Commission on the Future of Higher Education

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Secretary Spellings and former North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt at the announcement of the Secretary's Commission on the Future of Higher Education
Secretary Spellings and former North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt at the announcement of the Secretary's Commission on the Future of Higher Education

The formation of a Commission on the Future of Higher Education, also known as the Spellings Commission, was announced on September 19, 2005 by U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings. The nineteen member Commission was charged with recommending a national strategy for reforming post-secondary education, with a particular focus on how well colleges and universities are preparing students for the 21st-century workplace, as well as a secondary focus on how well high schools are preparing the students for post-secondary education. In the report, released on September 26, 2006, the Commission focuses on four key areas: access, affordability (particularly for non-traditional students), the standards of quality in instruction, and the accountability of institutions of higher learning to their constituencies (students, families, taxpayers, and other investors in higher education). Since the report's publication, the implementation of its recommendations have been made the responsibility of the recently appointed U.S. Under Secretary of Education, Sara Martinez Tucker.

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[edit] Formation and Motivation

A significant motivation behind the Spellings Commission's formation was the fear that the American higher education system is deteriorating and failing to prepare the American workforce for the rigors and competitiveness of the globalized marketplace. The Spellings Commission opens its report by stating that “higher education in the United States has become one of our greatest success stories.” but recently, as the commission bluntly states in its preamble, “[foreign higher education systems] are passing us by a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.” The commission emphasizes the relationship between industry, education, and the government.

Presidential commissions on education have been relatively common since the The Truman Report in 1947. Other notable groups include President Eisenhower's "Committee on Education Beyond the High School," (1956), President Kennedy's Task Force on Education (1960), and President Regan's National Commission on Excellence in Education, which produced A Nation at Risk (1983).

[edit] The Published Report

The published report (pdf) (first available on September 26, 2006 as a pre-publication copy), was titled A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education. It proposed several solutions to the problems facing higher education today, corresponding to the four primary concerns of the commission: access, affordability, quality, and accountability.

[edit] Access

According to the commission, access to higher education "is unduly limited by the complex interplay of inadequate preparation, lack of information about college opportunities, and persistent financial barriers" (Commission Report 5). The commission blames the lack of communication between colleges and high schools as one source of the problem. The report states that "forty-four percent of university faculty members say students aren't well prepared for college-level writing, in contrast to the 90 percent of high school teachers who think they are prepared" and "only 17 percent of seniors are considered proficient in mathematics, and just 36 percent are proficient in reading." In response to this, the Commission proposed linking the expectations of college professors for incoming freshman to the criteria required for students to graduate high school by increasing communication between the two groups. In order to accomplish this, the Report "strongly encourages early assessment initiatives that determine whether students are on track for college". Another proposal of the Report is an increase in the use of open content and open source at the collegiate level to increase access to more people.

[edit] Affordability

Another dilemma that the commission faces regarding the access to higher education is the availability for low-income families and, to a lesser extent, students of minority groups. The report states that "there is ample evidence that qualified young people from families of modest means are far less likely to go to college than their affluent peers with similar qualifications." In an effort to lessen the stress of paying for college, the commission's report recommended shortening the FAFSA form to encourage more people to apply for financial aid. The report also calls for greater productivity and efficiency of the financial aid system. State funding for higher education has fallen to the lowest levels the nation has seen in two decades, and the report proposes that Universities be held accountable for their "spending decisions... based on their own limited resources."

[edit] Quality

The report urges colleges and universities to embrace innovative ideas for new methods of teaching, such as distance learning, to improve the quality of higher education. The report also addresses the idea that organization and nation-wide reform are key parts in repairing the problems of higher education. [1] Modifying the curricula and assessments on a nation-wide level would help distinguish students in the academic world.

[edit] Accountability

Lastly, the commission proposes creating a public database, where statistics and other information about colleges and universities could be viewed by all in order to clarify the haziness of accountability. The information that would be made available in the proposed database would include the cost, price, admissions data, and college completion rates of colleges. The database could eventually even contain data such as the "learning outcomes of students". The Commission argues that colleges might have a more vested interest in the success of their students if this information were made public to prospective students and their parents.

[edit] Criticism and Controversy

Commission member David Ward refused to sign the final version, citing "several issues of serious concern" including the report's tendency to attribute problems with multiple causes entirely to the state of higher education.

After the publication of the report, it has been the target of criticism from prominent individuals in higher education, including Robert Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities (and not a commission member), who stated that the report lacked a "nuanced understanding" of the realities of higher education.

Privacy advocates have criticized the call for a national student database, which Spellings and the commission have argued should include information on individual students' performance.

Microsoft's Gerri Elliot, a commission member, sparred with other commission members over the inclusion of a discussion of the benefits of open source software and open content.

[edit] Response to Report's Recommendations

But the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education's "Measuring Up 2006: The National Report Card on Higher Education" focuses on most of the same areas as Spellings Commission report. The "report card" looks at individual states and assesses the status of their higher education since 2000. Although the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education is not directly affiliated with the commission, there is significant overlap in not only the areas of concern, but in some of the membership (notably James B. Hunt, Jr. and Arturo Madrid). Spellings is quoted as saying that she is proud her report has similarities to the National Center's report.

One of the most controversial proposed implementations of the report's recommendations is the proposal for a federally managed system to record the progress of individual college students. The Department of Education has proposed revamp or expand the current Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, arguing that a database is necessary to sufficiently assess the status of universities and college students nation wide. University and pro-privacy advocates fear that such a plan would require universities to submit much more information causing vast increases in cost and time commitment to the universities and could be regarded as an invasion of students' privacy. The Department of Education addresses some of these anxieties on a "Myth vs. Fact" page posted to the DOE web site on September 29, 2006.

Some universities are beginning to use and modify Learning Management Systems to create information systems that provide for a means of articulating institutional, classroom and personal learning outcomes at all levels as well as means to consistently rate performance toward those objectives. Alternative solutions are being researched, while the Spellings commissions is seeking funding for test projects in the 2008 federal budget."Goal Aware Tools" development effort is one such attempt.

[edit] Implementation

Since the US Department of Education published the Spellings Commission report on September 26, 2006, Spellings has pushed for progress in implementing the recommendations, progress that faces the challenge of working with limited time before the 2008 presidential elections. This push for tangible changes in the remainder of her term has included:

  • The appointment of Sara Martinez Tucker as U.S. Under Secretary for Education by the U.S. Senate. Tucker was nominated by President George W. Bush in August of 2006, but not confirmed until December. With Spellings, Tucker has created a more limited list of short and long-term goals for implementing the Commission Report's recommendations, a list headed by plans to increase the efficiency of the financial aid system, to create greater access to higher education, and to ensure that high school students are better prepared for college.
  • Plans to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), and to notify students before the spring of their senior year whether or not they would qualify for aid.
  • A push to make comparative evaluation of individual universities' performance more possible, particularly through revamping or expanding the current Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (a push that has been met with some resistance by higher education interests.
  • A planned summit on carrying out the recommendations of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. This summit will take place in Washington DC March 21-22, 2007.

[edit] External links