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Federal Commission Issues Disappointing Report
By Gwendolyn Bradley
The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education issued its final report in September, concluding that American higher education is at odds with contemporary realities and that, as a result, the economic competitiveness of the United States is threatened. The nineteen-member commission spent a year reviewing issue papers and holding hearings with the intention of developing a comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education. One commissioner, David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, declined to sign on, citing the inclination of the report to recommend policies based on a one-size-fits-all approach to higher education and to blame problems arising from multiple factors, such as escalating costs, solely on colleges and universities.
While the AAUP shares a number of concerns raised by the report—barriers to access for students of all ages, preparation of high school students for college-level work, the burden of costs on students in the face of lowered government funding, and the importance of accountability and transparency—the report locates these concerns in a framework built on flawed assumptions, says Gerald Turkel, chair of the AAUP’s Government Relations Committee. “Its analysis has a narrow economic focus and sees higher education as a market that should have uniform standards for measuring outcomes and technological means of providing skills training—it largely ignores the diversity among institutions that would make standardization both difficult and undesirable,” he says.
To address the problems it identifies, the report proposes ways to make higher education more “efficient,” including “cost cutting and productivity improvements” that can be realized by reducing barriers for transfer students, instituting performance benchmarks, and encouraging new education providers, including for-profit institutions and long-distance learning. It makes no mention of the de-professionalization of the faculty that is occurring as the proportion of contingent faculty grows; indeed, the role of faculty is largely ignored. The report takes for granted that “new providers and paradigms, from for-profit universities to distance learning” will be “part of the education landscape” that enables higher education to “adapt to a world altered by technology, changing demographics, and globalization.
While the report calls for an increasing emphasis on need-based support, including an increase in the buying power of Pell Grants, it does not recommend more federal funding for student aid. Given this omission, it appears that it aims at a redistribution of federal funding rather than a sorely needed increase in funding. While it calls for higher education to “recommit itself to its core public purposes,” the report does not attempt to square this call with its embrace of technologically driven change, and it is in fact hostile to those things that have long informed and enabled higher education’s public purposes: principles of shared academic governance, professional and academic relationships, and the centrality of academic community are dismissed as impediments to “innovation.”
“The commission has said that the report is an occasion for a national dialogue on higher education,” says Turkel. “The AAUP looks forward to participating in this dialogue in a manner consistent with the factual situation faced by American higher education and based on values of academic freedom.”
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