Raising the Bar on College Completion and Quality:
Can We Focus on Both Goals at Once?
I recently returned from a meeting in Minneapolis of the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) that overlapped with a meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and featured speeches by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter. Reflecting on these meetings and the flurry of recent news about the rapid adoption of the common core standards by many states, my feelings have veered from hope to serious concern about the direction of K-16 education reform.
On the “hope” side of the equation, I was heartened by presentations and discussions at the SHEEO meeting. These individuals—who are at the very center of managing severe state budget cuts and positioning their state systems to educate far more students with fewer resources—were very aware of the need to focus attention not only on meeting President Obama’s 2020 goal to increase the number of college graduates, but also on ensuring that the quality of student learning increases as well. As one speaker, Jamie Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, put it, in all our discussions about educational goals, it’s “the learning that matters most.” There were also other thoughtful discussions about how to improve learning outcomes and specifically about the role of accreditation in assuring institutional quality. For instance, SHEEO members discussed whether the current system can and should do more than define “minimum” standards and, instead, push institutions to improve at all levels—including for the top performers. Can accreditation also be about raising aspirations at the top, as well as ensuring that institutions guarantee a minimum achievement level for graduates?
Other elements of the meetings and recent news—including announcements about the new National Governor’s Association initiative, Complete to Compete—elicited in me more concern than hope. Even thoughtful policy makers still seem incapable of fully grasping the complexity of enabling all students to achieve the full breadth of learning outcomes they really need. Because of the nature of policy, everyone is still focused on numbers: How do we get more individuals to go to college and graduate in a timely fashion? Shouldn’t we just reward institutions who graduate more students? Isn’t the key a better data-tracking system to keep track of where students go and where they graduate? Won’t technology solve all our cost problems? Can’t we just increase productivity by putting more courses online? There are many adult students who have obtained college credits, but never completed a degree. Couldn’t we just gather those credits in an online “bank” of some sort and enable them to move quickly into an accelerated program and graduate with a degree in very little time?
I don’t know the full answer to all these questions, and certainly some of them may point the way toward important policy solutions, but I am skeptical about the possibility of these approaches really getting us to the finish line—if that line means truly educating students to thrive, rather than just survive, in a competitive global economy. So many assumptions lie behind these seemingly simple questions. For instance, are we really going to assume that credits earned many years ago by a returning adult student signify that she has achieved learning outcomes appropriate for today’s challenges and adequate for her to pursue further learning and succeed in the future?
Unfortunately, as AAC&U has documented in its surveys of employers (pdf) commissioned as part of the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, America’s educational quality shortfall is at least as severe as our college completion shortfall. This isn’t necessarily because our schools or colleges are getting worse, or today’s students are growing less intelligent or less ambitious. The world itself is raising the bar for what success really means. Even those students who are succeeding by our simplest measure—those actually graduating—lack the full set of skills and abilities they need in today’s workplace. Only about 26 percent of employers we surveyed think today’s colleges and universities are doing a good job of preparing college students effectively for the challenges of today’s global economy. AAC&U’s board of directors also made this point clear in its statement, “The Quality Imperative,” (pdf) released in January.
So, while I am concerned, I sincerely “hope” we can keep our eyes on the quality learning prize as much as we can on the completion prize. Our students—and our nation’s future—depend on it.
