A propósito de los anteriores postings sobre las propuestas del Presidente Obama para los créditos estudiantiles en los EEUU, resulta interesante la carta que le dirige el comncoido psicológo R. J. Sternberg.
Dear President Obama …
Indise HigherED, January 30, 2012 – 3:00am
By Robert J. Sternberg, provost, senior vice president, Regents Professor of Psychology and Education, and George Kaiser Family Foundation Chair in Ethical Leadership at Oklahoma State University
Dear President Obama:
Thank you for the interest in, and passion for, higher education you showed in your talk on January 27 at the University of Michigan. Many of us in higher education, and especially in state institutions of higher learning, are excited about the prospect of increased federal funds directed at our enterprise, especially in a time of relative drought for state funding. I would like to express 10 hopes for the new program that perhaps some others share, although of course I only can speak for myself.
Please don’t rush it. Some of us will be afraid of a replay of the scenario that emerged from No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Although the law was well-intentioned, its metrics for progress and implementation were not well-thought through, and have resulted in (a) straitjacketing of public schools in terms of what curriculum they feel they can teach, (b) relegation of important school subjects — such as history, civics, languages, music and art — to the back of the back burner, (c) high-stakes tests that were not ready for prime time, (d) gaming the system, with some states actually lowering standards when they discovered that they otherwise could not meet the ever-more-stringent goals the law placed, and (e) demoralization and discouragement among educators regarding the role of the federal government in education. Many, including myself, feel it was an overreach on the part of the federal government, and we seek to prevent the same phenomenon in higher education. Whatever legislation may emerge from your new initiative needs to be much better planned than NCLB was.
Please respect differences in college missions and goals. Although there are commonalities among institutions of higher learning, a wonderful feature of higher education in the United States is its diversity — students can go to a wide variety of institutions to learn different things in different ways. For example, students who engage in a pre-professional major come out of college with a somewhat different kind of knowledge base and set of skills from students who strongly emphasize the liberal arts. I worry that a one-size-fits-all measure of outcome quality will hamper colleges and the students in them from optimally achieving their own individual goals. I especially worry about metrics for progress that will undermine liberal education in this country — the very education that brought you, your wife, and most of the nation’s leaders to where they are today. Many educators hope that the federal government does not intrude upon the diversity in educational experiences that makes our system of education great.
Please understand the limitations of standardized tests. Virtually all of us in higher education believe in accountability, but many of us know that there are no standardized tests out there — at least at this time — that comprehensively measure the outcomes that are important for college learning. Both the Association of American Colleges and University (AAC&U) and the Lumina Foundation have proposed exciting frameworks — Liberal Education for America’s Promise (LEAP) and the Degree Qualification Profile (DQP), respectively — for capturing many (but not all) aspects of college learning. Standardized tests, however, do not come close to measuring all or even most of them. For example, none of these tests measure the creative, practical, ethical, wisdom-based, and team-based skills that students will need to succeed in the world of work and the broader world of life. I very much hope that any legislation will reflect the limitations of standardized tests and not create a nightmare in which college professors are pressured to teach to some kind of narrowly conceived national test.
Please understand the pressures on college tuition and fees. We in higher education empathize with families who feel that tuitions and fees are climbing at a rate faster than they can afford. My family is one of them, worrying about how we eventually will have the funds to put our 1-year-old triplets through college. But please understand that, at least for state institutions, we have had to raise our tuitions and fees largely because of substantial, and in some states (but not my own State of Oklahoma), draconian cuts in state funding. Private colleges and universities are under pressures of their own. Please ensure that colleges and universities are not penalized for increases in price that reflect our continued commitment to providing quality education at an affordable price. Please keep centrally in view the role our higher education system plays in supporting cutting-edge scholarly activity and research that are fundamental to our world standing. We know we can do better on price and we are trying to control costs and hence tuition, but federal price controls are not the answer to the problem.
Please take into account factors that lead to differential college completion rates. I can understand why any governmental body at any level would be concerned with completion rates. So am I. But at least some of us in higher education wish to make sure that three factors are taken into account in evaluating completion rates. First, some colleges purposely accept students who, for a variety of reasons, are less likely to complete college than are other students who go elsewhere. In elite institutions that accept primarily students at the top of the academic heap who come from relatively affluent families, completion rates are likely to be higher than at open-admission institutions that accept all applicants, many from indigent families. The country needs many different kinds of institutions of higher learning, but their completion rates almost inevitably will be different and for good reasons. Second, I hope, along with my colleagues at the AAC&U, that considerations of completion do not overshadow considerations of quality. Over-focusing on completion can lead one to disregard the important issue of whether the education being completed is of the best quality our institutions of higher learning can provide. Third, please keep in mind that students fail to complete college for varied reasons, only some of which are under the control of the institution.
Please be temperate in focusing on a jobs-based agenda. Certainly one measure of the success of an institution is whether students are employed upon graduation, whether they are employed in their field of study, and what level of income the jobs provide, especially in helping students repay their student loans. But please keep in mind that there are many factors that determine how well an institution will stack up in the jobs competition, some of which are not perfectly correlated with the quality of education they provide. One is the perceived prestige of the institution, independent of the actual quality of education it provides. Another is whether the institution emphasizes pre-professional training — students are more likely to be employed in the field of their major if they are pre-professionally oriented; many students intend careers in areas that welcome and reward broad knowledge and a strong liberal arts foundation, rather than job-specific skills (fields such as communications, public service, and the nation’s many service and innovation-minded industries). A third factor is the part of the country and even a given state in which students study and then seek jobs. The employment situation is better in some locations than in others. Please consider that there is no simple statistic that will indicate how well colleges are doing in achieving appropriate job placement and starting salary. And finally, as you know from your own post-college experience, some students do not seek the highest starting salaries. Teachers in this country, for example, are underpaid (relative to other countries and relative to what I, at least, believe they are worth) and yet they choose a profession knowing they will be underpaid because they want to educate our students. A college should not be penalized for producing more poorly-paid teachers than, say, better-paid engineers.
Please don’t force us into political correctness. Some of us may worry that the grant proposals the government seeks will lead institutions to try to satisfy some governmentally imposed agenda rather than their own. As I said above, institutions have different goals and missions, and it would be unfortunate if they were forced to compromise in their own missions in a search for federal funds. Such enforced conformity would impoverish, not enrich, higher education in our great nation.
Please ensure sufficiency of resources. Some of us worry that either the money the federal government puts into higher education will not be sufficient to make a large difference or that some states, upon receiving grants, will commensurately decrease their own state funding. I suspect many of us hope that any new funds the federal government allocates to higher education will be incremental funds rather than replacement funds.
Please create a sustainable program. If colleges are asked to make substantial commitments to achieve federal funding, I hope that whatever program is created will be sustainable — even after a new president and Congress eventually come into power — so that the effort of the colleges will be worth their while in the long as well as the short term. Sustainability will mean bipartisan support for whatever initiative is eventually passed.
Please ensure whatever program is enacted has self-correcting mechanisms. It is rare that a large new educational initiative is perfect in its original implementation. Who among us can claim quickly to attain perfection in the implementation of any of our strategic plans? If and, more likely, when things begin to go off course, please ensure that mechanisms are in place to ensure that the program can be self-correcting so that it truly accomplishes its goals.
Thank you again for your interest in, and desire to enhance, higher education in our country. We in universities want to do what we can to improve and we welcome assistance.
Sincerely,
Robert J. Sternberg
Bio
Robert J. Sternberg is provost, senior vice president, Regents Professor of Psychology and Education, and George Kaiser Family Foundation Chair in Ethical Leadership at Oklahoma State University. He also is president of the Federation of Associations in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences and Treasurer of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The views represented in this letter were influenced by conversations at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the AAC&U in Washington. The opinions expressed in the letter, however, are strictly the author’s own personal views and do not represent those of any institution with which he is affiliated.
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Más sobre el tema de los créditos estudiantiles en los EEUU
‘Gainful’ Comes to the Nonprofits
Obama higher education plan signals policy shift
By Libby A. Nelson, Inside HigherED, January 30, 2012 – 3:00am
After the applause faded from President Obama’s State of the Union address, a question lingered: Obama told colleges they were “on notice,” but what does “on notice” mean, anyway?
Friday provided a few answers.
In a speech at the University of Michigan, the president laid out a plan for higher education that could be a key plank of his re-election campaign this year. Obama proposed using campus-based financial aid programs to reward colleges that keep net price low and punish those that do not. Two new competitions, modeled on the administration’s “Race to the Top” program for elementary and secondary education, would reward states that invest in higher education and colleges and nonprofit groups that improve productivity. A host of new disclosure forms would give students more information on price and financial aid.
On one level, the plan is an election year crowd-pleaser, an appeal to middle-class voters who feel college for their children is increasingly out of reach. But it also signals a shift in the administration’s higher education policy, which until now has focused on reining in for-profit colleges and increasing financial aid for low-income students.
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/30/obama-higher-education-plan-signals-policy-shift#ixzz1kxuh2HDz
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The plan calls for linking federal aid not only to net price increases but to whether colleges provide “good value” to students — a “quality education and training that prepares graduates to obtain employment and repay their loans,” the White House wrote.
If that sounds familiar, it’s for good reason. A similar philosophy guided the Education Department’s controversial and much-protested “gainful employment” rule, which judges the value of for-profit colleges and vocational programs based on on whether they prepare their students for “gainful employment” by looking at student loan repayment rates.
The real message in “on notice”: Increased scrutiny and regulation aren’t just for for-profit colleges anymore.
“They’re sending a strong signal about where the second Obama administration, if we have one, is likely to go,” said Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a think tank. “They’re not going to just keep putting millions of dollars into the Pell Grant Program and letting the chips fall where they may.”
The president’s higher education plan appears poised to become a major feature of his re-election campaign, alongside support for manufacturing, clean energy and other ideas intended to help shore up the troubled economy.
The plan’s central feature is a change to the campus-based Perkins Loan Program, which provides funds to institutions to lend to their students. The White House has proposed expanding the program to $10 billion per year and revamping the formula for distributing both Perkins loans and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants. Money would be directed to colleges that do well on three criteria: setting a “responsible tuition policy,” providing “good value” to students, and enrolling and graduating relatively large numbers of low-income students. Colleges that do not meet those standards could see their funding for campus-based programs cut.
The plan also would create a $1 billion “Race to the Top” competition for college affordability and completion. The money would serve as an incentive for states to maintain funding on higher education, the administration said. A second competition, called “First in the World,” would provide up to $55 million for colleges or nonprofit organizations to improve productivity.
“If you can find new ways to bring down the cost of college and make it easier for more students to graduate, we’ll help you do it,” Obama said, referring to the states, in his speech at Michigan.
Many higher education experts and college groups were skeptical of Obama’s plan when it was first proposed, in broad strokes, during the State of the Union address Tuesday night. Reactions from the major higher education associations after his speech Friday were tempered. Most praised the president for his proposals to expand work-study programs and Perkins loans: “If approved by Congress, it would provide an enormous amount of money to help students and families,” Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said in a statement. “Colleges and universities stand ready to do everything they can to help enhance student access and completion.”
But they also pushed back strongly on additional federal involvement, especially in measuring the value of a college education or trying to force universities to keep prices low: “Colleges, states, and the federal government must work together in a climate of mutual trust and collaboration,” David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said in a statement. “The answer is not going to come from more federal controls on colleges or states, or by telling families to judge the value of an education by the amount young graduates earn in the first few years after they graduate.”
(Responses from individual college presidents were less measured. Michael Young, president of the University of Washington, called Obama’s plan “nonsense on stilts” and “political theater of the worst sort,” according to the Associated Press.)
All noted that important questions remained. For public universities, state support is key: so far, it’s unclear how the Race to the Top competition would function, and whether it would be enough of a reward to spur states into increasing support. Tuition increases at public colleges and universities have been driven largely by declining state support, which Obama noted in his speech Friday and many higher education leaders reiterated.
“I think it’ll be very hard to sustain holding tuition to inflation if the states can’t keep their side of the bargain,” M. Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, said in an interview. “Affordability for publics is fundamentally a question of state appropriations.”
The Race to the Top for elementary and secondary education required states to make policy changes before they could even be eligible to enter the competition. But whether the competition for higher education will work that way, and what changes might be required, is unclear, said Andrew Kelly, a research fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“It sounds like what they’re getting at is a maintenance of effort,” Kelly said, referring to requirements to keep funding above certain levels to remain eligible for federal funds. But maintenance of effort requirements, including some related to higher education, have foundered in the past because the amount of federal funding at risk pales in comparison to state budget shortfalls. “What would the prerequisites even look like?” Kelly said. “I don’t think anybody knows.”
Education Department officials said more details will be released with the budget request for fiscal year 2013, which will provide information on how the administration plans to pay for the expanded Perkins loans, the two competitions and other factors of the plan. Obama has called on Congress to act on other parts of his higher education agenda immediately, including stopping the interest rate on subsidized student loans from doubling in July. The Democratic-led Congress cut the interest rate in half in 2007, with the knowledge that it would reset to the higher 6.8 percent rate without action (and available funds) to stop it, as Republican critics of Obama’s new plan have been quick to note.
Still, given the Congressional deadlock, it’s unclear whether any part of the plan will face a vote in the near future. And some provisions, especially the proposal to measure the “value” of degree programs, might require additional legislation, Kelly said. The regulation of for-profit colleges hinged on a brief phrase in the Higher Education Act: for-profit colleges, and programs not in the liberal arts, must prepare students for “gainful employment in a recognized occupation.” There is no such basis for regulating traditional degree programs.
In a way, using similar criteria makes sense, Carey said: after all, even students studying art history or philosophy are attending college because they hope to get a job. “The president has kind of taken on the lenders and the for-profits and won significant victories, and he’s now turning his attention to the traditional sector,” Carey said. “They’ve been treating the symptoms of rising college prices, but they haven’t really tackled it as a problem.”
But some critics said that shift in focus takes away from what was seen as the administration’s primary goal: enrolling and graduating more low-income students. Further expansions to the Pell Grant Program would do more to make college accessible, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of higher education policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“I don’t have high hopes for [the new plan] being very effective in helping him achieve what I thought his goal was, which is getting more students from low-income families to be college graduates,” Goldrick-Rab said, describing the plan as “a little all over the place.”
“This is going to cause problems for the institutions that have the least resources to begin with.”
Goldrick-Rab said she saw the plan largely as an election-year attempt to appeal to the middle class. But given the unlikelihood of major change this year — and the fact that a second Obama term would also include the 2013 scheduled reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, an anticipated vehicle for many of the new policy proposals — its ramifications are likely to linger long beyond 2012.
“This is setting a new agenda, and I think it’s easy to underestimate that this is an important shift in the dialogue,” Kelly said. The new conversation is about using incentives to force colleges to change, rather than just funding grants for low-income students, he said. “That’s a fundamentally different agenda than we’ve had in the past, even within this administration.”
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/30/obama-higher-education-plan-signals-policy-shift#ixzz1kxuZxtaP
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