Education Sector in the News

From "Imperfect Accountability," Inside Higher Ed, March 2, 2010:

"One by one, as the U.S. Education Department under Secretary Margaret Spellings intensified its pressure on higher education to be more accountable to the public, groups of colleges unveiled voluntary efforts in which their members would collect and publish data designed to answer that call. The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities put forward its University and College Accountability Network (known as U-CAN) and the country's two major groups of public institutions unveiled their Voluntary System of Accountability, on a site they called College Portraits.

"U-CAN profiles also include information identified by policymakers as important for accountability," the independent college group writes on its Web site. "Congress and the U.S. Department of Education have called for more consumer information to help the public evaluate and choose colleges—a goal that NAICU strongly supports."

"The College Portrait is a source of basic, comparable information about public colleges and institutions presented in a common, user-friendly format,... designed to provide greater accountability through accessible, transparent, and comparable information," the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities say in describing their accountability system.

Nice rhetoric—but the groups' accountability systems/networks don't live up to it, researchers from Education Sector and the American Enterprise Institute say in a report released today.

"[A] close examination of these two prominent efforts reveals serious flaws that undermine their utility as engines of accountability," Chad Aldeman of Education Sector and Andrew Kelly of AEI write in "False Fronts? Behind Higher Education's Voluntary Accountability Systems." "For these efforts and others like them to improve consumer choice and exert meaningful pressure on schools to improve, they need to be more complete, comparison-friendly, and designed to highlight institutional differences.

"If existing flaws are not resolved, the nation runs the risk of ending up in the worst of all worlds: the appearance of higher education accountability without the reality. As such, policy makers and consumers should not be persuaded that these systems satisfy the need for increased transparency and accountability in higher education until their flaws are addressed."

The authors are particularly dismissive of the independent college group's U-CAN effort, which it says "provides almost no new information about costs, student experiences, or learning outcomes to parents and prospective students." While the site allows students and others to compare multiple colleges based on certain student and institutional characteristics (including college prices), "it does not obligate institutions to gather or reveal any data that are not already available elsewhere." ...

Read more from this article in Inside Higher Ed.

From "2 Efforts to Provide Data on Colleges to Consumers Fall Short, Report Says," The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Higher education will have to be more accountable for its performance and more open to consumers about the actual cost of attending a college, and help people make easier comparisons among institutions, in order to succeed as the nation's economic engine, says a new report from two nonprofit think tanks here.

Two major voluntary efforts under way to measure and report colleges' costs and academic effectiveness are inadequate, and provide parents and students with too little information to make informed choices about where they will get the most from their tuition dollars, say researchers at the two organizations, the libertarian-leaning American Enterprise Institute, and Education Sector, which is a proponent of reforming higher education

And without a more thorough and open form of accountability, institutions will not have any incentive to make the changes that will improve students' success, concludes the report, "False Fronts? Behind Higher Education's Voluntary Accountability Systems."

"If existing flaws are not resolved, the nation runs the risk of ending up in the worst of all worlds: the appearance of higher education accountability without the reality," the authors say. ...

Read more from this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.