With higher education’s future now in play at the federal level, parents and students should pay attention to what the U.S. Education Department does with its new report.
The “final recommendations of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education”:http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/0809-draft.pdf came out last week.
Colleges should hold down costs and be held accountable for what students learn, the commission said. The whole process by which institutions of higher education are accredited needs to be overhauled.
Will that mean students will have to pass exit exams to earn college diplomas? Does it mean the federal government will get into the business of licensing colleges?
The report is due on U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spelling’s desk in mid-September. But already department officials are scheduling regional meetings to discuss making changes to the college accreditation process—by writing regulations rather than going through Congress.
Consultant Roger Martin of Mamaroneck, who works with college faculty and officials, says people are worried that the one-size-fits-all approach the Bush administration took toward public K-12 education in No Child Left Behind will be forced on public and private colleges, which have very diverse missions and student bodies.
Martin, a historian and president emeritus of Randolph Macon College in Virginia, said there are other things in the report that are controversial. The amount of data USEd wants colleges to collect about every student has people suspicious, he said.
“I’m not sure some of the recommendations are the best way to go,” he said today. “On the other hand clearly the whole price issue is one that needs to be dealt with in some way. Also, we’re saying we’re the best educational system in the world. The question is, can the people who come out read and write and think analytically?”
7 Comments
I havent seen much analytical thought from the new programmers in the field. I blame OO design. But that is me. As far as exit exams, I think It’s unfair that US citizens have to go through that just not to get hired. With the influx of dirt cheap so called computer people from other parts of the world it makes it difficult and unreasonable. I know many people highly skilled losing jobs to the unskilled untrained programmer from afar. I lose many job offers to that as well. I graduated with a B.S. in C.S in 86 and have worked ever since but i have seen the changes and so far they are not good. Making exit exams for US schooled people would be unfair because there are others coming in with purely FAKE diplomas.
Raising the issue of college exit exams calls into question the very nature of the American college system. I have always been under the impression that a college or university’s role is to provide students with the opporuntity to learn, but that it is ultimately up to the student to take advantage of the opportunity.
Good point. Lets see . Exam to get in .. exam to get out. $100k (if you are lucky – for 4 years)
visa to get in country with fake degree? priceless.
It’s a sad part of life. But my dad had it right , education is very important and everyone should have one along with that experience is even more important.
Lanning Taliaferro’s blog entitled “College Exit Exams” in which I am quoted touches on a very important point that I hope caught the attention of Journal News readers. The Spelling Commission came up with many recommendations for higher education, some good and some not so good. I mentioned my concern about collecting data on individual students, a proposal that is problematic for a wide range of reasons, constitutional and otherwise. What needs to happen now is for Congress to review the Commission’s recommendations, allow testimony and then create regulations, based on their review of the report, that are in the public’s interest. Unfortunately, as your blog points out, after some regional meetings, the Department of Education is planning to write the regulations themselves rather than going through Congress. There is a very good reason why Congress rather than the DOE should settle on the final rules. Not only is it Congress’s constitutional duty to do so, but when the Commission was meeting, Charles Miller, its chair and a Texas businessman, unilaterally put into the report a recommendation encouraging more students and families to use private loans rather than government-financed loans. When Commission members found out that he did this, they were not happy campers. Miller only backed off this recommendation when it was pointed out to him that over a five year period $32 billion in interest would be added to what parents already have to pay for college loans. I would like to think that by having Congress now review the proposed regulations, we stand a better chance of getting rules that are not only in the public’s interest but that actually work.
Bravo to Roger Martin’s judicious view!
A case study, with concrete examples, of some new ways to size up college learning just came out from Pace University, where I work. I did a lot of the writing, and tried to provide a quick overview (31 pages) for parents, students, and citizens interested in the emerging alternatives to the stale ranking techniques of US News & World Report. It can easily be downloaded from our website at http://appserv.pace.edu/execute/page.cfm?doc_id=21422.
In addition to details about promising new assessment instruments (“What it’s like to take the NSSE: Reporting the academic activities that really give you an education” and “What it’s like to take the CLA: Would you buy this airplane… or this argument?”) the report has brief policy recommendations from Pace’s President, David A. Caputo. As you’ll see, he’s in favor of more self-assessments of learning, and of incentives to encourage them. But he thinks anything like “uniform national testing” would be “neither practical nor desirable,” and “would hurt students who are most at risk.”
Dr. Caputo would love comments, at president@pace.edu.
I’d love them here!
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