Could national standards of performance be the big idea campus communicators have been waiting for?

By Andrea Jarrell

No accountability discussion these days would be complete without mentioning the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education. The article examines the nature and wide range of the Commission's work, but in particular looks at the idea of national standards as one way to measure the government's return on investment and to assess institutional effectiveness. The article suggests that if higher education can succeed in designing and carrying out a comparative system of standards of excellence, it could reclaim the definition of academic excellence long held hostage by commerical rankings.

U.S. higher education needs a "comprehensive national strategy" if it is to remain the best in the world, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said in September 2005, as she announced the formation of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. This September, the 19-member commission is scheduled to deliver a handful of "big ideas" intended to set the course for 21st century higher education in the United States. One of those ideas might be a new voluntary system of standards to measure student and institutional performance. Such a system, if done well, could be a boon to campus communicators, arming them with their own competitive edge.

To be clear, the purpose of the Spellings Commission is certainly not to help institutions better market themselves. But if you believe that effective marketing is rooted in credibility, or if you have ever yearned for definitive evidence of excellence to make your case, the power of this potential new tool will be apparent.

At a crossroads

In establishing the commission, Secretary Spellings said, "The good news is that we still have the finest system of higher education in the world. But we're at a crossroads. The world is catching up." The commissioners, on a fast-track schedule, have been grappling with how to stem the tide of ominous trends such as those catalogued in a November 2005 National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education Policy Alert:

David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, told Inside Higher Ed at the start of the commission's deliberations that there are members who believe the challenge is primarily a work force question. "Another subset sees it as an overarching question of research and global competitiveness," he said, "and another set of folks who come in mostly concerned about the traditional role of higher education to transfer knowledge and educate an informed citizenry."

Some commissioners have characterized the commission's work as fixing problems, while others see it as building on success. But all agree that the charge revolves around three "A's" that have been higher education hot buttons for at least a decade: access, affordability, and accountability. This trio of issues has taken on new urgency in the wake of increased global competitiveness, studies that reveal ill-equipped graduates entering the work force, and the public's persistent cry of "uncle" in response to tuition.

For nearly a year the blue-ribbon commission, composed of corporate and association executives, policy makers, current and former campus presidents, and professors, has deliberated, heard public testimony, and considered a wide array of proposals. Ideas range from transportable education savings accounts designed to promote lifelong learning, to financial incentives that would encourage partnerships among colleges and institutions in minority and immigrant communities-where many of the nation's future students and workers live. One highly controversial proposal suggests creating a national accreditation system to replace the current decentralized model. There have also been calls to catch up to Chinese universities that have already leveraged the Open Source movement to expand the reach of their university curricula, and calls to set high school and college retention goals to increase the abysmal 18 percent of current ninth graders who will ultimately earn an associate's degree within three years or a bachelor's degree within six years.

As of its May meeting, the commission said it would attempt to whittle down what one member called more than 200 "wonderful ideas" to no more than six "bold" recommendations. Among the final recommendations is likely to be one of the most challenging to accomplish-some form of an accountability system to measure student-learning outcomes at individual institutions and to allow consumers to easily compare the costs and results of different programs.

Rocky road to standards

From the start, assessing institutional effectiveness has been part of the commission's agenda. "Most people don't realize that federal dollars make up about one-third of our nation's total annual investment in higher education," Spellings said at the commission's launch. "But we don't ask a lot of questions about what we're getting for our investment." Spellings made it clear she wanted the commission to tackle vital questions about the public's return on its investment, both as taxpayers and as individuals.

The goal is not only to ensure that institutions teach students what they need to know to be part of a globally competitive national work force, but also to ensure that prospective students-consumers of higher education-receive the education institutions say they deliver. Commission Chair Charles Miller, an investment executive and former chairman of the University of Texas System's Board of Regents, has repeatedly called for transparency in the way institutions report performance that will allow prospective students to shop and compare among institutions.

That's easier said than done in an apples-and-oranges system. "For any assessment tool or method to be accurate, reliable or useful, there must be agreement on what is being measured," states a proposal from the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. "This concept sounds deceptively simple, but because of the diversity of institutions, agreeing on common goals for higher education in general and student learning in particular are not straightforward tasks." This proposal, submitted to the commission at its April meeting in Minneapolis, calls for "voluntary accountability" as many in higher education have worried that the commission will recommend a federally mandated one-size-fits-all set of standards to measure a multiplicity of institution types comprising nearly 4,000 colleges and universities.

In an opinion column for Inside Higher Ed, Earlham College President Doug Bennett criticized the commission for "flirting" with the one-size test idea. A proponent of the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, Bennett advocates "multiple measures of whether students are learning because of the wide variety of kinds of missions in American higher education; institutions do not all have identical purposes." In what might be considered support for the NASULGC/AASCU proposal, Bennett writes, "Whichever standards a college or university chooses to demonstrate effectiveness, they should not be a creation of the institution itself-nor of government officials-but rather the independent development of professional educators joined in widely recognized and accepted associations."

Although the proposal was met with some all-talk-and-no-action skepticism-possibly a "grand filibuster"-it also was lauded by the commission's chairman and several commissioners who indicated that such a plan could be an important step forward. During the April meeting, commissioner Robert M. Zemsky, chair and CEO of the University of Pennsylvania's Learning Alliance for Higher Education, said the submission of the proposal had "changed the discussion in all sorts of ways."

Perhaps the best indication of the NASULGC/AASCU proposal's significance was the response from other association presidents. David Ward of the American Council on Education, who is a member of the commission, said he would join NASULGC President Peter McPherson in moving the concept forward. During the Indianapolis meeting Ward said "the associations have to try our best to move fast, though it's fraught with difficulty. … It's exciting really. I look forward to this discussion." Although David Warren of NAICU points out that many of his organization's members already use NSSE, CLA, and other accountability measures, he says the NASULGC/AASCU plan will exert greater pressure on NAICU members to be proactive. He and George Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges, say they will look forward to the plan for demonstration of how accountability might be adapted across institution types.

Democratizing the rankings

Does anyone in advancement or admissions remember life before the U.S. News & World Report rankings cast their long shadow over higher education communications? What would institutional marketing efforts be like without the specter of commercial rankings? If Spellings Commission Chair Miller has his way, we just might find out.

Miller and several other commissioners have warned that the only way voluntary accountability would work is if it enables consumers to compare performance across institution type. If such comparison is possible Miller envisions creating a national database that would allow prospective students and parents to create their own rankings, evaluating institutions on a variety of dimensions according to the prospective applicant's own profile and needs. (This is an especially timely proposal given the past admissions season's "stealth applicant phenomenon"-a dramatic increase in the number of applicants who bypassed the admissions office altogether in favor of unmediated sources.) Although Miller's intent is to "democratize" the rankings for an increasingly diverse population of students who do not fit the first-time, full-time traditional student model, the result could be just as liberating for institutions whose core competencies don't fit commercial rankings molds.

Being able to compare institutions is what consumers love about commercial rankings, and it's one of the things institutions hate about them. But the fact is, institutions are working harder than ever to make just such comparisons. As they promote their missions and programs to prospective students and donors in an intensely competitive climate, they need proof points to help prospects see what makes their institutions special and just what the prospect's return on investment will be. Campus communicators have long been between a rock and a hard place-competing in a field of institutions for students and donors, called upon to assert their quality within that field without the benefit of objective comparative measures of excellence. In the absence of consumer-friendly objective proofs, campus marketers-like consumers-have sometimes turned to the rankings to make their case. In a white paper proposing his idea to put the rankings in the hands of consumers, Miller points out that the rankings have come to "serve by default as an accountability system for colleges and universities."

But if higher education can succeed in designing and carrying out a comparative system of standards of excellence, it could reclaim the definition of academic excellence long held hostage by commercial rankings. And that should be a big idea all of higher education can agree on.

To read the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges discussion paper on voluntary accountability, go here. For reports, remarks, and complete transcripts of the Spellings Commission meetings, go here.

This is from the July/August 2006 edition of CURRENTS.