The Chronicle News Blog: Charles Miller Assails Private and Research Universities in ‘Personal’ Letter
When Charles Miller, chairman of the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education, submitted the panel’s report last week to the U.S. secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, he included a cover letter that was not part of the official document posted on the Education Department’s Web site.
In the letter, Mr. Miller shares what he calls “strictly personal observations,” calling the system of financing higher education “dysfunctional.” He writes that “in addition to the lack of transparency regarding pricing, which severely limits the price signals found in a market-based system, there is a lack of the incentives necessary to affect institutional behavior so as to reward innovation and improvement in productivity. Financial systems of higher education instead focus on and reward increasing revenues—a top line structure with no real bottom line.”
In keeping with previous comments he has made, Mr. Miller singled out private colleges for the most criticism, writing that they resist being held accountable, as shown by their opposition to a unit-record system to track students. “What elevates this concern,” he writes, “is the fact that so-called ‘private’ colleges and universities receive a large amount of support from the public, that is, the taxpayer.”
He also takes aim at a group he hasn’t to this point: research universities. “Research expenditures are a major ‘cost driver’ in higher education and need the same intense examination and skeptical analysis other financial issues require, especially since most of these are public funds,” he writes.
He concludes by saying that the time has come for “an examination of the whole system, with no special rights for any recipient of public funds and no free pass for any type of institution, no exception for those ranking high in the ‘top tier,’ or no exception for those bearing the arbitrary and often inaccurate label as a ‘private’ institution.”
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