Two months ago, the Commission on the Future of Higher Education issued its final report. The Commission, appointed last year by President Bush and working closely with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, was comprised of 19 members ranging from present or retired college and university presidents to corporate CEO types. It was chaired by a Texas businessman who was deeply involved in the system of higher education in that state. The Commission was charged with the development of a national strategy for postsecondary education that meets the country’s needs for an appropriate 21st century workforce.
Only one member of the Commission, David Ward, the president of the American Council on Education, had the gumption to withhold his support for the report’s findings and recommendations. A number of leaders in higher education had serious reservations about the report. I certainly did.
During most of the last month I was back in India, traveling with a group of CC alums, parents and family members. I visited old friends, and met with students at three different secondary schools where I was trying to encourage interest among top students there in coming to Colorado College.
From a distance of 10,000 miles, I was reminded of just how great our country’s competitive advantage in higher education really is. Bright young students in India are eager to come to the United States to study, some as undergraduates and many as graduate students. Last year some 585,000 foreign students were enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities.
They were attracted by the diversity of our institutions, ranging from community colleges to large research universities, from open- admission public institutions to small highly-selective liberal arts colleges like CC. Above all, they were drawn to the variety of high- quality programs we offer in this country. And in choosing to study here, they invested some $13 billion in our institutions of higher education—making the United States one of the largest export earning service industries.
What is evident at a distance of 10,000 miles seems invisible to the eyes of the members of what has come to be called the Spellings Commission. Commission members spent little time exploring the strengths of our system of higher education. Instead, the report focused on a list of familiar complaints about access, affordability and accountability.
I do share concerns on each of these counts. But I also want any serious look at these problems to begin with an understanding of the richness, the diversity and the complexity of U.S. higher education. One of the things that make us quite different from the rest of the world is that our system is not national, not exclusively cut from one bolt of cloth—like so much of higher education in Europe, Asia and the rest of the world.
The Spellings Commission made almost no effort, for example, to distinguish among the missions of comprehensive public universities, community colleges and private liberal arts colleges. To imagine that there is one standard to measure success (for example, retention or graduation rates) at the range of institutions that make up the mosaic of higher education in the United States is to miss one of our most distinctive strengths.
Sadly, the Commission failed almost completely to consider the relevance of the liberal arts tradition that is a cornerstone of higher education in this country. Glenn Brooks, a political scientist and former dean of Colorado College, noted in a recent email the result of a word search of the Spellings Commission report: Liberal education (0), history (0), philosophy (0), creativity (0), technology (38), workforce (36) and skills (36).
We need to be concerned about raising the endowment at CC to ensure financial aid for the students who are admitted but cannot afford our tuition. But the irony is that we have a higher percentage of students of color, and deep-need students, than many large public universities. I am saddened that the Spellings Commission did not acknowledge the remarkable number of our highly-selective private liberal arts colleges that fulfill this public purpose. Not only do we provide access for first-generation and minority students; we also retain them and graduate them at much higher rates.
For the Commission to paint all of American higher education with a single brush does a disservice to the whole enterprise because it fails to recognize the distinctive contributions made by different types of colleges and universities. As a consequence, Commission members failed to offer solutions that resist a one-size-fits-all character. Such solutions could well do more damage to higher education in the United States than the problems they are intended to address.
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President Celeste’s leadership of Colorado College has a magisterial
quality, in the best sense of the term, so it is not surprising that in his blog of Dec. 6, 2006, he crisply analyzes the defects of the Spellings Commission report. His remarks deserve further comment. The report indeed failed to reflect the rich diversity of American higher education. But it also typified the ever more prevalent flaw of giving credence to ‘concerns’ simply because they’ve become popular among ‘reformers.’
Access and affordability are valid issues, and ones minimally swayed by
what neo-Freudians call ‘the tyranny of the shoulds.’ Accountability,
by contrast, is a monster anyone can let out of the box. If uncritically embraced, it displays a hydra-headed dimension that seems endless.
Already in most public school districts, enormous amounts of time are
given to testing. Tests with draconian penalties like those in ‘No Child
Left Behind,’ lead to numerous hours practicing to take the test or
teaching to it. State tests were too often designed to give but a snapshot (to provide data needed to support charter or private school options) so educators, to their credit, added MAP [Measure of Academic Progress] to measure growth. A need was also found to require writing tests.
There are English Language Acquisition tests, and pecial education tests. Tests in mid year have been proposed to allow schools to adjust tactics
to ensure good performance on tests in March or May. In an era when
a new breed of educators openly question the value of such tests, there are more of them than ever, and they drive the entire range of energies in public education, even to yearly changing yearly calenders.
President Celeste astutely notes the potential damage that recommendations by the Spellings Commission could cause to higher education. But its failure to set limits to ‘accountability testing’ also affects the applicant pool of every college where selectivity includes diversity. If diversity were to mean nothing more than the inclusion of students from urban public schools, those students arrive at college with far too many hours consumed by accountability, instead of devoted to history and the arts.
As students return from winter break, it is important to underscore
the words in this post about the liberal arts. Eight hundred years have now passed since the University of Paris was chartered. Its hope and promise have been fulfilled by more colleges and universities in America than in any other nation. In today’s competitive climate, there is more than enough accountability already in the system. Schools that do not
meet expectations at the elite levels are swiftly penalized, because so many second tier institutions are struggling mightily to replace them.
The workplace itself has an ever decreasing tolerance for mediocrity. Lockheed-Martin did not win the Orion contract with a workforce
educated at colleges who need help with accountability. The fact
that so many foreign students come to the U.S. to study is one of our
best measures of success.
Equally salient, leaders of both India and China recently observed that their educational systems were severely deficient compared to the U.S.
in providing a liberal arts education. They were happy to be good in science and technology, but envied our possession of the very strengths that former C C Dean Glenn Brooks found absent in the Spellings report.
The East Asian giants understand all too well that without the creativity that feeds entrepreneurship, and without serious study of the ‘seekers and wonderers’ who influenced the history and philosophy of the ages,
their vast populations will never fulfill the bright promise of the future.
In the near term, they will seek to learn from the U.S. how to provide such an education. In that quickly dawning day, Colorado College, repeatedly ranked as one of the best educational values in America, is
in fact positioned to assume a role of leadership in the world beyond
any we may have imagined.
As always, I enjoy reading your entries. I totally agree–in fact, I’d like to see an even more flexible education system in this country (I dropped out of high school in favor of Simon’s Rock College before transferring to CC, and it was a ridiculously awkward process–and after my B.A., I’m finding I have to get a GED so I can collect my AmeriCorps tuition aid for grad school).
My roommate is a student at PPCC, as is my partner, and their experiences and needs are definitely different from mine and each other’s. My partner is very dyslexic and stubbornly unsuited to the concept of “liberal arts”–even community college isn’t focused enough on practical skills for him. My roommate is ambitious and will probably be one of the relatively few PPCC students to go on to a four-year degree–she wants research opportunities, which are hard to come by at a community college.
Types of higher education institutions are different, and the individual institutions within those categories are different. That’s a valuable thing. I, for one, felt that CC gave me both a very strong grounding in my field and the chance to explore other subjects (although less than I would have liked, due to the difficulties of being a transfer student). A liberal arts education is not incompatible with “technology” or “workforce skills” (although I’d also argue that the place to learn the latter is in jobs and internships, not school).