments' sustained underinvestment in higher education has insidiously eroded affordability and threatened access for prospective students and their families, Congress is turning up the heat on colleges to be more accountable by measuring performance and demonstrating outcomes.

Our nation is entering a new era in higher education — one as significant in its scope and impact as what we faced after World War II. Demographic trends suggest that increases in college applications will come largely from members of underrepresented groups, many of whom will be students of color from low-income families, whose high-school curricula will not have prepared them to persist and succeed in college.

David Brooks has written in The New York Times that "we live in a country stratified by education. … The gap between rich and poor is widening. Students in the poorest quarter of the population have an 8.6-percent chance of getting a college degree. Students in the top quarter have a 74.9-percent chance." The truly engaged university must ensure, to borrow a phrase from the former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, that the "path to leadership" is visibly open to economically disadvantaged students whose backgrounds cut across racial and ethnic borders. So here is my advice to the presidential candidates:

• Sweep the ideologues out of the Department of Education who insist on one-size-fits-all accountability. The strength of the American higher-education system — that which has made it the envy of the world — has been its diversity of institutional types, each with a singular mission and history as well as the freedom to decide whom it admits, what it teaches, and how to teach. Cookie cutters may make good cookies, but they make bad colleges.
• Let us do our job and stop treating higher education as if it were some kind of regulated utility company. Higher education is more than a commodity; it is a social good.
• Provide incentives for elementary, secondary, and higher education to work together as a coherent and coordinated whole.
• Provide incentives for higher education to fix its pricing structure so that all qualified students can afford to attend college. The good news from my sector: According to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, 80 percent of dependent full-time undergraduates at private institutions receive some form of financial aid. On average, those students pay less than two-thirds of the published tuition, and families that demonstrate the greatest financial need pay only about a quarter of the published tuition. The bad news: According to federal statistics reported by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, middle-income and high-income students at private institutions are now likelier to receive institutional aid — and more of it — than are students from the lowest income quartile.
• Reinvest significantly in higher education, beginning with the community colleges, so that those students will have a chance to participate meaningfully in the knowledge economy, or, better yet, matriculate seamlessly to four-year colleges.
• In your first 100 days in office, assemble a group of the country's business and education leaders to figure out ways that local and state businesses can contribute significantly to continuous improvement in education.
• Finally, fix the health-care system. A less costly and more efficient health-care system will permit a larger portion of federal and state budgets to find their way to all levels of education as well as to the social and family-support programs that increase educational access and success.

Let us not retreat from the social compact that we made with this nation more than a half a century ago with the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the GI Bill of Rights. Let's get it right. Even though the challenges today may be more complex, we did it once and we can surely do it again.

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MARLENE M. JOHNSON, executive director and chief executive of Nafsa: Association of International Educators: The next president will face daunting foreign policy and national-security challenges. One of the most fundamental will be to restore America's international legitimacy. Both candidates recognize that need, and to address it, both have pledged to do a better job of public diplomacy. Reflecting the widespread preoccupation with that issue, an important conversation is taking place among concerned citizens to determine the appropriate public-diplomacy infrastructure to recommend to the next administration. There have been numerous proposals for reorganizing the public-diplomacy function within or outside the U.S. government.

Reengineering the next public-diplomacy agency, however, is not the only challenge, nor even the most fundamental one. Public diplomacy is essentially about understanding — America's understanding of the world, and the world's understanding of America. The United States cannot conduct effective public diplomacy with a world that it does not know, listen to, or understand. And the world cannot understand America unless we do a better job of nurturing the ties through which the world knows us.

For those reasons, education is not peripheral to public diplomacy, but rather at its core. It is impossible to conduct effective public diplomacy without accomplishing two things that universities are uniquely positioned to do: first, to ensure that students graduate with basic knowledge and understanding of the world and an ability to communicate in the world's languages; and, second, to attract international students and scholars to be educated in the United States and to experience and develop lifelong relationships with America.

The next president should announce a major international education project designed explicitly to foster an America that knows, understands, and is able to communicate with the world, and to strengthen the relationships through which the American people and the world's people can relate to, interact with, and understand each other. Such a project should include two higher-education components: a national program to establish study abroad as an integral part of American undergraduate education, and the restoration of America's status as a magnet for international students and scholars.

America must graduate far more students from college with basic international knowledge and proficiency in a foreign language. To make that happen, the next president should put his administration squarely behind the Senator Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act, which would quadruple study-abroad participation and diversify study-abroad opportunities in terms of participants, fields of study, and destinations. The president should make it a priority to carry out and including funding for that bill if Congress enacts it this year, and to reintroduce it if Congress does not.

The next president should also announce a comprehensive strategy for enhancing the attractiveness of our nation to international students and scholars. That will require creating a capability in the White House to provide strong policy guidance and coordinate federal actions with respect to international students and scholars. It will also require revising immigration law and visa policy to make it easier for legitimate visitors to enter the country while maintaining necessary vigilance to identify illegitimate visitors. Such a broad, national effort would immediately send a strong signal to the world that the United States is committed to strengthening international understanding.

(Nafsa recently issued a set of policy recommendations for the next president on international education and public diplomacy, which can be found at http://www.nafsa.org/pdpaper08.)

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JAMES T. HARRIS III, president of Widener University, and IRA HARKAVY, associate vice president and director of the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania: Over the past decade, a movement dedicated to educating students for democratic leadership has developed and is having a significant impact, especially in urban areas. With the election of a new president, this is an appropriate time to harness the power and momentum of that movement and create a new compact among the government, higher-education institutions, and their communities. The federal government should encourage colleges to better realize their mission by tapping into the intellect and energy of professors and students to help solve important social problems.

Fortunately an increasing number of such partnerships between colleges and their communities have developed, most notably those that engage the colleges with community groups, governmental and nonprofit organizations, parents, and others to better educate children and attack the roots of poverty and neighborhood decline. One area where colleges can make, and have made, a particularly significant contribution is by working with local public schools.

The next president could help encourage such partnerships by directing federal support and attention toward institutions that have demonstrated through their actions a commitment to improve the quality of learning and life in their communities.

A good first step would be to create a multi-agency federal commission designed to advance the social responsibility of colleges. The commission could produce recommendations that would serve as the basis for a national summit on the civic responsibility of higher education, which would help spur both a national conversation and appropriate action at all levels of government.

The government could also strengthen and expand community-based work-study to engage more college students with their communities. By making federal work-study money more flexible, so that institutions could develop creative and effective linkages to local communities, that program would be a more powerful and effective antipoverty tool.

The government should also encourage the development of strategies and programs to promote regional consortia of higher-education institutions that could work together to improve schooling and community life.

In addition, the next president could give prestigious awards to outstanding partnerships of schools, colleges, and communities. We suggest that these awards be based on the "Noah principle" — awards given for building arks (producing real change), not for predicting rain (describing the problems that exist and will develop if actions are not taken). The severe and worsening conditions in America's urban schools and communities require government, foundations, corporations, and colleges to collaboratively, immediately, and systematically carry out the Noah principle: in short, taking bold action and doing the right thing.

The federal government and we in higher education must do more to reward and recognize institutions that take the risk to create mutually beneficial and respectful partnerships that make a profound difference in communities and on campuses.

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FRANCE A. CÓRDOVA, president of Purdue University: Attracting more domestic students into science, engineering, technology, and math — what we call the STEM disciplines — has been identified as a national imperative, asserted by scientific societies, national organizations of universities, business groups, the National Science Board and federal science agencies, Congress, and the current American president.

That comes in response to reports such as "Science and Engineering Indicators, 2004," published by the National Science Foundation, which stated that during the previous 30 years the United States had fallen from third to 17th in the world in the number of 18- to 24-year-olds with science degrees. American universities are fortunate to have attracted many bright students from other countries to earn degrees in the STEM disciplines. Because of U.S. visa restrictions and competitive opportunities in their home countries, not all of those students stay. Yet they advance scholarship and research with their professors while they are here, enhancing our nation's achievements in science and engineering. The challenge is to encourage domestic students to concentrate in such disciplines.

Fifty years ago, when our nation was jolted into the space age, Congress approved the National Defense Education Act, improving science and math teaching, strengthening Ph.D. programs, expanding need-based college loans, and sharpening teacher proficiency in foreign languages and culture. It succeeded in attracting students to STEM fields, with profound results. We answered the challenge then, and we can do it again. President John F. Kennedy's imperative to send people to the moon can be matched today by imperatives for energy independence, environmental sustainability, and economic growth, along with advancements in education, medicine, health-care delivery, food safety, and security.

When I joined Purdue University, a year ago, I launched a "tiger team" to consider how to attract students — especially women and minority students, a relatively untapped talent pool — into the STEM fields. We laid out a road map that advocates four years of high-school math (required in many other countries); encourages the "marketing" of the lure of scientific exploration, starting in elementary school; and calls for more partnerships in this effort from for-profit and nonprofit enterprises that clamor for graduates in science and engineering. We also suggest initiatives to improve the scientific experience in the classroom, especially in the initial college years, when students often find themselves in a class with hundreds of others.

We are in the midst of a presidential campaign, preparing to elect a leader whose policies and actions will set a course for our nation through the 21st century. Energy, the environment, and the economy have emerged among the major issues. Our ability to meet those and more challenges hinges on our success in training American students in the STEM fields.

It is my hope that our presidential candidates will move that effort to the forefront of the national debate and advocate proposals to position our country for global leadership. The goal is building a national commitment to educate a competitive work force in an increasingly technical world — one in which knowledge and innovation are the essential ingredients for success.