The biggest problem with higher education today isn’t that students can’t afford to enroll – it’s that too many of the students who do enroll aren’t learning very much and aren’t earning degrees, Kevin Carey argues in the winter issue of the progressive journal, Democracy.
Carey, policy director at the think tank Education Sector in Washington, D.C., compares the highly secretive nature of higher education institutions to that of organized religion, complete with its “priests and mysteries.” He argues colleges that receive federal Pell Grant funding should be required to report teaching, learning, and long-term student employment results to the public.
Along the way, Carey includes some fascinating nuggets about how the higher education lobby has thwarted efforts at making colleges more transparent. One example: Colleges have begun to participate in some voluntary surveys and tests that measure student learning.
But when Mark Schnieder, commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, suggested in 2006 that colleges should have to tell people where to find testing data that the colleges had already agreed to disclose, he nearly got canned.
Carey points the finger at the American Council on Education and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities – groups he refers to by their address, One Dupont Circle.
(Schneider) proposed adding some new questions to the annual survey all colleges are required to fill out in exchange for federal funds. Colleges would be asked if they participated in surveys and tests like NSSE and the CLA. If the college answered "yes," and had already chosen to make the data public, it would be asked to provide a link to the appropriate Web address. It would not be required to participate in any test or survey not of its choosing, or disclose any new information. It would just have to tell people where to find the information it had already, voluntarily, disclosed. One Dupont Circle rose up in anger and the proposal was summarily squashed. For his temerity, Schneider was nearly fired
That same year, then-Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education recommended upgrading an archaic federal data-collection system, including electronic student records, to provide more accountability.
When the topic was broached in mid-summer, the president of NAICU issued a press release denouncing it as "Orwellian" and "an assault on Americans’ privacy and security in the shadow of the Fourth of July." When the Commission persisted, 1 Dupont Circle ran to Congress, which obligingly passed a law making the new information system illegal.
Finally, when Spellings called on accreditors to require colleges to report some kind of evidence that students were learning, “One Dupont Circle went back to Congress and made that illegal, too,” Carey writes. According to Richard Vedder at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, this piece is the talk of the town.
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