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Boston Globe: Education panel pushes for more need-based college aid
A national commission charged with charting the future of American higher education approved its final recommendations yesterday, calling on the government to provide more aid based on financial need, while telling colleges to be more accountable for what students learn.

Inside Higher Ed: 18 Yesses, 1 Major No
One by one, the members of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education offered their support for the panel’s report, though with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Some, like James B. Hunt, the former governor of North Carolina, virtually gushed, saying it “could be one of the most important reports in the educational and economic history of our country if we act on it.”

USA Today: Panel calls for “urgent reform” of higher education
Warning that U.S. higher education ìrequires urgent reform,î a national panel created by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is recommending a set of bold proposals, including overhauling the financial aid system and holding colleges and universities more accountable for their students’ progress.

The Chronicle: Federal Panel Approves Final Draft Report on Higher Education, With One Member Dissenting
It took 11 months, eight meetings, and countless e-mail exchanges, but the 19 members of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education have finally coalesced around a long-term vision for the nation’s colleges.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Friday, August 11, 2006

Federal Panel Approves Final Draft Report on Higher Education, With One Member Dissenting

By KELLY FIELD

Washington

It took 11 months, eight meetings, and countless e-mail exchanges, but the 19 members of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education have finally coalesced around a long-term vision for the nation’s colleges.

At a meeting here on Thursday, the panel voted, almost unanimously, to approve a report that warns of the perils of complacency and calls for sweeping changes in American higher education. The report will now go through final edits and revisions before being presented to the U.S. secretary of education in mid-September.

The motion to approve the report came via intercom from former Gov. James B. Hunt Jr., who was recovering from surgery at his North Carolina home. One by one, in alphabetical order, the commissioners voiced approval for the report, saying its dozens of recommendations would make higher education more accessible, more accountable, and more competitive in the global economy.

The only real dissent came from David Ward, president of the American Council on Education.

“I may be raining on this unanimous report,” he began. “However, as I review the final draft in its entirety, I regret that I cannot sign it.”

Mr. Ward said the report projected a “false sense of crisis” and blamed higher education for problems with multiple origins. He said it failed to recognize the diversity of higher education and seemed to suggest a “one size fits all” approach to improving higher education.

“Change in higher education is needed, but we need to get it right and above all do no harm,” he said in a statement circulated at the meeting. “I believe I can be more effective in this continuing dialogue if I am free to contest some aspects of this report.”

Robert M. Zemsky, chairman of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania, said he shared some of Mr. Ward’s concerns, though he pledged to vote for the report.

“David is right — we need to talk about building on the strengths of higher educations, and not on its weaknesses,” he said.

Mr. Zemsky argued that by focusing on higher education’s flaws — particularly in the early versions of the report — the commission had alienated academe. He said he had been “disheartened” by the large number of e-mail messages he had received “from people who are hostile” to the commission.

“There are a lot of people out there who no longer believe in us,” he said. “So we have more than heavy lifting to do, we have trust building as well.”

Reaction to the report from the “big six” higher-education associations has been mixed. While the American Association of State Colleges and Universities has largely endorsed the report — the association’s president, Constantine W. (Deno) Curris, on Thursday called it a “solid report” with “powerful and very good recommendations” — the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities has been highly critical of its proposals to create a national “unit record” database and overhaul the federal student-financial-aid system.

Meanwhile, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and the Association of American Universities have submitted letters offering some praise and much criticism of the report. Among other things, both letters argue that the report neglects graduate and professional education, ignores colleges’ efforts to contain costs, and overlooks the experimentation and change already taking place on college campuses.

“To suggest that we are complacent is a bit absurd,” Robert M. Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities, said in an interview. “I think we have engaged in a good deal of self-criticism, probably more self-criticism than any other sector of American society.”

The American Association of Community Colleges said in a statement that while the report, “on balance,” is positive for higher education, it “does not adequately address the role that state and local funding … play in the health of community colleges.”

And while the state-college groups have worked together to develop an accountability system for public colleges, all of the associations agree that any such assessment should be voluntary, and not imposed by the states, as the first three versions of the report proposed. This week, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges scored a victory when it persuaded the commission to eliminate language urging states to “require” colleges to measure student-learning outcomes.

Members of the commission did not comment on the lobbyists’ concerns on Thursday, but urged the associations to work with them to carry out the reports’ recommendations.

“This will not be a time to nitpick and to complain,” said Mr. Hunt. “This will be a time we really need to push forward and change American higher education.”

And one commission member, Arthur J. Rothkopf, the former president of Lafayette College, issued a “plea” to the independent-college association, known as Naicu, to “take a hard look at what we’re recommending and not reflexively say no.”

“I would urge the presidents of private institutions to read the report before taking the response that this can’t be done,” he said.

In an interview after the meeting, David L. Warren, Naicu’s president, questioned whether Mr. Rothkopf had read the letter the association had sent to the commission on Tuesday. In the letter, Mr. Warren highlights his concerns but also notes that there are “many elements in the current draft that the Naicu membership can support and even applaud,” including the emphasis on increasing need-based aid and reducing regulation.

“I think we took a reasonably balanced view about the content of the report,” he said.

Thursday’s meeting was the final one for the federal panel, which Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings formed last fall to develop “a comprehensive national strategy for the future of higher education.” Still, several members admitted that the hardest part of their job — moving their report from recommendation to reality — lies ahead, and they pledged to support legislation and regulations to put their proposals in place.

“We have aspired, inspired, and now it is time to perspire,” said Nicholas Donofrio, executive vice president for innovation and technology for IBM. “The heavy work is clearly ahead of us.”

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The New York Times: Panel’s Report Urges Higher Education Shake-Up

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — A federal commission approved a final report on Thursday that urges a broad shake-up of American higher education. It calls for public universities to measure learning with standardized tests, federal monitoring of college quality and sweeping changes in financial aid.

The panel also called on policy makers and leaders in higher education to find new ways to control costs, saying college tuition should grow no faster than median family income, although it opposed price controls.

The report recommended bolstering Pell grants, the basic building block of federal student aid, by making the program cover a larger percentage of public college tuition. That proposal could cost billions of dollars.

Eighteen of the 19 members of the panel, the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, voted to sign the report, which attacked increasing tuition costs and pointed to signs of complacency on some campuses. David Ward, who as president of the largest association of colleges and universities was the most powerful representative of the higher education establishment on the commission, refused to sign.

Calling the report “a shot across the bow,” Dr. Ward said that academia would take it seriously, but that he wanted to remain “free to contest” it. Several proposals, including those on testing and financial aid, aroused fierce opposition from university leaders and at points divided the panel.

The chairman, Charles Miller, an investor and a former chairman of the University of Texas Regents, had hoped to turn out a punchy report that would rattle academia with warnings of crisis.But in the last six weeks, the commission issued six drafts, watering down passages that had drawn criticism and eliminating one this week, written by Mr. Miller, that had encouraged expanding private loans as a share of student financial aid.

A proposal on standardized tests was also weakened at the last moment. Previous drafts said that “states should require” public universities to use standardized test, but the final version said simply that universities “should measure student learning” with standardized tests.

All the panel members who participated in a meeting on Thursday at the Education Department headquarters here expressed unanimity on some points, including that the report correctly identified critical challenges like increasing access to higher education for poor students and holding institutions more accountable for students who drop out or graduate with few skills.

The members seemed at odds on how to carry their recommendations forward. Some, like former Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. of North Carolina, called on President Bush to incorporate them in the Congressional agenda.

Mr. Miller said the next step should be more “national dialogue” with governors and corporate leaders. He seemed upset by what he characterized as wrangling with representatives of the status quo.

“You can’t act on the recommendations today because you encounter one set of defenders and then behind them another set of defenders, and you get into all these battles,” he told reporters after the panel voted.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings established the panel a year ago, drawing members from sectors of higher education like community colleges, for-profit trade schools, liberal arts colleges and large research universities, public and private, as well as from the ranks of executives at I.B.M., Boeing, Microsoft and other businesses.

The commission was created at a time of increasing tuitions. From 1999 to 2004, median family income grew 13 percent and average tuition 38 percent, according to federal data cited in an interview by Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist on the commission.

Ms. Spellings urged the group to examine access, affordability and accountability, to determine whether colleges were turning out students qualified to compete in the global economy. The answer in too many cases, the panel said, is that they are not.

“Too many Americans just aren’t getting the education that they need,” the report said. “There are disturbing signs that many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing and thinking skills we expect of college graduates.”

A spokeswoman for Ms. Spellings, Katherine McLane, said, “The commission has made bold recommendations on improving the accessibility and affordability of higher education, to which the secretary intends to give very serious consideration.”

One recommendation that won broad support was for changing immigration laws to help foreign scientists who graduate from American universities obtain green cards.

Dr. Ward’s organization, the American Council on Education, is the major coordinating body for all higher education institutions, public and private. Leaders of some of the associations that belong to the council, like the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the American Association of Community Colleges, embraced the report as a helpful statement of priorities.

Other important groups in the council issued withering critiques.

The Association of American Universities, which represents 60 top research universities, noted that the report “deals almost exclusively with undergraduate education.”

Robert M. Berdahl, a former chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is president of the universities association, said, “What is needed is something much richer, with a more nuanced understanding of the educational engagement and how it is undertaken.” said

Another council member, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents 900 private institutions including liberal arts colleges, major research universities and church- and other faith-related colleges, attacked the recommendation to develop a national database to follow individual students’ progress as a way of holding colleges accountable for students’ success.

The association called the proposal a dangerous intrusion on privacy, saying, “Our members find this idea chilling.”

Several groups said the report spent much ink discussing increases in students’ work skills, while slighting the mission of colleges and universities to educate students as citizens.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company