Who We Are

Vision

The 20th century was a time of explosive growth and great success for American higher education. What began earlier in the nation’s history as a relatively small collection of colleges and universities serving the privileged became in the 1900s a vast array of institutions serving an equally large and varied population of students. Great universities were built that dominate the global landscape in science and research. Going to college after graduating from high school went from being the exception to the rule. The U.S. citizenry became the best-educated, most productive work force in the world.

But the nation's higher education system enters the 21st century with serious challenges. The nearly 3 million new students who enroll in American colleges and universities as freshmen every year enter institutions that are too expensive and growing more so every year. Students have only a 50–50 chance of earning a 2- or 4- year degree on time. And even if they graduate, the quality of education they receive is often substandard, leaving them under-prepared for the increasingly competitive global job market. As a result, cost and quality are the central challenges facing higher education today. 

Education Sector envisions an improved higher education system that focuses new attention on the quality of teaching and learning, degree attainment, and on reducing the costs of undergraduate education.

Rationale

The problems facing American higher education cannot be solved through direct government regulation. American higher education institutions and educators enjoy a great deal of autonomy. Comparable, publicly available information about student-learning results at different institutions is practically non-existent. Higher education institutions are fundamentally unaccountable for teaching and learning. They have large amounts of political and social capital, and a protected, highly advantageous market position. We cannot—and should not—try to regulate change in such an environment. Instead, we should give higher education institutions incentives to change on their own, by changing the way society perceives them and the way they see themselves.

Strategy

Education Sector's work in undergraduate education will use information, incentives, and accountability to improve quality and reduce cost. We will build awareness of the need for higher education institutions to improve and provide examples of ways to achieve such improvement. Our work over the next two years will focus on four strategic goals. We will:

1. Seek to convince the general, informed public of the urgent need to improve student learning and student degree attainment, and to hold down costs to students in undergraduate education. We will do this by highlighting the current state of student learning and attainment in higher education, and by examining high education's cost structures. We will disseminate our findings to audiences of state policymakers and to parents and students, those stakeholders most directly affected by the quality and cost of undergraduate education. For example, a forthcoming report on college graduation rates will call attention to nation’s low college graduation rates, particularly for minority students, and highlight institutions that have been unusually successful in raising graduation rates.

2. Identify, publicize, and promote effective methods of measuring success in learning, attainment, and cost.We will do this by continuing the valuable dialogue around reforming college rankings that we started with the 2006 report, College Rankings Reformed. We will draw attention to new sources of information that can be used effectively in ranking colleges and we will highlight new methods for constructing sound rankings out of existing data. We will bring these ideas to a broad audience of policymakers, educators, parents, and students.

3. Identify, publicize, and promote effective methods of improving success in learning, attainment, and cost. We will study and describe the strategies of higher education institutions that successfully educate a wide range of students, as well as institutions using innovative methods to improve instruction and reduce costs. We believe it is important to not only identify the shortcomings of undergraduate education, but to offer examples of success, to show that there are realistic solutions to the problems we identify.

4. Create and promote higher education accountability systems based on effective methods of measurement, systems that give higher education institutions strong incentives to improve the quality of their undergraduate teaching and learning. We will do this by starting a discussion around what methods can be used for institutions to improve their accountability systems and also by proposing a mechanism to do so. We plan, for example, to publish a scorecard of state accountability systems, which will analyze the national landscape of higher education state accountability systems, and highlight current best practices among states.

Impact

We will gauge the impact our work in undergraduate education by measuring our role in the national higher education policy conversation. We will look for public statements by policymakers and higher education leaders acknowledging the problems we highlight through our work and for action addressing the problems.  We will also monitor specific changes aligned with the recommendations provided in our reports. We hope to see changes in state higher education accountability policies that are designed to improve the overall quality of education provided by states’ institutions.