In an environment where lawmakers and the public at large are raising tough questions about the quality of higher education, college trustees are being pressed to apply the same type of scrutiny to their institutions.
Assembled at the annual meeting of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges here on Monday, college trustees wrestled with their dual roles as the biggest cheerleaders and harshest skeptics of the institutions they serve. David W. Miles, president of the Iowa Board of Regents and a participant on a panel about governance challenges, suggested college boards will gain credibility only if “no one is asking harder questions of our institutions than we are.”
Mr. Miles’s suggestion mirrors a statement issued on Monday by the governing-boards association. Boards should be demanding more information about student-learning outcomes at their colleges, while showing deference to faculty expertise in shaping curricula and creating the tools to assess educational quality, the statement reads.
The statement follows a 2010 association survey of board engagement, which found that 62 percent of trustees thought their boards spent insufficient time discussing student-learning outcomes. Without concrete data showing student achievement, such as graduation rates and passage rates for professional examinations, trustees will be unable to respond to increasing questions about the true value of degrees their colleges award, speakers here said.
“The institution of higher education has been measured so long by the inputs and not by the outputs,” Mr. Miles said.
“The conversation,” he added, “should be about what do you want these institutions to accomplish for the state.”
Board members have an important role to play in ensuring that colleges are delivering high-quality programs and degrees, but trustees should not dictate course offerings or design metrics to determine whether students are meeting objectives, said Susan Whealler Johnston, the association’s executive vice president. It is very much within a board’s purview, however, to ask, “How do we know that we do a good job?” Ms. Johnston said.
The association has long stated that educational quality is a matter of board concern, but the organization’s new statement on the subject comes after years of growing scrutiny about the value of higher education. Congressional inquiries, along with books that have been critical of the academic rigor of American higher education, have placed colleges on the defensive.
As several panelists noted, there is still considerable disagreement about how colleges should even go about determining their effectiveness in preparing students for their postcollege lives and careers.
“This is a field that hasn’t grown up yet. We’re still having a lot of fistfights in the schoolyard on it,” said Suzanne Woolsey, chair of the Colorado College Board of Trustees and a trustee at the California Institute of Technology.
While there is no doubt that colleges will need to transform to better educate students at a time of diminishing resources, board members should also understand that transformation takes time in academe, said Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California system. An impatient rush by regents to make changes without sufficient facts can backfire, he said.
“You shouldn’t ride in on a white horse and say, I know everything about this university,” Mr. Yudof said.
