Making Higher Ed More National, Not Federal (column)

Anybody who has spoken with me about the state of higher education for more than 10 minutes has probably heard me ramble on about the challenges (along with the benefits) that arise from the fact that we lack a higher education “system” in the United States.

It would take a very long column (if not a book) to lay out my thinking on why our collection of thousands of colleges, universities, training providers and other entities that help prepare individuals for work and life (while fulfilling all the other roles these institutions play in our society and economy) doesn’t amount to a system, or behave like one. Suffice it to say that it’s a combination of:

But those benefits, I’d argue, are increasingly outweighed by disadvantages that hamper the industry. Most prominently, we struggle to create concerted, collective progress even when we generally agree it’d be good to move in certain directions (better education and workforce data, improved credit transfer, etc.). It’s very hard to get systemic movement in a nonsystem. And in this moment, in particular, the traditional higher ed model of change—one institution at a time, with individual colleges recreating the wheel rather than working together—just isn’t up to the task.

One way to create more system-like behavior would be for more government direction. A more aggressive governmental role might result in more beneficial coordination among institutions (particularly at the state level, where most statewide bodies don’t do enough now to encourage colleges and universities to stay in their respective lanes and stick to their missions).

And it would be good if we could return to a functioning federal policy infrastructure. Certain systemic problems—like the increasingly dysfunctional way we help Americans pay for education and training and hold institutions accountable for their performance—can’t be addressed without federal involvement. It would be really nice to see our representatives in Washington work together to, say, update the federal Higher Education Act for the first time since 2008 (we’re already more than a decade late, and the seams are showing in ways that hurt today’s students).

But I have no interest in a heavier-handed government role, and not just because of the extraordinary moment we’re in now (though it isn’t a heartening advertisement for what a greater federal role might look like). The historical benefits of a limited federal role in higher education—institutional diversity, protection from the worst kinds of political intrusion, experimentation—remain.

So the question for me is how we might go about getting more national in our approach to higher education without it being more federal.

We don’t lack organizations or approaches that operate at a national level. Hundreds of professional and disciplinary associations, faculty unions, philanthropic foundations, sports governing bodies and policy groups focus on higher education writ large, and an equivalent number of companies have customers across the entire country and the whole spectrum of higher education. But groups like the American Council on Education, the closest thing we have to an industry trade association, can’t really tell their members what to do (and risk losing them if they push too hard), and even deep-pocketed foundations and companies don’t have enough money to bribe persuade institutions to behave in certain ways.

And that matters because some of the most widespread and intractable problems facing higher education persist because they are complex and involve many players with differing, and often conflicting, interests. What are those issues, why do they vex us so and how might a more coordinated national approach help to break the logjams?

This is a quick-and-dirty first pass, since each of these deserve much more explication than I can muster here (and as usual I’m coming up against my deadline).

• Better education and workforce data. Huge time, energy and investment have gone into addressing the fact that we lack a common system for understanding how people flow from education to work (and swirl between them). This is one area where we’ve considered—and for decades formally rejected through acts of Congress—a centralized federal approach, in the form of a student-level data system. In the absence of a federal solution, individual states and multistate collaboratives have developed their own approaches, but they don’t talk to each other.

There has been increased talk of unifying several federal data systems of late, and it’s hard to imagine how this issue gets resolved without a significant federal role, since any alternative (such as building off the National Student Clearinghouse) could end up putting sensitive data in quasi-private hands. Not sure how much longer we can wait.

• Enabling credit transfer/learning mobility. As I touched on in my last column, one of our biggest systemic problems is the difficulty learners have moving between educational institutions and experiences and getting credit for the learning they’ve accumulated. The financial and personal costs of this are enormous, and the lack of connective tissue between institutions—and colleges’ dogged belief that the education they offer is better than/different from what learners gain somewhere else—are major causes. The problem gets even more complex and urgent as the number of dual-credit high school students and nondegree credentials grow.

We’ve done a ton of work on this, from articulation agreements between individual institutions to transfer guarantees within public university systems or even across regions. But a national approach would almost certainly require much more involvement from accreditors, which are a strange beast in this and other conversations because they are at the very least quasi-governmental, and executive branches of both parties often seek to use them to push colleges in directions of their choosing.

In a recent Inside Higher Ed column, Quintina Barnett Gallion of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers talked about what it would take to move beyond the “giant hairball” we’ve created around what AACRAO calls learning mobility. “The question is not whether higher education has the collective intelligence to solve these problems,” she writes. “It does. The question is: How do we, as a field, redesign our collaborative vehicles and membership ties to build shared frameworks? At some point, these parallel conversations must align.”

• Educational quality and better teaching. Change in higher education gets harder the closer you get to the heart of the enterprise: teaching and learning and student success. That’s where the behavior is most individualized, with hundreds of thousands of instructors engaging with millions of learners in ways they largely design themselves. That isn’t a bad thing—in fact, it can be magical, like many interactions between human beings—but the dispersion makes it hard to institutionalize, “standardize,” even gauge whether what’s being taught and learned is actually benefiting students. Feature or bug? That’s in the eye of the beholder, and a topic for another day.

What’s relevant for this conversation is that the teaching and learning space is extremely difficult to understand, to organize, let alone to corral in some way. Which is why efforts to improve it or “reform” it at any kind of systematic level have been so evasive, despite significant work by groups like the American Association of Colleges and Universities and many disciplinary associations. (Reform at the individual campus level can be difficult for other reasons: A president or provost who pursues significant changes in, say, the balance between teaching and research, or major curricular reforms, or tenure, can easily alienate enough faculty members to doom them.)

Another effort, the Alliance for Better College Teaching, is just getting underway, with the specific goal of aligning the many “isolated, fragmented” initiatives undertaken over recent decades to try to create a “higher education system where every student experiences evidence-based teaching practices in every course.”

The leaders of the effort acknowledge how many hard changes would be required to bring about such a change: strengthening the emphasis on teaching in graduate school, improving support and professional development for faculty members on campuses, increasing incentives and rewards for good teaching in tenure and promotion, to name a few. And that coordination will be required “among colleges/universities, disciplines, states, national organizations, and policy makers,” among others. Doable? I have no idea. Worth a try? Without a doubt.

I could go on listing other realms in which coordinated national efforts might make progress possible where it seems unattainable or even fanciful now. (The one closest to my heart would involve the major college groups coming together to create their own broad-based way of proving higher education’s value, which I laid out here.) This is enough for now.

But the main takeaway I’d leave you with is this: Solving higher education’s biggest, most intractable problems is going to require a degree of cooperation and compromise that the industry has rarely mustered.

On my pessimistic days, I doubt that it can. On my hopeful days, I think it might be able to, especially given the increasing pressures. On all days, I know that it must, for the learners.