En su edición de hoy, The Chronicle of Higher Education afirma en un artículo de David Breneman que los siguientes tópicos continuan en el centro del debate sobre el futuro de la educación superior de los Estados Unidos [ver texto completo más abajo]:
+ How well is it serving our citizens?
+ How can affordability be ensured?
+ How well and effectively are students learning?
+ How cost-effective is the system?
+ How do we ensure that the system is globally competitive?
Argumenta que estos tópicos venían ya siendo discutidos desde el momento que, en agosto de 2006, se dio a conocer el Spellings Report, así llamado por la Ministra de Educación Sueprior de la Administración Bush, quien presidió la Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education .
Ver el Informe Spelling y diversos comentarios al mismo publicados por Inside Higher Education en el siguiente enlace.
Asimismo, sostiene el articulista del Chronicle:
Any objective review of American higher education will quickly show that those questions and issues are appropriate, reasonable, and worthy of discussion and study. They are not inherently politically partisan, nor heavily ideological, and there is every reason to believe that a Democratic administration in Washington would pursue them. Not to confront them as serious concerns is to abdicate responsibility. The voluntary system of accountability supported by many public universities should be credited as one promising response.
Sin embargo, alega, las universidades de élite tienden a pasar por alto estos tópicos e informes externos críticos del estado de la educación superior norteamericana pues miran el mundo universitario a través de la óptica altamente selectiva de sus propias instituciones, de donde resulta una particular miopía que entraba la discusión:
In short, leaders of elite institutions, viewing the world from their own vantage points, see little in the Spellings report or the “Measuring Up” reports to motivate them to change. Their fully predictable response to any new report from an external group that is critical of higher education is initially defensive, as the leaders assess the reports for what may be perceived as harmful. The next response, the leaders having concluded that the reports are largely irrelevant to their institutions, is to simply ignore the reports. Such a response is understandable in that those colleges are succeeding in the marketplace by virtually any measure. Why bother to answer external criticism when it does not pose a direct threat to either institutional resources or prestige? The result is a nonconversation about public-policy matters, as the groups fail to interact.

POINT OF VIEW
Elite Colleges Must Stop Spurning Critiques of Higher Education
By DAVID BRENEMAN
The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated February 15, 2008
Lawmakers have been putting increasing pressure on private colleges to spend more of their endowments on student aid. Just a few weeks ago, members of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee sent letters to dozens of institutions with endowments of at least $500-million, demanding detailed information about how they manage those endowments, how much they charge students to attend, and how much financial assistance they provide. One also hears rumblings about taxing endowments or imposing price caps on tuition increases.
Is it possible that such threats are linked, at least in part, to the negative and even hostile response of leading institutions to the criticisms of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education convened by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings? Since the Spellings commission issued its report more than a year ago, many leaders of our top colleges and universities have ignored or castigated its key recommendations. Meanwhile, higher-education institutions have drawn more and more public scrutiny.
Does the Spellings report still warrant attention in the waning days of the Bush administration? My answer to that question is a resounding YES. The four higher-education issues that the report emphasizes are the right ones and will continue to be with us for years: access, affordability, quality, and accountability. But unfortunately a worrisome disconnect exists between public policy and the nation’s higher-education institutions.
People outside colleges and universities — intelligent and thoughtful legislators, governors, business people, and alumni — who are broadly supportive of higher education, but who do not swallow all the arguments that institutions make on their own behalf, are raising the following questions about our higher-education system:
How well is it serving our citizens?
How can affordability be ensured?
How well and effectively are students learning?
How cost-effective is the system?
How do we ensure that the system is globally competitive?
Those are the issues that the Spellings report highlights. They parallel the biennial report card, “Measuring Up,” that the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education has released since 2000. The National Center’s chairman, James B. Hunt Jr., a former governor of North Carolina, was an influential member of the Spellings commission. “Measuring Up,” for which I chair the advisory committee, grades each state on six measures of educational performance, including preparation, participation, affordability, completion, benefits, and learning.
Both the Spellings commission and the “Measuring Up” reports highlight areas of systemwide underperformance, including the heavy reliance on remediation at many institutions, price increases that consistently exceed increases in the Consumer Price Index and in family incomes, and a complex, largely incomprehensible, and often inequitable system of student aid. They also cite low rates of college completion, a lack of access for many people, and a failure to assess student learning.
Any objective review of American higher education will quickly show that those questions and issues are appropriate, reasonable, and worthy of discussion and study. They are not inherently politically partisan, nor heavily ideological, and there is every reason to believe that a Democratic administration in Washington would pursue them. Not to confront them as serious concerns is to abdicate responsibility. The voluntary system of accountability supported by many public universities should be credited as one promising response. But why has the reaction to both sets of reports from much of the rest of the leadership of higher education been so defensive and dismissive?
Part of the answer is that those shortcomings do not resonate with the experience of the leaders of the top 5 percent to 10 percent of our nation’s colleges and universities. For example, those institutions are not troubled generally by remediation, but curiously more with its opposite: the overpreparedness of many highly qualified students who bring 20 to 30 Advanced Placement credits with them when they enroll. Those institutions are wrestling with how much of that credit to accept, thereby releasing students from many introductory courses. Their issue is whether AP courses are truly the equivalent of college courses, and some faculty members and administrators have their doubts.
Further, with regard to tuition increases, the most selective institutions long ago discovered that students and their families are simply not deterred by high and rising prices. Instead, the elite colleges face extreme excess demand, with many more students clamoring for admission than they can accept. Indeed, many joke wryly that Princeton University’s and Amherst College’s tuitions are too low, as the market-clearing price would be thousands of dollars above what students now pay. Furthermore, the resources available per student are much greater than the tuition price, as everyone enrolled receives a subsidy from endowment earnings, annual gifts, and the like. Consequently, concerns about affordability do not generate much traction at such campuses.
In addition, most of those institutions have begun offering virtual free rides to students admitted from families with incomes below some measure, and Harvard and Yale Universities have recently extended financial support far up the income scale. Consequently, they can argue that, with federal and state student aid plus their own resources, they are handling the affordability problems that a modest number of their students face. That dilutes their concern about the overall health of the student-aid system.
Nor do most of the elite colleges see completion rates as a concern, as they graduate a high percentage of students within four years (or four years and a summer). And, as selective colleges, by definition, they do not accept responsibility for universal access. That task is left to nonselective four-year colleges and the community-college system.
Finally, with employers and top graduate and professional schools eager to snap up their alumni, selective colleges are not impressed by the arguments for developing better measures of student learning. Granted, that stance avoids the question of the value added by the education that they offer, but in such an environment, it is easy to not be concerned about assessment.
In short, leaders of elite institutions, viewing the world from their own vantage points, see little in the Spellings report or the “Measuring Up” reports to motivate them to change. Their fully predictable response to any new report from an external group that is critical of higher education is initially defensive, as the leaders assess the reports for what may be perceived as harmful. The next response, the leaders having concluded that the reports are largely irrelevant to their institutions, is to simply ignore the reports. Such a response is understandable in that those colleges are succeeding in the marketplace by virtually any measure. Why bother to answer external criticism when it does not pose a direct threat to either institutional resources or prestige? The result is a nonconversation about public-policy matters, as the groups fail to interact.
The disconnect between the nation’s leading colleges and universities and public policy draws attention to the fact that only the leaders of the most prestigious institutions are given a platform from which to discuss concerns about higher education as a whole. The presidents of Eastern Midwestern State University or Big City Community College simply do not command the attention of academe or the public. But, as we have seen, it is precisely the most-elite institutions that have little reason to so engage.
It surely will not be healthy for higher education in the long run if external parties conclude that the leadership of our institutions will not respond to reasonable concerns. Is it only accidental that lawmakers are considering taxing endowments, altering tax benefits for charitable giving, imposing price caps, or denying student aid to certain campuses — all blunt clubs that may be more indicative of frustration than careful thought? Does the failure of our most prominent institutions to engage with higher education’s toughest problems help explain the withdrawal of the major private foundations’ support for work on higher-education policy? Will government officials, business leaders, and others have to seek new ways to hit higher education with the proverbial two-by-four in order to get our attention?
Naturally one hopes to avoid such harmful confrontations. Perhaps the way to do that would be for our leading institutions to undertake serious thought, discussion, and action on the troubling disconnect between policy makers and higher education. We need a set of leaders in the spirit of the former presidents Howard R. Bowen of the University of Iowa, Ernest L. Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Clark Kerr of the University of California, who can go beyond the narrow focus on a single institution to speak to the enterprise as a whole. That would be a valuable and noble activity, worthy of all of our support.
David Breneman is a professor in economics of education at the University of Virginia and a former dean of the university’s Curry School of Education. This essay is based on a presentation made at the Forum for the Future of Higher Education’s 2007 Aspen Symposium.
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http://chronicle.com
Section: Commentary
Volume 54, Issue 23, Page A40