I ended my service as a member of Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of American Higher Education on the phone from Bangkok, formally assenting to sign “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education,” the commission’s report. Only in retrospect have I understood just how fitting that conclusion was for a grand adventure that ended with little more than a whimper.
In the final arguments over the text of that report—arguments that often pitted the commission’s higher-education members against its chairman, Charles Miller, what had come to matter most was the tone rather than the truly modest substance of our conclusions. Each succeeding draft had become more sanitized, more tolerant of ambiguity, more ready to admit a diversity of opinion. In the end we produced a report with too many recommendations, too many words, and too many distracting sidebars to persuade colleges and universities to do much of anything differently.
What Miller had wanted was a forceful report, much like “A Nation at Risk,” that would call attention to higher education’s “really bad flaws.” His way forward meant developing a tough set of metrics measuring the outcomes that higher education could not ignore—much as elementary and secondary education could no longer ignore the metrics that No Child Left Behind put in place, first in Texas and later in the nation as a whole. Miller had played an important role in that effort and had taken the lead in getting the University of Texas to develop a similarly tough set of metrics for its campuses. The University of Texas Board of Regents still lists first among Miller’s accomplishments as board chair the “creation of state-of-the-art higher-education accountability system.”
For Miller the key was a proposed unit-record system on the one hand and, on the other, a test remarkably like the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which he believed could measure what students at a given institution were and were not learning. Both ideas died aborning—the former blocked by Congress, the latter so watered down in the text of the commission’s report as to be unrecognizable.
I originally thought that Miller had lacked a coherent strategy for putting in place what his commission recommended—that he saw as his principal task getting higher education’s attention. The way to do that was to use strong language, forcefully identifying the enterprise’s many flaws and broken parts. I have since understood that I was wrong. Miller had entered the fray with a Plan B that, in the end, would provide the Spellings Commission’s most lasting and perhaps its only impact on American higher education.
Plan B was the federalization of the process by which colleges and universities are accredited and their students become eligible for federal student-aid programs. During the life of the commission, I was often perplexed by Miller’s disparaging of that process. For most colleges, accreditation is a once-every-10-years exercise that seldom if ever touches the sinews of the institution. In “A Test of Leadership,” the commission described accreditation as a “large and complex public-private system of federal, state, and private regulators, [that] has significant shortcomings. ... [D]espite increased attention by accreditors to learning assessments, they continue to play largely an internal role. Accreditation reviews are typically kept private, and those that are made public still focus on process reviews more than bottom-line results for learning or costs.”
But nowhere in our final report, nor in any of the informal conversations in which I engaged as a commissioner, do I recall talking about accreditation as a federal lever for regulating higher education.
That, however, was Miller’s Plan B. Most of us, I think, were surprised by the announcement by the Department of Education following our last meeting that the federal negotiated rule-making process by which accrediting agencies were certified would henceforth “examine whether any proposals made by the higher-education commission can be put in place through federal regulation.” That November, Secretary Spellings made explicit what her and Miller’s Plan B option entailed. The headline in The Chronicle told the tale: “Spellings Wants to Use Accreditation as a Cudgel.”
By then it was clear that neither the commission nor our report would spark a general reform of higher education. What was left to the secretary was a largely untried strategy of using the Department of Education’s suzerainty over the accreditation process to establish the specific criteria for determining whether individual institutions were providing a higher education of sufficient quality to enable their students to participate in the federal government’s student-aid programs.
In the end, it was a strongly worded letter from Senator Lamar Alexander—a former U.S. secretary of education, former governor, former president of the University of Tennessee—that put the kibosh on this first attempt to put into effect what I have come to think of as the Plan B option. It was Congress, and not the department, the senator reminded the secretary, that had both the authority and the responsibility for regulating higher education.
Then the Democrats took control of the Department of Education, with different ideas and a different set of targets—principally for-profit colleges and universities—but with a similar willingness to experiment with federalized processes in order to change higher education.
Instead of metrics for measuring educational quality, two quite different tasks—establishing a standard for determining how much graduates needed to earn to say their educations yielded “gainful employment,” and defining the credit hour—became the focus of the department’s rule-making. And where Miller and Spellings had come up short, Robert Shireman, then-deputy undersecretary of education, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan succeeded, putting in place a regulatory environment that provides the department with a broad role in determining what kinds of higher education are eligible for the federal government’s $100-billion-plus investment in student financial aid.
Almost immediately, accreditation was changed. Both irritated and alarmed, the accrediting agencies have done what bureaucracies under attack always do—they have stiffened, making their rules and procedures more formulaic, their dealings with the institutions they are responsible for accrediting more formal and by-the-book, and the documentation of each of the steps they had taken to comply with the department’s new standards and criteria more precise and detailed. For a college or university now up for reaccreditation, the safe way forward is to treat the process as what it has become: an audit in which it is best to volunteer as little as possible.
I now better understand the unintended irony of Miller’s oft-repeated charge that accreditation has stifled innovation.
Among the myriad forces stifling innovation across higher education, it is actually his and Margaret Spellings’s creation of an unprecedented and hence untried federal regulatory process that today helps discourage all but the most foolhardy colleges from trying anything different. It was not, to be sure, what they intended, but unfortunately it is what we got.
