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Subject: Education Department Hears
Appeals to Make Colleges More Accountable for Student
Education
Department Hears Appeals to Make Colleges More Accountable for Student
Performance
By STEPHEN BURD
Two panels of student-aid experts, state officials, business leaders, parents,
and students selected by the U.S. Education Department urged the Bush
administration on Friday to hold colleges more accountable for the academic
performance of their students.
The Education Department put together the panels to speak here at a special
session of the agency's annual student-aid conference devoted to the
reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the law that governs most federal
student-aid programs, which Congress is scheduled to begin considering later
this year. Education Department leaders, including Sally Stroup, the
department's assistant secretary for postsecondary education, moderated the
panels. Ms. Stroup said that the administration would consider the advice of
the panels when drafting its proposals for reauthorizing the act, which expires
at the end of the year.
Bush administration officials have repeatedly said that they will use the same
principles that guided their efforts to improve elementary and secondary
education, such as demanding greater accountability and performance from public
schools, to guide their approach to renewing the Higher Education Act. While
such talk has alarmed many college lobbyists and leaders, who fear that the
administration intends to ratchet up the government's oversight of colleges,
most of the panelists agreed that it is appropriate for the government to make
sure that colleges do a good job educating their students, retaining them, and
graduating them in a timely manner (The Chronicle,
September 20).
"If we are going to maintain taxpayer support for federal higher-education
programs, I believe we must provide taxpayers with the confidence that their
tax dollars are being well spent," said Richard T. Jerue, vice president
for government relations and corporate development for the Education Management
Corporation, which primarily operates for-profit art institutes and culinary
colleges. "Quality and accountability are the ways to assure that."
In his presentation, Mr. Jerue promoted a proposal by the Career College
Association, which lobbies on behalf of for-profit institutions, that would
require colleges to create an "Institutional Report Card." Such
reports, he said, "would give students, parents, policy makers, and any
other interested party tangible information about a particular school, its
mission, goals and objectives, what it purports to do, and its success in doing
that."
As part of that proposal, institutions would be required to report the rate at
which they graduate their students, as well as other factors that "attempt
to assess what happens to the student while he or she is in school," he
said. Colleges could report on their retention rates or transfer rates,
depending on the missions of the institutions
In addition, Mr. Jerue said, colleges would be required to provide
"outcome measures" that would try to answer the question "What
value-added did the student receive from the education they just paid for?" Factors such as job-placement rates, average starting
salaries, licensure information, graduate- and professional-school admission
rates, passage rates for competency tests or certification exams,
student/alumni satisfaction surveys, or employer satisfaction surveys could be
considered. "The outcome measures will necessarily be different depending
on the mission of the particular institution involved," he said.
Another panelist, Jeanne Adkins, talked of how, as director of policy and
planning for the Colorado Department of Higher Education, she helped develop
measures for judging the performance of the state's public colleges.
Ms. Adkins, who is now the director of the Colorado Student Loan Program, the
state's student-loan guarantee agency, said she believes that the performance
measures, which are taken into account when the state legislature divvies up
new spending for the public colleges each year, have been "a success for
consumers and for institutions." Colleges that originally opposed the
reporting requirements, she said, have recently sent out news releases pointing
to the improvements they have made in raising their graduation and retention
rates.
Ms. Adkins, however, told the department officials that if they decide to move
forward with accountability measures, they should not just try to duplicate the
Department officials indicated on Friday that they will move ahead with
accountability proposals, but did not specify exactly what those proposals
would be. Ms. Stroup told Ms. Adkins, "As we talk about accountability in
the coming months, my guess is that we will hear the same sorts of 'why this
can't work' or 'why we can't do this' as you heard in
After the panels concluded, department officials allowed members of the public
to speak on reauthorization. College lobbyists, who had been left off of the
panels, reiterated their opposition to proposals that would increase the
federal role in holding colleges accountable for the performance of their
students. They said, however, that they would support efforts by the government
to make data that colleges already provide to the federal government, states,
and college guidebooks more widely available to students and their families.
"The Department of Education already collects a boxcar full of data from
institutions of higher education," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice
president for government and public affairs at the American Council on
Education. "It might be that what we ought to be thinking about is making
the public more widely aware of what's available" on the department's Web
site.
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Chronicle of Higher Education