Useful Data and Bad Ideas for Higher Education
The final reportby the commission chartered by U.S. Secretary of Education MargaretSpellings, "A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of AmericanHigher Education," is now available online as a pdf download. Thereport is written in a style that could be a classic exemplar of whatused to be called the foot-in-the-door sales technique. It begins withstatements and data that, in and of themselves, are either rooted infact (e.g., the decline of American college graduation rates to 9th inthe world) or easy to agree with (e.g., "We want a higher educationsystem that gives Americans the workplace skills they need to adapt toa rapidly changing economy"). But, as it progresses, the reportessentially becomes a call for extending the Bush Administration's NoChild Left Behind Act to higher education, complete with high-stakestesting.
By recommending, in the guise of accountability, assessment (thereport even names which tests should be used) of all students toascertain the amount learned, the Spellings Commission would embarkhigher education on the pathway toward vocational preparation as afirst objective. The Commission's a priori assumption that thisobjective is paramount is worthy of serious debate. While vocationalpreparation is essential to the mission of some schools--communitycolleges come readily to mind--extending this conceptualization totop-tier public and private research universities is franklydangerous. An alternative approach is suggested by Derek Bok, former President of Harvard and author of Our Underachieving Colleges, who starts with much of the same unassailable data as the Spellings Commission, but makes recommendations based on a broader set of assumptions about higher education's role in society.
The danger of the Spellings report lies in the U.S. Federal Government's power to enforce its recommendations via control of a huge portion of higher education funding in the U.S. Three of the top five recipients of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for medical research are private universities, illustrating the capacity for any federal mandates to affect all of American higher education.
While calling their study a "national dialogue", the report's authors anticipate and attempt to curtail arguments suchas the above by quoting past presidents of the University of Chicago and HarvardUniversity who objected in the 1940's to the G.I. Bill on the groundsthat the likely hordes of new students would somehow dilute and demeanhigher education. The author's clear suggestion being that objectionsto their conclusions and recommendations would be similarly archaic ifnot elitist.
The Spellings Commission is different. Under the lofty and nobleframework of expanding access and affordability, its recommendationswould fundamentally alter the mission of higher education by makingcertain implicit assumptions as to its purpose. Access andaffordability are serious issues arising from complex economic andpolitical factors, but the Commission's recommendations are potentiallyeven more destructive than the problems they seek to ameliorate.