Economics professor Rich Vedder of Ohio University is a member of the new national commission on the future of higher education. His voice should be a persuasive one, as he comes to his new duty informed by data. He argued compelling for change from the evidence he gathered and reported in his recent book, Going Broke by Degree. From his words excerpted below, we can conclude, as I did in an earlier post, that the new commission is focused on institutional performance in the form of the three accountability obligations and the three accessibility obligations identified in this blog and used to index its posts: learning accountability, program accountability, expense accountability, affordability of access, capacity for access, and convenience of access.
OU prof named to federal commission on higher education
Jon Peters, The Athens News, October 13, 2005
"If you break down our mission, we're basically examining accessibility, affordability and accountability within the context of higher education," Vedder said. "Our role is to frame the national debate and to foster dialogue about constructive change."
One of the major issues slated for discussion concerns tuition costs, which have risen sharply above inflation for the last century. "We need to consider whether the status quo is turning colleges into havens for the elite," said Vedder, author of "Going Broke By Degree: Why College Costs Too Much."
Vedder was skeptical of the notion that this creation of a federal commission represents a power-grab of higher education by the Bush administration. "It's possible the commission could constitute a federal power-grab but, gauging from my conversations with (Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings), and because each major political party is roughly equal in representation, I don't think that's the case," he said. Read more ...
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