The Lumina Foundation for Education has become one of the best-known higher-education philanthropies in the country, spending nearly $50-million annually on projects to improve college completion, but now the foundation is worried about “initiative fatigue,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, the group’s president, in remarks here on Wednesday.
As a result, he said, the foundation is shifting its focus away from giving money to new projects to develop policy ideas. Instead, Lumina will work to enact the changes needed to drastically improve college graduation rates. The foundation’s goal is to have 60 percent of Americans hold a postsecondary degree by 2025.
Mr. Merisotis made his remarks at a session of the annual meeting of the State Higher Education Executive Officers, gathering this week in Minnesota. States, Mr. Merisotis said, are in a policy “sweet spot” where the changes they effect can be big enough to make a difference but small enough to be manageable.
Still, Lumina’s change in focus doesn’t mean that the organization will be spending less money, he said. In fact, the foundation will expand its efforts by convening business leaders, lawmakers, higher-education groups, and faculty members to build consensus on specific policy measures.
In addition, he said, Lumina will draft model policies for states, including legislation. The group is already working with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative-leaning organization, to write and introduce bills in statehouses.
Lumina has also hired a director of state policy to coordinate the foundation’s efforts.
While Mr. Merisotis praised state higher-education leaders, he urged them to accept a changing higher-education landscape that will include a much more diverse student body requiring more remedial education.
Higher education needs to remove the stigma for students who arrive at college without the academic preparation they need to succeed, Mr. Merisotis said. “Higher education needs to be more focused on the needs of students and less focused on the needs of the institution,” he said.
In a response, John C. Cavanaugh, chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, asked Mr. Merisotis to consider engaging gubernatorial candidates and the many new governors who are expected to take office next year (37 states hold gubernatorial elections in November). Those politicians should be urged not to discard the policies of their predecessors out of political expediency, Mr. Cavanaugh said.
Arguments on Academic Integrity
At another session of the meeting, Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, found herself in a hot seat, of sorts, defending the regional accrediting group’s standards.
It’s a familiar role for Ms. Manning, who recently has come under fire from Congress for the commission’s decision to accredit American InterContinental University in 2009 and, last week, for the group’s refusal to transfer accreditation to a group of investors seeking to buy the financially struggling Dana College, in Nebraska. The college is set to shut down, displacing hundreds of students and faculty members.
But on Wednesday, Ms. Manning was seated between Peter P. Smith, senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education, and Marshall Hill, executive director of Nebraska’s Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education, to discuss how institutions and accreditors could maintain academic integrity during a time of rapid growth in enrollment and the rise of for-profit colleges.
Mr. Smith said that higher education, on the whole, was not becoming more effective or efficient, and that institutions should be allowed to test academic innovations without having to risk their accreditation, which is necessary for a college’s students to receive federal financial aid.
Institutions should also make themselves more accountable by setting standards for what their students should learn and linking those benchmarks to necessary job skills, Mr. Marshall said. In addition, he said, colleges should be more open about which credits they will accept from other institutions.
Ms. Manning said the discussion about quality was facing “absolute confusion,” because the concepts of learning and completion are often conflated in higher education. “We are spending a lot of time figuring out how to give people credit for what they know rather than on helping students learn more,” she said.
And setting minimum standards for learning, she said, creates the risk that those benchmarks will become a ceiling rather than a floor.
Mr. Hill joked that someone who had read the news of Dana College’s demise might think that he and Ms. Manning would disagree on everything. But, he said, he agreed that minimum standards for learning outcomes were a bad idea for colleges.
Mr. Hill said that to ensure academic quality in the future, state governments should take a stronger regulatory role, while accreditors should make their processes and findings more transparent to the public.
Enduring Value of Liberal Arts
Defenders of the liberal arts can take some comfort in the findings of a survey of employers’ expectations of what kind of education they would like their workers to have. The survey was the centerpiece of a panel discussion at the conference on Wednesday.
The survey, released in January by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, found that a vast majority of employers want colleges to place more emphasis on improving students’ written and oral communication, critical thinking, ability to apply knowledge and skills to “real-world” settings through internships, and capacity to analyze and solve complex problems.
Results of the survey show that learning only “narrow” skills, specific to one job, “is not enough,” said Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications and public affairs at the association.
Lois Quam, founder and chairwoman of Tysvar, LLC, a company that advises and gives support to groups developing clean-energy and health-care innovations, and an alumna of Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minn., said she looks for workers who have the ability to “envision something that doesn’t yet exist” and to imagine multiple ways of fulfilling that vision.
People trained to do only one thing will struggle with those challenges, she said. “They can’t handle the ambiguity.”
And having employees who are curious and can consider things from several perspectives is crucial to avoiding business catastrophes, Ms. Quam said.
The most successful interview question for potential employees is whether they have any questions for me, she said. “If they don’t, I never hire them,” Ms. Quam said.
