If there’s one thing that colleges have been good at during the past hundred years, it’s getting a growing number of students onto their campuses. But now a century’s worth of practices devoted to increasing enrollment have to be overhauled to make sure that more of those students leave college with degrees.
That is the underlying, if unstated, theme at the annual policy conference of the State Higher Education Executive Officers, taking place here through Friday. While the solutions to that challenge are likely to be discussed for many years to come, some consensus is emerging about the policies that must change to attain the goal, including how higher education is financed, how technology is used, and how the quality of a degree is ensured.
“We have to produce more degrees, with high quality, and at a lower cost,” said John Hayek, senior vice president for budget, planning, and policy at the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education.
Mr. Hayek moderated a panel discussion on what are arguably the most difficult questions facing public higher education: Who should pay for college and how should institutions spend their money?
The present model for shifting the costs of public colleges to students through tuition hikes is unsustainable, and the rapid growth in spending on research, administration, and employee benefits has done little to improve undergraduate education, said Jane V. Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability. Ms. Wellman points out that the only growth in spending on instruction over the past decade has occurred at the wealthiest four-year public and private institutions. Spending at community colleges, which educate the vast majority of low-income and minority students, has been basically flat.
While colleges have cut costs in recent years in response to the economic downturn, much more money could be saved by eliminating administrative redundancies, she said. And degree production could be improved by making sure that students are not taking unnecessary courses, she added.
One approach that more states are considering is “performance funding"—giving colleges money based on the number of students who graduate rather than the number who enroll. Although many states have adopted some version of this, most involve too little money to encourage real change and instead encourage institutions to game the system, said Nancy Shulock, professor and executive director of the Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy at California State University at Sacramento. Newer ways to reward colleges for performance are emerging in several states—such as Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee—that sets clearer goals for colleges, rewards progress on those goals, and involves an amount of money that makes it worth the effort to make sure more students graduate, she said.
Quality Question
But improving the graduation rate will mean little if institutions can’t ensure the quality of their degrees, said Mark D. Milliron, deputy director of postsecondary improvement for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has taken an active role in efforts to improve college attainment. To maintain and even improve the quality of a degree with fewer resources, institutions must learn to use technology in ways that are common in other parts of daily life but largely ignored in academe, such as interactive video games, Mr. Milliron said.
Colleges have also been too slow in using data on educational performance to improve education, filtering it through a lengthy process that may not be complete until the students are gone. “We’re spending all our effort on getting scorecards to trustees and legislators,” he said.
Instead, said Mr. Milliron, students are asking: “Can you use information about me to help me?”
In addition to using data to give students more immediate feedback about their classroom performance, colleges are going to have to start using online learning more effectively, tapping the increasing amount of open-source material available on the Internet. Colleges are giving “a lot of lip service to blended learning,” which uses both online and face-to-face instruction, Mr. Milliron said.
But a more effective way, he added, is to determine what works best online and what works best in the classroom.
