The Learning Cloud

If educational attainment is the goal, is a "learning assurance commons" the solution?

The monograph that I drafted in early 2009 has been published online as part of the special "Future-of-Higher-Education" edition of the EDUCAUSE Review (vol. 45, no. 1, January/February 2010) - see Waste Not the Learning Productivity Crisis. I occasionally update the monograph and maintain the most recently updated version on this blog site. The monograph includes a proposal to create a "commons" governance mechanism as a means to harmonize the rights and responsibilities of education providers and their myriad external investors - students, families, donors, employers, and governments. To further elaborate the concept and its relevance to today's educational attainment challenges, I drafted and posted to this blog site a new draft paper, Affording and Quality-Assuring Educational Attainment.

“Harmonize” admittedly has a blue-sky undertone. However, Kris Kristofferson’s insightful lyric that “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose” speaks to the perils that arise when rights and responsibilities are not in balance. Try therefore to imagine how existing strategies for managing and improving educational attainment in various gated sectors of the modern educational patchwork might be purloined and stitched together into an integrated quilt of flexible, scalable, affordable tertiary educational experiences bearing the various parties’ unified imprimatur of quality assurance – “learning assurance.” Imagine an “unbundled” education enterprise in which:

• Education providers voluntarily 1) report a few, common institutional accountability indicators of educational attainment within selected peer and geopolitical groupings, and 2) administer independent assessments (through third-party non-governmental assessment providers) of their enrolled students’ core communication and critical thinking skills at fitting levels of learning readiness.
• Students – initially their guardians – earn and renew government-funded “vouchers” on a periodic basis via the above independent learning-readiness assessments administered by the participating education providers where they are currently enrolled or hope soon to enroll.
• Governments allow students to spend their earned vouchers, but only with the education providers that voluntarily comply with the above protocols for 1) reporting educational attainment metrics and 2) administering independent learning-readiness assessments to their students on a periodic basis.

The “hat trick” for such a compact of mutually beneficial interdependencies is governance. Which party should govern such a tri-partite compact? Cited in her 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, Elinor Ostrom’s “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons,” suggested to this author that his first approach in “Waste Not the Learning Productivity Crisis” to balancing economic governance among all of education’s stakeholders was on target. Like a river flowing through multiple geopolitical jurisdictions and bounded by property owners with competing interests, the path to educational attainment should be governed by no one government or other education-related interest. The “Learning Assurance Commons” (LAC) described here is a governance collaboration for securing the greatest common economic and individual good of all: educating humanity for its own sake and for the sake of the planet.

The LAC would be designed to create enabling leverage for the multi-party compact outlined above. The LAC would collaboratively identify and manage non-technical “interoperability” protocols for tracking progress in educational attainment around the world, while also relying on extant technical interoperability standards for education’s software applications, digital resource sharing, and data exchanges to help improve upon and account for education’s productivity. Technical interoperability enables digital connections within and among disparate learning communities and their apps and data. Non-technical interoperability would encourage education providers and their external investors to embrace and account for the scale, flexibility, pace, and affordable price of educational attainment at a time when, acting alone, no one education provider, government, or other education investor can catalyze and attract participation in such a collective macro feat.

The most powerful leverage for attracting seed participation in the LAC would be government interest in funding students (with earned vouchers). Start-up discussions in any micro or macro context, no doubt, would include such considerations as student financial need, part-voucher/part-loan possibilities, workforce-based loan forgiveness possibilities, regional-versus-national interests, and so on.

In return for the right to earn vouchers, participating students, their parents, and their education providers would commit to flexible protocols for quality-assuring educational attainment and making it affordable as both an individual and common good. Such a compact also could stabilize the government funding available to education providers – to reciprocate for their commitments to minimally invasive accountability protocols. An actionable plan is summarized in the draft paper – based on the “learning productivity agenda” for accounting for educational attainment. The plan and the learning productivity agenda were first described in the monograph cited above.

Comments will be welcomed from those who venture into the draft paper.

A recent monograph explains why the times need a-changin' in education - and how to change them

"Learning productivity" is a phrase chosen to discourage any dismissive thought that, because "productivity" is a business word, productivity in education is solely about "business" or administrative productivity. Following the money in education, after all, reveals the dominant role (among total expense outlays) of the expense of supporting teaching and learning  and, thus, raises questions about today's financial models for core teaching and learning activities. Education's "business models" have for years relied on student headcounts, student FTEs, credit hours, and other "unit" inputs to generate the revenues that pay for outflowing outcome expenses.  That's why "learning productivity" is an undeniably apt phrase for considering outcomes versus costs in education –  the effectiveness and the efficiency resulting from the private and public investments that pay for education's outcomes, which should be measured with quantitative evidence for credentials granted and learning (competencies) achieved.  The "learning productivity crisis" is the pressing need to change the financial or business model for education to focus, not on input revenues in support of educational opportunity, but on incenting the assured educational outcomes that are needed at global scale for civic and economic security.

 

I’ve been working since early 2009 on a monograph on the learning productivity crisis.  Yes, I said monograph – weighing in now at around 60 pages. I apologize for suggesting such a lengthy read, but the learning productivity crisis is a complex, multi-dimensional, challenge to the education enterprise and its role in sustaining a prosperous and peaceful world. First posted to this blog in June, the monograph will be available in its at-that-moment form through a left-column link on my About page labeled Waste Not the Learning Productivity Crisis. That link, in URL terms, will continue to be  http://institutionalperformance.typepad.com/WHG/Waste_Not_the_Learning_Productivity_Crisis.pdf, even as the PDF file is periodically edited and saved under the same file name.

 

According to EDUCAUSE, we need “uncommon thinking for the common good." We therefore should understand the future education common good before trying to think uncommonly about education. That's why I conceived the monograph from an evidence-driven, tough-love, policy perspective that may provoke uncommon thanking and change-leadership from education leaders of all stripes from all nations. The monograph pulls together and documents the major pressures facing education around the world. It goes on to recommend how to think about those pressures in terms of globalization and how to relieve them by using technology strategically.  Among its many claims, it purports to:

• Define a “learning productivity agenda” – in Section II.D.
• Connect the learning productivity agenda to ongoing pressures that are often described in terms of accountability, accessibility, and affordability – in Section II.E.
• Make the case that learning productivity is at a crisis stage – starting via the metaphor of a global brains race in Section II.F and continuing in Sections VII – IX via the metaphors of assessment, pipeline, and economic icebergs.
• Explain why and how the strategic application of technology and “learning-cloud" strategies are necessary to any resolution of the crisis at scale – starting in Section II.F.6 and continuing in depth in Sections V and VI.
• Offer case-study examples to ground the monograph's grand themes – see the “profiles in productivity" in Section III.
• Propose a “Education Assurance Consortium” (EAC) in Section X to make education entitlements available to learners who earn them, while also equalizing the current education-provider centric education universe to focus more on learning outcomes and to give more control to learners and the civic and economic needs of the world. The EAC may be blue-sky in its reach, but its agenda can be realistically engaged in the U.S., for example, at the level of education systems and state governments.

With or without an Education Assurance Consortium, there are directional recommendations throughout the monograph that need to prevail for the common good. Some of these recommendations will be viewed as unrealistic or simplistic, such as the idea of earning an entitlement by submitting periodically to common, normative assessments of basic fluencies and critical thinking skills. Such provocations to the education enterprise, however, merit serious discussion along the way to equalizing or better balancing rights and attendant responsibilities among education providers and education investors (students, parents, governments, employers, philanthropists) – the basic idea behind an EAC-like construct.

Let's not waste a perfectly good crisis in higher education!

I recently uploaded to my "About" page a draft outline/document describing today's global learning productivity crisis. The draft summarizes "learning productivity" and why it is at at crisis stage that is being exacerbated by the global recession. The summary goes on to explain how and why IT-enabled service redesigns and innovations are key to increasing learning productivity.

Economic Productivity Depends on Education Productivity

A number of reports and projects are beginning to converge on a definition of student success that, as it should, promises to help improve higher education's productivity. For example, a new initiative from the Gates Foundation, described by Inside Higher Education's Scott Jaschik in Gates Foundation to Spend Big on Community Colleges, aims at scalable student success. Providing a critical pathway into higher education and life-long learning, community colleges still maintain relatively low tuitions and open access in order to attract and enroll millions of students. Yet their credential completion rates leave much to be desired, as do those of most 4-year public universities, and the issue of completion rates drives the Gates Foundation's plans to work with the nation's ~1,200 community colleges.

Improving credential completion rates is an obvious productivity improvement, but is only one plank in a broader three-plank productivity agenda formulated over the past few years in this blog and, more importantly, by the Lumina Foundation's Making Opportunity Affordable statewide grant program. Supported by Lumina, eleven states are in the planning stages to improve statewide productivity in public tertiary education. To do so is to:

1. Improve the competitiveness of the workforce. Increase the percentage of tertiary credential holders in the overall adult population.
2. Improve credential attainment rates. Increase the average rate of credential attainment within the collective tertiary credential-seeking "student body."
3. Reduce credential “production” expenses. Decrease the overall average of per-credential-granted annual operating costs (per-credential production costs).

The first goal above is at the heart of what David Brooks called the "skills gap" in his NY Times column, The Biggest Issue. Interpreting research from Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz in their book, The Race Between Education and Technology, and from James Heckman's paper, "Schools, Skills, and Synapses," Brooks observes that the U.S. started in the 1970s to lose a 35-year global education advantage (and its attendant economic productivity advantage), as education stagnation set in. During this continuing period of stagnation in the U.S., a number of other countries have significantly increased the proportions of their workforces with higher skills. Even though the U.S. has continued to increase its college-going rate over the decades, it has not improved upon the stagnating percentage of its workforce with higher, more competitive skill and knowledge levels. As a result, national economic productivity and competitiveness have been compromised by a "skills gap" between the U.S. and the several nations that have done better on goals 1 and 2 above. The income gap in the U.S. between the richer among us (those with a tertiary education credential) and the poorer (those without a tertiary education credential) accordingly continues to grow as the nation's economic fortunes show serious signs of deterioration -- to say the least.

To make matters worse, the strategies that too often come to mind for improving credential completion rates are too labor intensive to scale when simultaneously attempting to increase the proportion of the workforce holding a tertiary credential. Consider, for example, that the U.S. is well along the path to becoming a "minority majority" nation, which implies the need, not only to enroll an increasing percentage of first-generation, under-prepared, needy students, but also to help them attain a credential. We will therefore need new, less labor-intensive student success strategies, and that is why goal 3 is so central to the overall productivity challenge in tertiary education. The Gates Foundation will have to confront the challenge of helping under-prepared, needy students succeed at a reduced per-student cost of support -- in order not to compromise community colleges' commitment to affordable access. My 07/10/2008 post, Productivity in higher education - no longer an oxymoron, outlines a number of IT-enabled strategies for increasing the productivity of tertiary education and, therefore, of student success.

Productivity in higher education - no longer an oxymoron?

I've published print articles and also ranted here for several years on the fraternal-twin themes of productivity and performance as they apply to higher education, where they have long been two "P" concepts non gratae. The Spellings Commission certainly brought more attention to them than I ever did. Now the Lumina Foundation's Making Opportunity Affordable (MOA) grant program is working to make "productivity" a word grata in the U.S.nonprofit higher education community.

From the 37 states that submitted letters of interest to MOA at the end of 2007, eleven were selected to participate in a planning process designed to generate proposals for multi-year implementation grants. The implementation grants will help fund major efforts (in 5 of the 11 states) to improve statewide productivity in higher education.

What, you may wonder, is the meaning of productivity in the MOA community of states? Informed by my participation in the MOA National Advisory Group but with no intent to speak for MOA leaders, I’ll describe what I believe to be MOA’s interpretation of productivity. By thinking in national terms to avoid state-by-state contextual differences in demographic trends and economic development needs, my description proceeds as follows:

To increase productivity in U.S.nonprofit higher education is to:

1. Improve the competitiveness of the workforce: Increase the percentage of postsecondary degree holders in the overall U.S. adult population.
2. Improve degree attainment rates. Increase the average rate of graduation within the nation's collective postsecondary degree-seeking "student body."
3. Reduce degree production costs. Decrease the national average of per-degree-granted annual operating costs (per-degree production costs).

Why these three performance imperatives? In the same order and with some connective comments, the answer can be summarized as follows:

1. According to research results from the Spellings Commission and numerous other national study groups, national competitiveness in the global economy will increasingly require a more highly educated adult population (as described in the first performance improvement above). National demographic trends reveal, moreover, that this goal cannot be achieved unless the diversity of the student body is reshaped to align more closely with diversity trends in the overall population along dimensions of culture, race/ethnicity, educational preparation, family income, and age. Demographic trends also reveal why the first goal (proportionally more postsecondary degree-holders in the population) does not necessarily follow from the second goal on graduation rates. Graduation rates, after all, can be improved by selecting for the best prepared students while ignoring diversity/opportunity issues.
2. An expedient path to increasing the proportion of postsecondary-degree holders in the population would attempt not only to enroll more degree-seeking students in absolute terms, but also to increase the percentage of those who graduate. The graduation-rate goal would then likely be a consequence of the first and third performance improvements. In any case, it deserves its own statement because improving graduation rates implies the need for recruitment, enrollment, and retention/persistence strategies reflective of the new diversity-of-enrollment demographics implied by goal one above.
3. Reducing per-degree operating costs helps assure the affordability of per-degree pricing to degree seekers and their public and private benefactors. The enrollment demographic trends cited above underscore the importance of affordability to degree seekers and their private benefactors, while downward trends in per-student public subsidies cry out for attention to unit costs, such as per-degree-granted operating costs.

The MOA grant program focuses on states because they are the major source of public funding for higher education in the U.S. The three highlighted performance improvement goals can easily be translated and refined into statewide goals after adjusting for population demographics and economic development needs on a state-by-state basis. Indeed, the three goals translate via context into institutional, regional, national (non-U.S.), and inter-nation performance goals (think Bologna Process). Like the inter-nation Bologna Process, any statewide MOA process faces the complexity of balancing academic cultural traditions against legislative and executive policy making, state economic conditions, public financing mechanisms, and multiple governance "systems" for public higher education.

Unlike the Bologna Process, the MOA process does not require direct evidence of learning accountability. My post of June 17 that immediately preceded this one offers a recipe for independently assessing learning accountability (in the limited but core area of basic fluencies and critical thinking skills). That customizable recipe may be worthy of consideration by the eleven MOA state teams. The MOA challenge, whether expanded to include learning accountability or not, is how to improve performance and productivity simultaneously and account for them.

Improving productivity in the inter-dependent national and global economies has for some years now depended primarily on the use of technology to enable innovation and business/organizational process redesign. This observation and the technology-enabled empowerment of “experts” to demand employment and/or contracts that minimize any obligations to collocate with an employing or contracting organization are the key points in Thomas Friedman’s “flat-world” book. Higher education cannot remain an exception to these “givens” about productivity.

Higher education’s initial productivity challenge is to recognize that the student-to-instructor ratio (or degree-to-instructor ratio), while being an excellent direct proxy for per-student (or per-degree) annual operating expenses, need not be an inverse proxy for academic quality (the higher the ratio, the lower the quality). Over the past ten years, three IT-enabled strategies for academic program redesign have emerged to help academic leaders and their institutions meet this challenge:

• Flex Program and Service Redesign Strategy: Use technology to maximize high-tech (asynchronous) self-service, while providing on-demand high-touch expert assistance.

  Applied to academic programs and all administrative and student support services, this strategy is based on three core premises:

  • Instructors matter! Few students can learn without guidance from content experts (faculty members and other instructors). That’s why universities invest in a faculty, rather than investing only in a library and sending all students to the library to “self-acquire” their education. Students also need the services of librarians, advisors, and others who help with the learning specifics at hand and with the larger, integrative student-service context in which specific learning should be situated.
  • Instructors matter, but so do immediacy and convenience! All students today expect a blend of high-tech and high-touch instruction and support services. This is the idea partially expressed on many campuses around the theme of integrating academic programs and student services through an institutional portal. The idea of blending high tech and high touch, however, must be carried into the academic domain for competitive reasons, because all students appreciate online (asynchronous) self-service in their learning activities. Even the students who choose a residential academic experience appreciate the convenience of online self-service. At the other extreme, some students can only participate in an education that is free of (or nearly free of) requirements for scheduled real-time interactions with instructors, other students, and campus support personnel. From each of these extremes to the other, high-tech (asynchronous) online self-service must be complemented for all students by real-time or nearly real-time opportunities (some scheduled and some not) for individualized expert help with their learning and the other support services required for their success. These individualized (high-touch) services include a 24x365 technical help desk and a number of other toll-free services, along with business-hours or office-hours walk-in support and various forms of individualized synchronous and nearly synchronous online support.
  • Redesign academic programs for both mission and market(s)! Public institutions typically have mission obligations not only to support educational access as a general societal and individual good, but also to help meet various economic and workforce/professional educational goals established by the states or communities in which they operate. Private institutions, however, are free to select the various academic and geographical markets in which they compete. To the extent to which they are tuition dependent, however, even private institutions must choose markets realistically on the basis of market research. By using IT to redesign all student services and some strong academic programs as though they must be delivered entirely (asynchronously) online to students who cannot come to campus or otherwise participate in regularly scheduled real-time interactions, an institution or consortium can then tailor related, necessary high-touch instruction and other services to the needs of the specific academic program markets chosen as target markets – from traditional residential, coming-of-age undergraduate markets to workforce/professional- and graduate-degree markets in which the convenience factor of flex delivery may be essential to success.
• Common Course Redesign Strategy: Use technology to redesign large-enrollment courses for both improved learning outcomes and reduced per-enrollment costs – as per the redesign strategies pioneered by the National Center for Academic Transformation and its client institutions.
  
  

  By listing undergraduate courses in descending order of enrollments (aggregated for each course across all sections) and accumulating their percentage shares of all undergraduate enrollments (or credit hours), any institution (or system) will come to a cumulative subtotal enrollment percentage of approximately 40%-50% somewhere between the top 20-30 courses. The high-enrollment courses on the list are taught at almost every college and university in the nation – as common courses that at most institutions present significant capacity, enrollment management, and operating expense issues. Over the past seven years, the NCAT has worked with a number of institutions on these courses to demonstrate conclusively that IT-enabled redesign of faculty labor focused on student engagement and the measurable improvement of student learning can not only improve student learning and student and faculty satisfaction, but also reduce per-enrollment direct instructional and instructional support costs – for an average 40% offset in such costs. This strategy and its results can be further amplified when multiple campuses and non-residential support centers work together. Although this course redesign strategy and its results are counterintuitive to traditional academic culture, the time is right to focus blending high tech and high touch on the general education program – specifically on the cluster of 20-30 highest enrollment introductory courses in the basic fluencies and disciplines that are so central to mission goals of access and student success. A number of institutions are also applying the common course redesign strategy to developmental courses in support of retention and graduation.

• External Sourcing Strategy: Focus on unique internal academic program strengths and services, while selectively sourcing other programs and services from external partner organizations and businesses to reduce unit costs while simultaneously improving quality, nimbleness, and capacity.

  In The World Is Flat 3.0, Friedman identifies eight “flattening forces” that derive from using technology to redesign organizational structures, business processes, and business models. He refers to these technology-enabled sourcing models as:

  • Out-sourcing – as in externally sourcing a 24x365 technical help desk or online “coaching” service for all students
  • In-sourcing – as in externally sourcing central IT leadership (CIO) and management/delivery, with the CIO serving as a cabinet member in the internal planning and decision-making process
  • Work-flowing – as in using technology to redesign, streamline, and track, for example, institutional performance reporting and analytics processes, enrollment management processes, or institutional grant proposal and management processes
  • Supply-chaining – as in externally sourcing marketing and student recruitment
  • Open-sourcing – as in participating in an open-learning collaborative or in joining a community-sourced application software collaborative while also externally sourcing the application’s ongoing support
  • Off-shoring – as in contracting for the online delivery via foreign adjuncts of teaching or tutoring services in baseline mathematics and other STEM introductory content areas
  • In-forming – as in encouraging “Googling” for research and in externally sourcing online informational and learning resources (content, courses, programs, benchmarking data, etc.) from external partners for the benefit of the institution and its students
  • Steroiding – as in migrating as many institutional services and alerts as possible to the student-owned mobile devices that have become part of the current generational communication and behavioral modalities

Various combinations of these three overlapping technology-enabled redesign strategies can be used to greatest effect in statewide collaborative efforts by systems and other consortia, such as in the 11 MOA statewide consortia. Unless these strategies are incorporated, for example, into the MOA statewide planning efforts, the MOA “movement” is not likely to reach meaningful productivity goals. That’s not to say that other efforts, such as statewide policy audits and changes, will not be essential to success. In any case, the "MOA Process" is our closest cousin to Europe's Bologna Process, and the eleven MOA states, the Lumina Foundation, and Jobs for the Future, which is managing the MOA Process for the Foundation, deserve the nation's gratitude for their investments of time and resources in the future of higher education in the U.S.

Public Higher Education’s Grand Challenge: Improving and Accounting for Productivity

The academic performance challenges and the funding squeezes facing public higher education are neither short-term nor low stakes. For example, per-student-FTE funding for public institutions, averaged across the states, continues to hover at 27-year historic lows when adjusted for inflation (according to a FY 2007 report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers). Predicting a worsening financial storm for public higher education, a 2006 report from the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems projected structural revenue shortfalls for every state by 2013. One performance compromising implication of these troubling financial trends is that current levels of per-student-FTE state funding, when adjusted for inflation, are not likely to be available to public colleges and universities as they respond to pressing societal and economic development challenges requiring improvements in a) statewide college-going rates, b) enrolled-student graduation rates, and c) affordable access for the most financially and educationally needy populations in a state’s current and future demographic profile. Were public higher education to move forward in a business-as-usual modality, net tuition increases and/or enrollment caps would be the compromised results of the vise-like squeeze between downward pressure on per-student-FTE state funding rates and mounting societal expectations for affordable, equitable, successful access to quality academic programs.

Many institutions are trying to mitigate these compromises by actively identifying and implementing cost-containment strategies in order to reduce their operating costs. According to a recent survey conducted by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and SunGard Higher Education (SGHE), however, today’s cost-containment strategies rely more on support and business functions than on core academic functions – as would be expected when protecting current academic operating models is a typical goal. Yet core academic functions account for much of annual operating costs. For example, direct instructional costs hover around 45-55 percent of annual E&G operating costs at most public institutions, while instructors and instructional support staffing account for 55-70 percent of annual E&G personnel costs. This “elephant-in-the-room” observation about the role of core academic costs in overall operating costs may account for the large majority of survey respondents who are willing to consider any operational area – even the core academic area – as a potential cost-containment opportunity.

The above observations reveal that public higher education’s most pressing challenge is to increase academic productivity – to reduce or stabilize per-student-FTE cost structures while simultaneously meeting societal demands for equitably increasing educational opportunity, affordable participation, and student academic success, all in the interest of regional and global competitiveness and the nation’s founding democratic principle of equal opportunity for all. The academic productivity challenge also will require developing both academic and financial metrics in order to track and report longitudinal progress publicly and transparently. This requirement for performance reporting aligns with the growing participation of public universities in the development of a “Voluntary System of Accountability” (VSA) and related public reporting template under the aegis of the AASCU and NASULGC membership. Both improving and accounting for academic productivity thus become for the foreseeable future the “grand productivity challenge” facing public universities and public community colleges in every state.

Learning from the Bologna Process

Clifford Adelman has written a report for the Institute for Higher Education Policy describing and analyzing Europe's Bologna Process. The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn from a Decade of European Reconstruction is timely and should be useful to those U.S. higher education systems and institutions working to improve upon and measurably account for their performance.

The inter-nation Bologna process was initiated in 1999 to foster greater "convergence" within European tertiary education in order to create a "European Higher Education Area." It's not a stretch to suggest that Secretary Spelling's Commission on the Future of Higher Education has recommended that U.S. higher education focus on "convergence" and common accountability practices in order to create a national understanding of the importance of higher education and how to navigate its opportunities most efficiently to greatest individual and national effect.

Anticipating and responding to many of the Commission's suggestions in Bologna's spirit of convergence, the Lumina Foundation's Making Opportunity Affordable grant program is initiating what appears to date to be the closest U.S. cousin to the Bologna Process, albeit at a statewide level, not at a national level. Eleven states have been competitively selected through a preliminary planning-grant process. Ultimately, up to five of these states will be selected for multi-year implementation grants. The hope is that the MOA states will find a way to converge on some level of common goals and effective practices.   

The eleven MOA states -- indeed, all U.S. postsecondary institutions -- would do well to study Adelman's report.  As he puts it, "Our primary story is about providing students with clear indications of what their paths through higher education look like, what levels of knowledge and skills will qualify them for degree awards, and what their degrees mean. These are road signs that are sorely lacking now. Student “success” does not mean merely that you have been awarded a degree, but that you have learned something substantial along the way and that the world knows what you have learned, what skills you have mastered, and that you have the momentum to meet the rising knowledge content of the global economy."

Lessons from the University of Phoenix

I'm often prompted by news reports about the University of Phoenix to wonder why more traditional (nonprofit) colleges and universities do not take more seriously the obvious success of the UoP in assuring the quality of its academic program outcomes while simultaneously controlling its per-enrollment cost structures in order to maintain competitive tuition rates. Now we learn that UoP has created a University of Phoenix National Research Center (led and managed internally and advised externally) to advance its understanding of how best to ensure quality learning outcomes in adult-student markets (while controlling its unit costs). 

Some systems are getting with the program

The National Association of System Heads understands and is acting on what it means to be a state system of higher education. The article excerpted below reveals that California State University, the University System of Maryland, and some other "state systems" are leading the way in measurably improving and accounting for public higher education's performance.

Closing the College Achievement Gap
Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Education, October 31, 2007

The inexorable rush to rankings glory, which tends to reward colleges and universities the more academically selective and wealthy they become, has not been good for low-income and minority students. By now the statistics are pretty well known: About half of Americans from low-income backgrounds go on to attend college, compared to about two-thirds of middle income Americans and 80 percent of those with large incomes. Barely two in five black and Hispanic freshmen earn a bachelor’s degree within six years of entering college, compared to about 60 percent of white freshmen and 64 percent of Asian Americans. And white Americans are twice as likely as black Americans and three times as likely as Hispanic Americans to have earned a bachelor’s degree by the age of 29. Read more ..

To test, or not to test; that is the question

Learning accountability -- or the lack thereof, depending on your perspective -- remains front and center in the post-Commission-on-the-Future-of-Higher-Education tension between the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, working through the Department of Education, currently appoints all members of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. NACIQI, in turn, advises the Secretary on accreditation and recommends which accrediting organizations should be “federally recognized.” NACIQI's leverage over CHEA and its member institutions and organizations, especially the regional accrediting agencies and their client institutions, is that only those institutions that are accredited by “federally recognized” accreditors are eligible for the approximately $100 billion in federal funds granted annually to higher education.

The excerpt below suggests that NACIQI may stop recognizing some of the regional accrediting organizationsand unless they and their client institutions come to grips with the Commission's call for direct evidence of student learning accomplishments, such evidence presumably involving test scores or stats that are comparable across peer groupings of institutions. My opinion is that such evidence is possible to generate, albeit in a process that is culturally incorrect in higher education. That opinion and practical (but culturally incorrect) how-to suggestions are detailed in a post on October 22, Decoupling Testing from Teaching: Heresy or a Culturally Inconvenient Imperative?  

U.S. Review of Accreditors May Produce a Showdown: Bush administration is expected to push colleges for more accountability
Paul Basken, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 30, 2007

A dispute over the federal agency charged with reviewing college accreditors may come to a boil at a key review session next month, when the waning Bush administration will have one of its highest-profile chances to try to force colleges to do more to demonstrate how well they help students learn. The federal agency is scheduled to assess five of the six main regional accreditation bodies and decide if they deserve renewed recognition. Some of the accreditors say the session has the potential to play out as a politically explosive showdown between the Education Department and the accreditors and colleges that have been seeking to take control of decisions about how institutions' performances are measured. Chronicle subscribers can read more ...