Things have been pretty quiet around EMU as of late, seems to me. The football team has two more chances to pick up wins (I’m guessing that it’ll be a “perfect season” in a bad way), we’re waiting for the search for the Chief of Governmental and Community Relations to begin, people are getting ready for Thanksgiving break, etc. So I took a few minutes to surf through the Chronicle of Higher Ed to see if there was anything new there. “Not much,” but a couple articles I found interesting:
“Duncan Promises Colleges Attention to Cutting Costly Red Tape;” here are the opening paragraphs:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan promised on Tuesday to work on reducing regulatory reporting burdens on colleges, saying he would gladly cut federal red tape if institutions, in return, showed greater progress on improving student performance.
“I’m more than willing to exchange that,” Mr. Duncan told college leaders at the annual meeting of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities here.
The secretary offered the commitment in an area in which federal officials routinely promise relief but, to the eyes of colleges, rarely succeed. The legislation passed last year to reauthorize the Higher Education Act brought colleges more than 100 new federal reporting requirements, according to an analysis by the American Council on Education.
Of course, the problem is trying to define exactly what “improving student performance” means. And I think the complexities of that are pretty well articulated in a commentary piece from last week, “4 Faulty Assumptions About American Higher Education” by Arthur Hauptman. The “four faulty assumptions” in question here for Hauptman are:
* Access to college is declining after decades of growth because people can no longer afford it and because states have cut their support substantially.
* Degree-completion rates are flat or declining, and America has lost its once-dominant position relative to many other countries.
* The United States’ ranking in attainment—the percentage of adult workers who hold college degrees—has dropped from first to the middle of the pack among countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
* Higher-education degree attainment in America has been flat for the past 40 years.
Hauptman takes each of these on in interesting and informative ways, but this observation about how public universities are funded by state governments really struck me:
Modest degree-completion rates are also a function of how we finance our system. States typically support their public institutions based on how many students enroll each year, not how many pass their final exams, like Denmark does, or complete a year of study, like England does. The result—lower completion rates—is predictable. In addition, public institutions in this country tend to charge much lower fees than most private institutions. As a result, they do not feel the same pressure to provide the necessary courses to allow their students to complete their studies on time as do most private institutions, where students and their families must pay much more for any delay.
It’s an interesting thought. If places like EMU were funded based on completion rates and if the cost of attendance was raised, then both would encourage higher graduation rates. Probably.
