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

Margaret Spellings

Margaret Spellings was the Secretary of Education from 2005-2009 under the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush and previously served as White House Domestic Policy Adviser to President George W. Bush....

. 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

Non-traditional students

Non-traditional student is an American English term referring to some students at tertiary educational institutions. The National Center for Education Statistics acknowledges there is no precise definition for non-traditional student, but suggests that part-time status and age are common elements...

), the standards of quality in instruction, and the accountability

Accountability

Accountability is a concept in ethics and governance with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as responsibility, answerability, blameworthiness, liability, and other terms associated with the expectation of account-giving...

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

Sara Tucker

Sara Martinez Tucker was the Under Secretary of Education at the U.S. Department of Education and former president and Chief Executive Officer of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund....

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

Workforce

The workforce is the labour pool in employment. It is generally used to describe those working for a single company or industry, but can also apply to a geographic region like a city, country, state, etc. The term generally excludes the employers or management, and implies those involved in...

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 Truman Report

Higher Education for American Democracy

Higher Education for American Democracy was a report to U.S. President Harry S. Truman on the condition of higher education in the United States. The commission to write this report was established on July 13, 1946, and it was chaired by George F...

in 1947. Other notable groups include President Eisenhower's

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army...

"Committee on Education Beyond the High School," (1956), President Kennedy's

John F. Kennedy

John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....

Task Force on Education (1960), and President Regan's

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....

National Commission on Excellence in Education, which produced A Nation at Risk

A Nation at Risk

A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform is the title of the 1983 report of American President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education. Its publication is considered a landmark event in modern American educational history...

(1983).

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

Accountability

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

Composition studies

Composition Studies is the professional field of writing research and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States...

, 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 from high school

High school

High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....

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

Open content

Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software....

and open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

at the collegiate level to increase access to more people.

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."

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. http://chronicle.com/ Modifying the curricula and assessments on a nation-wide level would help distinguish students in the academic world.

Accountability

Lastly, the commission proposes creating a public database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

, 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.

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

Association of American Universities

The Association of American Universities is an organization of leading research universities devoted to maintaining a strong system of academic research and education...

(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

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

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

Open source

software and open content.

Response to Report's Recommendations

The Higher Education Consumers Resource (http://www.highereducationconsumersresource.org/)took exception to the report, citing inadequate research on root cause of the problems. With over 80% of all Americans having successfully completed 12 years of school, the fact that fewer than 25% go on to successfully complete a college degree is meaningful. In Ohio alone, there are 8 colleges that graduate less than 35% of the full-time freshman class within 6 years. This indicates serious institutional barriers to success within those institutions. Higher Education Consumers Resource believes academic and career advising from independent sources not beholding to the college or university is one step towards reducing dismal successful college completion rates.

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.

Jim Hunt

James Baxter Hunt Jr. is an American politician who was the 69th and 71st Governor of the state of North Carolina . He is the longest-serving governor in the state's history.-Early life:...

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 nationwide. 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.

Additionally, some disciplinary organizations, such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the Council of Writing Program Administrators, have begun to demonstrate the ways in which member institutions engage in assessment practices designed to improve student learning. They make the case, advanced in documents like the NCTE-WPA White Paper on Writing Assessment in Colleges and Universities, that good assessment is locally contextualized, based in the principles of the discipline, and must be used to improve teaching and learning at the local level.

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
Sara Tucker
Sara Martinez Tucker was the Under Secretary of Education at the U.S. Department of Education and former president and Chief Executive Officer of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund....

as U.S. Under Secretary for Education by the U.S. Senate. Tucker was nominated by President George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....

in August 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
Free Application for Federal Student Aid
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid is a form that can be prepared annually by current and prospective college students in the United States to determine their eligibility for student financial aid .Despite its name, the application is the gateway to...

(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).

Related Acts

The Higher Education Opportunity Act (enacted August 2008) has stated:

Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the Secretary to establish any criteria that specifies, defines, or prescribes the standards that accrediting agencies or associations shall use to assess any institution’s success with respect to student achievement.

External links

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