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News, Views and Careers for All of Higher Education

Sept. 20, 2005

The Future of Higher Ed

Saying she believes the United States needs a “comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education,” U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Monday announced the formation of a national commission on the future of higher education.

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In a speech at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Spellings said the 19-member panel, an eclectic mix of business executives, current and former college presidents, higher education researchers and experts on minority students, would explore such issues as student access, college prices, and how well the higher education system is “preparing our students to compete in the new global economy.” The panel’s first meeting is scheduled for October 17 in Washington.

Spellings went out of her way to say that in creating the commission, she was “not advocating a bigger role for the federal government in higher education,” which has long been seen as a world leader in large part because it is so decentralized, promoting competition and innovation. But the education secretary also made clear – in language that is likely to make some college leaders nervous – that an underlying premise behind the panel’s creation is that the federal government has every right to examine academe more closely.

“Most people don’t realize that federal dollars make up about one-third of our nation’s total annual investment in higher education,” compared to the less than 10 percent the government puts toward the national cost of elementary and secondary education, Spellings said. “But unlike K–12 education, we don’t ask a lot of questions about what we’re getting for our investment in higher education.”

“It is time,” she added, “to examine how we can get the most out of our national investment.”

To undertake that examination, Spellings has turned to top officials at corporations like IBM, Microsoft and Boeing, former college presidents such as James J. Duderstadt of the University of Michigan and Charles M. Vest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advocates for minority and other underrepresented students, including Kati Haycock of the Education Trust and Sara Martinez Tucker of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, and ex-politicians like James B. Hunt Jr., the former governor of North Carolina.

The panel includes two sitting college presidents — Charlene R. Nunley, president of Montgomery College, and Robert Mendenhall, president of the online Western Governors University – as well as Jonathan Grayer, CEO and chairman of Kaplan, Inc., which among other things is a for-profit provider of higher education. David Ward, head of the American Council on Education, higher education’s umbrella lobbying group, is also a member.

College groups had relatively little to say about the national commission, mostly because they knew virtually nothing about it. (Ward told a group of officials from other higher education associations Monday morning that he could offer little insight on its goals.) Members of the panel apparently were approached in late August and have received only a brief form letter outlining its mission in the broadest terms. The commission grew out of two roundtables that Spellings organized, an April one in Washington and a more recent one in Denver, for government officials, university officials and policy makers.

Higher education officials who did have something to say about the panel offered a range of perspectives. Ruth Flower, a top official at the American Association of University Professors, said the faculty group was concerned by the heavy representation of corporate leaders and for-profit higher education officials, and the American Federation of Teachers, in a letter to Spellings, complained about its dearth of voices representing rank and file faculty members who are on the front lines.

While several of the former college presidents on the panel are now professors, the only full-time professors on the panel are Arturo Madrid of Trinity University, who is an expert on Hispanic education and a former Education Department official, Robert Zemsky, an expert on higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, and Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist who writes widely and critically about rising college prices, among other things. (In fact, he and David Ward have been sniping at each other in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in recent weeks over an op-ed that Vedder wrote on tuition prices. The meeting planner might want to make sure someone sits between them.)

From a slightly different angle, Neal McCluskey, an education policy maker at the Cato Institute, expressed concern that the panel would involve the federal government more in the goings-on of a higher education system that has benefited from operating in a relatively free market. “This would be taking higher education in exactly the opposite direction of where we’d want it to go,” he said.

“The reason American is still considered by far the leading system in the world is because there’s so much competition — no direction from a single government entity saying, ‘All colleges have to do X, and our national goals are Y.’ Students are choosing which innovations they like, and they’re not all getting the same USDA-approved higher education that has everything the leaders in Washington think is appropriate.”

Heading up the national panel — and in the potentially unenviable position of weaving together those and other widely varying perspectives — will be Charles Miller, an investment executive who until last year was chairman of the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents, a position to which he was appointed by then Gov. George W. Bush.

Miller said the intensifying talk among business leaders about America’s declining competitiveness and the public’s increasing concern about rising college prices are “pretty strong signals” that “something isn’t quite right” in American higher education. “It’s not a surprise that somebody alert to what’s going on in America would say we need to talk about this more,” he added.

While he understood that the idea of a national commission might provoke concern among some people in higher education about heightened federal intervention, “the federal government isn’t going to run the higher education system,” and “we’re deregulation and local control people,” Miller said. And while it’s true that decentralization has been a hallmark of the American higher education system, he said, “we have a long tradition of federal support for higher ed,” and “the idea that our system somehow happened by osmosis” is off-base.

He added: “Accountability and deregulation go together.”

The members of the new commission are:

  • Carol Bartz, chairman and CEO, Autodesk, Inc.
  • Nicholas Donofrio, executive vice president for innovation and technology, IBM
  • James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus and director of the Millennium Project, U. of Michigan
  • Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president, worldwide public sector, Microsoft
  • Jonathan Grayer, CEO and chairman, Kaplan, Inc.
  • Kati Haycock, director, The Education Trust
  • James B. Hunt, Jr., chairman, Hunt Institute for Educational Policy and Leadership, former governor of North Carolina
  • Arturo Madrid, Murchison Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Trinity U. (Tex.)
  • Robert Mendenhall, president, Western Governors University
  • Charles Miller, private investor; former chairman, U. of Texas System Board of Regents
  • Charlene R. Nunley, president, Montgomery College
  • Arthur J. Rothkopf, senior vice president and counselor to the president, U.S. Chamber of Commerce; president emeritus, Lafayette College
  • Richard Stephens, senior vice president for human resources and administration, Boeing
  • Louis M. Sullivan, president emeritus, Morehouse School of Medicine; former secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
  • Sara Martinez Tucker, president and CEO, Hispanic Scholarship Fund
  • Richard Vedder, adjunct scholar, American Enterprise Institute; professor of economics, Ohio U.
  • Charles M. Vest, president emeritus and professor of mechanical engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • David Ward, president, American Council on Education
  • Robert Zemsky, chair and professor, the Learning Alliance, U. of Pennsylvania

— Doug Lederman

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Comments

Was this inevitable?

As a graduate student and teaching staff — how higher education (and health care) costs can keep rising at rates higher than the rate of inflation, is beyond most people’s understanding and patience level.

This rate of increase is unsustainable — I see my peers and students hurting financially, and it is insane.

Where is the shared sacrifice by the established groups? Are resources being directed to the most productive areas? What options are being considered? Where is the innovation?

The machine’s broken. Please fix it, before someone has to do it for you. Thanks.

A.D., Foot Soldier at Small college, at 5:53 am EDT on September 20, 2005

looking at the wrong problem

Perhaps The University is the wrong tool for the problem at hand? While academic institutions have provided world leadership in research, particularly in the sciences and their hand maidens, technologies, it is not to say that, possibly, The University has over sold itself as a sort of universal tool.

Perhaps the intellectual and professional armamentarium needs more specialized and directed tools in today’s Internet driven world.

There is too much evidence being accrued which indicate that much of what is offered at a university at an undergraduate level can be more efficiently, expediently and thoroughly delivered in a more meaningful and cost efficient manner

Perhaps The University, as carnival barker, selling itself as the universal intellectual, social and professional cure-all, needs to be taken less seriously- or as evidence shows, is being seen in a different light by its audiences.

thoughts?

tom, editor at On the Horizon, at 12:52 pm EDT on September 20, 2005

Local control

That comment about “we’re local control folks” was interesting to us, who in our community have had to “take control” and finance the provision of postsecondary options for our remote southwestern Colorado region ourselves. No public college was willing to establish postsecondary programs and student services for our low population rural area so we have had to “do it ourselves", just like the homesteaders before us hired a teacher and provided board and rm and a few dollars to teach at one room rural schools.

Our new higher ed center is based on the knowledge that valid access to postsecondary education involves much more than location for populations isolated by socio-economic, cultural, and geographic factors. Working with our public institutions toward our goals has been an exercise in frustration and we have even met disrespect for our mission, so something does need fixing, but whether this Washington based commission can do it is questionable. I would have liked to see them put someone from the Lumina Foundation on it. They are doing great work.

Sarah Silver, Director at University Centers of the San miguel, at 2:18 pm EDT on September 20, 2005

I share the concerns of faculty organizations. Spellings’ cadre of private interest and administration figures makes me wonder if she hasn’t forgotten just what has led to the recent decline in the prestige of our post-secondary system in recent years.

Still, there is another, far more fundamental, reason this is the wrong panel. We have to plan for K-12 education in this country. Maybe if we came up with a way to deliver education instead of no. 2 pencil-marked exams we would have a prayer of getting kids ready for college.

Andrew Purvis, at 3:47 pm EDT on September 20, 2005

The Future of Higher Education

Perhaps the exalted commission will find that our world merely has a supply and demand problem? There are too many sons and daughters of corporate giants, too many former campaign assistants, too many token representatives of this or that minority, all with college degrees.

Unfortunately, the supply of college graduates who actually studied while at university, but are not well-enough connected to be appointed into important positions continues to grow. We are just producing too many college graduates who recognize that the emperors have no clothing.

It would seem that increasing numbers of our high school graduates intuitively recognize the current state of our culture, so they’re flocking to technical college to learn how to repair computers and shake down the post-modern, twisted, empty-shell corporations?

F.G.,Ph.D.

Dr. F. Gump, Muckraking Provost at Mental Institute, at 5:06 pm EDT on September 20, 2005

Who represents CTE as part of the future of higher education?

Who represents career and technical education?

I for one appreciate and acknowledge the efforts on the part of U. S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. The federal government is in the best position to help coordinate the various programs being offered. We certainly need a clearinghouse to identify and make available the more successful curriculums. However, we did note a lack of representation on the panel of an adult/vocational educator. I respectfully volunteering to become an alternate member of the group. As a small business owner turned university instructor, I believe I am in the enviable position to represent other opinions. In any event, allow me to propose that the committee consider requiring that new educators in higher education obtain a teaching credential. Subject matter competency does not necessarily mean an individual know how to guide the process of learning nor motivate the individuals involved.

Lawrence J. Guzzetta, Jr. Ph.D. Teacher/Educator University of San Diego Palm Desert, CAguzzetta@dc.rr.com

Lawrence J. Guzzetta, Jr., Ph.D. at University of San Diego, at 5:54 pm EDT on September 20, 2005

Credentials

While it is true that knowledge in a field does not bear a one-to-one correspondence with teaching skill, we would do well look at the relative success of college instructors and professors and credential-bearing K-12 educators. Credentials have proven less than useful in guaranteeing success there, yet we might find ourselves going from being overstocked with faculty to scrabbling about in search of a few willing to spend the extra time to earn credentials.

I’m probably lighting a short fuse to a huge pile of explosives here, but this is why we have tenure and peer evaluations. I suspect there is someone right now ready to say that peer review by those who don’t have certifications cannot reasonably be expected to equate to the quality of said certs, but let’s be real. As more and more requirements have been placed upon educators, fewer and fewer people have been willing to join those ranks. Too many people are doing a few years before switching to more lucrative careers in other fields, simply because they are being administered to death in the classroom, meeting continuing education requirements, even with useless courses, or overseeing almost monthly standardized exams that measure how well they taught one group of students how to take tests.

Let’s get back to education for a change. I would like to see a return to teaching, from the ground up, the basics. I want to see one college class in which every student can correctly identify the parts of speech in every sentence on one page of text before I start my first day.

Andrew Purvis, at 7:48 pm EDT on September 20, 2005

intrusive and meddling diversions

With NCLB under a withering barrage of criticism from every hamlet and city in America, and with formal complaints or lawsuits underway in 47 states against NCLB, and with two-thirds of Americans disagreeing with NCLB’s use of a single measure to make high-stakes decisions, and with 61% of informed poll respondents opposing NCLB (see story here), it is not surprising that Queen Mag would want to change the subject.

Out of the blue, or out of the storm clouds following Katrina, here comes Mom-Secretary to announce that, since the effort to bring NCLB to the high schools fell flat earlier this year, that now Bush Co. wants to know what is going on in the University. As reported by Inside Higher Ed, most everyone was surprised by this bold stroke of educational meddling:

College groups had relatively little to say about the national commission, mostly because they knew virtually nothing about it. Remaining consistent with other blue-ribbon panels sent out to study education issues, the illustrious body is heavy on corporate bosses and short on educators, with only two real professors among the 19 members, and one of them is economist and chief among ideologues for the American Enterprise Institute, Richard Vedder.

Chairing the Commission is retired investment specialist, Charles Miller, who just wound up his tenure as a Bush appointment on the Board of Regents for UT (that one in Texas). Mr. Miller has a bachelor’s degree in Math (UT ‘59) and would appear imminently qualified to do whatever he is told by the Business Roundtable and the educational antiquarians such as Bennett, Finn, and the Great Carnine who inspired this intrusion and diversion in the first place. When the heat gets too great, set fire to another kitchen.

“Advocates for minority and other underrepresented students” include Kati Haycock’s Education Trust, espousing a 1950s liberal agenda based on a keep-on-the-sunny-side phony meritocratic technocracy.

The other “advocate” is the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, a private venture chaired by Dr. Robert Benjamin, who is President of Council for Aid to Education, which has as prominent Board members Benno Schmidt, Jr. of Edison Schools and, wouldn’t you know it, Harold W. McGraw, Jr. as Special Advisor. And these are the advocates for the poor. I suppose we might add Jonathan Grayer, CEO and chairman, Kaplan, Inc. as an advocate for the poor and downtrodden—after all, his company is doing its humanitarian duty in the test-failed urban schools where billions in tax dollars are shoveled out for private tutoring firms like Kaplan, who, by the way, are accountable to no one except the the hacks at ED who are writing the checks.

Being accountable to no one would seem to automatically qualify for inclusion on a national Commission headed by Spellings and the band of dark visionaries circulating in the White House.

Jim Horn PhD, at 9:31 pm EDT on September 20, 2005

American Faculty

Foot Soldier writes: << As a graduate student and teaching staff — how higher education (and health care) costs can keep rising at rates higher than the rate of inflation, is beyond most people’s understanding and patience level. >>

I am dyslexic and can’t spell, but I try to do better than that with my grammar when I am posting on an educational site about the state American education.

John Lobell, Pratt Institute

John Lobell, Pratt Institute, at 4:36 am EDT on September 21, 2005

Sizzling stuff from Jim Horn, and the connection to a Nickleby kind of meddling.

A. G., Purdue University, at 4:39 am EDT on September 22, 2005

Pay attention to all these good thinkers — especially Jim Horn.

It’s necessary to remember that Sec. Spellings’s words and thoughts are not her own, any more than Pres. Bush’s are.

The Business Roundtable is running education at all levels. Just read “A Nation at Risk,” 1983. The goals are all there.

I see that the Pres. is worried about paying for the high-school ("academic (math-and-science) elite") program.

The Business Roundtable has engineered it completely, but he’s afraid, I’m sure, of offending the BRT by reminding them that they were going to pay for it.

The “cuts” he will choose will further trash education for the everybodies, and poverty will increase.

Peg T. Oliver, M.Ed.

Peg Oliver, Director at Coalition of Literacy Services, at 7:45 pm EDT on October 11, 2005

Public Accountability / Public Trust

We could work together to see to it parents and pulbic leaders received the information needed to make decisions. We could give shape to an academic product we are proud of and willing to talk about it with others. We could be at the forefront of public accountability as it supports the public trust responsibllity we have.

I know what to do, I would prefer not to be told what to do.

Vince Pellegrino, VP, at 12:05 pm EST on December 6, 2006

EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION

WHEN SOMETHING IS WRONG, YOU FIX IT. SCHOOLS ARE FAILING NOW AND HAVE BEEN FOR CENTURIES. k-12, WHY? IF SCHOOLS ARE SOCIAL EXTENSIONA, JUST WHAT IS THE “BREAK” IN HUMAN LIFE THAT IS CORRECTLT REFLECTED IN SUCH AN IDIOTIC DIVISION? WHAT IS WRONG WITH A SINGLE, CONSISTENT EDUCATIONAL SERVICE? WHATS WRONG...THE SYSTEM.

Davì Pizota, Crisis. or crises’ at PANDILLA ii, at 5:10 pm EST on December 7, 2006

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