A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of US Higher Education, Report

Three hundred and seventy years after the first college in our fledgling nation was established to train Puritan ministers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it is no exaggeration to declare that higher education in the United States has become one of our greatest success stories. Whether America’s colleges and universities are measured by their sheer number and variety, by the increasingly open access so many citizens enjoy to their campuses, by their crucial role in advancing the frontiers of knowledge through research discoveries, or by the new forms of teaching and learning that they have pioneered to meet students’ changing needs, these postsecondary institutions have accomplished much of which they and the nation can be proud.

Despite these achievements, however, this commission believes U.S. higher education needs to improve in dramatic ways. As we enter the 21st century, it is no slight to the successes of American colleges and universities thus far in our history to note the unfulfilled promise that remains. Our yearlong examination of the challenges facing higher education has brought us to the uneasy conclusion that the sector’s past attainments have led our nation to unwarranted complacency about its future.

It is time to be frank. Among the vast and varied institutions that make up U.S. higher education, we have found much to applaud but also much that requires urgent reform. As Americans, we can take pride in our Nobel Prizes, our scientific breakthroughs, our Rhodes Scholars. But we must not be blind to the less inspiring realities of postsecondary education in our country.

To be sure, at first glance most Americans don’t see colleges and universities as a trouble spot in our educational system. After all, American higher education has been the envy of the world for years. In 1862, the First Morrill Act created an influential network of land-grant universities across the country. After World War II, the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the G.I. Bill made access to higher education a national priority. In the 1960s and 1970s, the launching and rapid growth of community colleges further expanded postsecondary educational opportunities. For a long time, we educated more people to higher levels than any other nation.

We remained so far ahead of our competitors for so long, however, that we began to take our postsecondary superiority for granted. The results of this inattention, though little known to many of our fellow citizens, are sobering.

We may still have more than our share of the world’s best universities. But a lot of other countries have followed our lead, and they are now educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels than we are. Worse, they are passing us by at a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.

We acknowledge that not everyone needs to go to college. But everyone needs a postsecondary education. Indeed, we have seen ample evidence that some form of postsecondary instruction is increasingly vital to an individual’s economic security. Yet too many Americans just aren’t getting the education that they need—and that they deserve.

• We are losing some students in our high schools, which do not yet see preparing all pupils for postsecondary education and training as their responsibility.
• Others don’t enter college because of inadequate information and rising costs, combined with a confusing financial aid system that spends too little on those who need help the most.
• Among high school graduates who do make it on to postsecondary education, a troubling number waste time—and taxpayer dollars—mastering English and math skills that they should have learned in high school. And some never complete their degrees at all, at least in part because most colleges and universities don’t accept responsibility for making sure that those they admit actually succeed.
• As if this weren’t bad enough, there are also disturbing signs that many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing, and thinking skills we expect of college graduates. Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined. Unacceptable numbers of college graduates enter the workforce without the skills employers say they need in an economy where, as the truism holds correctly, knowledge matters more than ever.
• The consequences of these problems are most severe for students from low-income families and for racial and ethnic minorities. But they affect us all.
• Compounding all of these difficulties is a lack of clear, reliable information about the cost and quality of postsecondary institutions, along with a remarkable absence of accountability mechanisms to ensure that colleges succeed in educating students. The result is that students, parents, and policymakers are often left scratching their heads over the answers to basic questions, from the true cost of private colleges (where most students don’t pay the official sticker price) to which institutions do a better job than others not only of graduating students but of teaching them what they need to learn.

In the face of such challenges, this commission believes change is overdue. But when it comes—as it must—it will need to take account of the new realities that are sometimes overlooked in public discussions about the future of higher education. While many Americans still envision the typical undergraduate as an 18- to 22-year-old with a recently acquired high school diploma attending classes at a four-year institution, the facts are more complex. Of the nation’s nearly 14 million undergraduates, more than four in ten attend two-year community colleges. Nearly one-third are older than 24 years old. Forty percent are enrolled part-time.

As higher education evolves in unexpected ways, this new landscape demands innovation and flexibility from the institutions that serve the nation’s learners. Beyond high school, more students than ever before have adopted a “cafeteria” approach to their education, taking classes at multiple institutions before obtaining a credential. And the growing numbers of adult learners aren’t necessarily seeking degrees at all. Many simply want to improve their career prospects by acquiring the new skills that employers are demanding.

In this consumer-driven environment, students increasingly care little about the distinctions that sometimes preoccupy the academic establishment, from whether a college has for-profit or nonprofit status to whether its classes are offered online or in brick-and-mortar buildings. Instead, they care—as we do—about results.

Against this backdrop, we have adopted an ambitious set of goals that spell out what our commission expects from American higher education, which we define as broadly and richly as possible to include all public and private education that is available after high school, from trade schools, online professional-training institutions and technical colleges to community colleges, traditional four-year colleges and universities, and graduate and professional programs.

• We want a world-class higher-education system that creates new knowledge, contributes to economic prosperity and global competitiveness, and empowers citizens;
• We want a system that is accessible to all Americans, throughout their lives;
• We want postsecondary institutions to provide high-quality instruction while improving their efficiency in order to be more affordable to the students, taxpayers, and donors who sustain them;
• We want a higher-education system that gives Americans the workplace skills they need to adapt to a rapidly changing economy;
• We want postsecondary institutions to adapt to a world altered by technology, changing demographics and globalization, in which the higher-education landscape includes new providers and new paradigms, from for-profit universities to distance learning.

To reach these objectives, we believe that U.S. higher education institutions must recommit themselves to their core public purposes. For close to a century now, access to higher education has been a principal—some would say the principal—means of achieving social mobility. Much of our nation’s inventiveness has been centered in colleges and universities, as has our commitment to a kind of democracy that only an educated and informed citizenry makes possible. It is not surprising that American institutions of higher education have become a magnet for attracting people of talent and ambition from throughout the world.

But today that world is becoming tougher, more competitive, less forgiving of wasted resources and squandered opportunities. In tomorrow’s world a nation’s wealth will derive from its capacity to educate, attract, and retain citizens who are to able to work smarter and learn faster—making educational achievement ever more important both for individuals and for society writ large.

What we have learned over the last year makes clear that American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly riskaverse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive. It is an enterprise that has yet to address the fundamental issues of how academic programs and institutions must be transformed to serve the changing educational needs of a knowledge economy. It has yet to successfully confront the impact of globalization, rapidly evolving technologies, an increasingly diverse and aging population, and an evolving marketplace characterized by new needs and new paradigms.

History is littered with examples of industries that, at their peril, failed to respond to—or even to notice—changes in the world around them, from railroads to steel manufacturers. Without serious self-examination and reform, institutions of higher education risk falling into the same trap, seeing their market share substantially reduced and their services increasingly characterized by obsolescence.

Already, troubling signs are abundant. Where once the United States led the world in educational attainment, recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development indicate that our nation is now ranked 12th among major industrialized countries in higher education attainment. Another half dozen countries are close on our heels. And these global pressures come at a time when data from the U.S. Department of Labor indicate that postsecondary education will be ever more important for workers hoping to fill the fastest-growing jobs in our new economy.

To implement the goals outlined above, we have distilled our deliberations into a series of findings that range across four key areas that the U.S. secretary of education charged with examining when she created this commission: access, affordability, quality, and accountability. Those findings are followed by a series of six far-reaching recommendations aimed at all the parties whose efforts will be needed to ensure that reform takes root: colleges and universities; accrediting bodies and governing boards; state and federal policymakers; elementary and secondary schools; the business community; and parents and students themselves.

We note that the commissioners did not agree unanimously on every single finding and recommendation. This was a diverse group, with varied perspectives and backgrounds, and from the beginning our commission’s explicit mandate was to engage in debate and discussion, as indicated by the first part of our panel’s formal name: “A National Dialogue.” In a higher-education system as diverse and complex as ours, it is no surprise that knowledgeable individuals can and do differ over certain matters. Nevertheless, there has been remarkable consensus among our members not only on the acute challenges facing the nation’s colleges and universities but also on how we can begin to address higher education’s weaknesses and build a promising foundation for a thriving 21st century postsecondary education system.

In outlining our conclusions and recommendations below, and detailing them in the remainder of this report, we recognize that some who care deeply about higher education—and whose partnership we value in the new endeavors we propose— may not easily accept either our diagnosis or our prescriptions. But we would note that past reforms that later came to be recognized as transformational for American society were not universally embraced at first. The G.I. Bill, for instance, greatly worried such 20th century intellectual luminaries as Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, and James B. Conant, president of Harvard University, each of whom fretted that newly returned veterans might overwhelm campuses and be ill-suited to reap the benefits of higher education. In retrospect, such concerns seem positively archaic.

We can make no promise that our proposed reforms would have an impact as enormous as that historic, door-opening measure. Nor do we make light of the inevitable questions and concerns that may be raised by all those who we are asking to participate in the reform measures called for in our recommendations, including postsecondary institutions, federal and state policymakers, and employers.

But were the American system of higher education—and those who want to help it rise to the challenges of a new century—to make the changes our commission recommends, we believe other important changes would follow. The result would be institutions and programs that are more nimble, more efficient, and more effective. What the nation would gain is a heightened capacity to compete in the global market place. What individuals would gain is full access to educational opportunities that allow them to be lifelong learners, productive workers, and engaged citizens.