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Government to Set Goals for Higher Education
By Wendi Maloney
Last September, U.S. secretary of education Margaret Spellings announced the formation of a new commission on the future of higher education. She noted that less than a third of Americans have bachelor’s degrees, even though “in today’s global economy, . . . around 80 percent of the fastest-growing jobs require at least some postsecondary education.” The nineteen-member commission is holding hearings around the country to identify ways to increase access to higher education and to explore how well institutions are preparing their students for the workforce. Spellings says the commission will take into account previous national studies of higher education, including the recommendations of the National Commission on Accountability in Higher Education and the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education. The goal is to develop a comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education. The commission must report to the education secretary by August 1, 2006.
Commission members include corporate executives, former government officials, university presidents, and higher education leaders, including three faculty members. The chair, Charles Miller, is a successful private investor and former chair of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas System. As this issue of Academe was going to press, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a December meeting in which invited speakers and commission members harshly criticized the current state of higher education and raised the issue of standardized testing for college students. According to the Chronicle, Miller suggested that colleges that do not want to participate in testing would have a simple choice: “Don’t take the money.”
“The AAUP assumes the commission’s role is entirely advisory and that its conclusions will be widely disseminated for critical comment,” says Roger Bowen, the AAUP’s general secretary. “In light of Mr. Miller’s ‘our way or the highway’ threat, the Association will perforce raise issues about the federalization of higher education, any attempts to deny faculty the right to determine academic standards, and the bullying notion that whoever pays the piper gets to call the tune. The commission needs to understand that standardized national testing is a nonstarter for the workhorses of the academy—the professoriate—and, we suspect, for most professional educators, including those administrators who understand that one size does not fit all.”
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