Uncertainty Greets Report on Colleges by U.S. Panel

When the Commission on the Future of Higher Education met for the first time last fall, the U.S. secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, made it clear that she envisioned a historic role for her panel. She placed the panel’s work in the context of the Morrill Act, which created land-grant colleges, and the GI Bill of Rights, which provided scholarships to service members returning from World War II.

Ten months later, at the commission’s final meeting, one of its members, a former North Carolina governor, James B. Hunt Jr., proclaimed its report “one of the most important reports in the educational and economic history of our country, if we act on it.”

Whether the document ultimately becomes a landmark or a footnote in higher-education history depends on those last five words. Already the Bush administration has announced that it will take up some of the recommendations as part of a broader rule-making agenda scheduled for the fall. But whether Congress, the states, and colleges will embrace the recommendations remains to be seen.

Many observers say it would be foolish for institutions to ignore the report, which warns of the perils of complacency and calls for sweeping changes in American higher education.

“This report was put forth in the spirit of starting a conversation,” said David W. Breneman, a university professor and dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. “If higher-education institutions turn their back on this, the feds could respond by trying to force this down their throats.”

Initial Anxieties

When Ms. Spellings announced that she had created a commission to craft a “comprehensive national strategy” for higher education, reactions ranged from doubt to suspicion. Skeptics questioned whether a group made up of both business and college leaders could possibly reach agreement on a long-term vision for higher education in just under a year; others asked why the administration had not formed the panel four years earlier, before Congress took up legislation to reauthorize, or renew, the Higher Education Act, the major law governing federal student aid.

Ms. Spellings replied that the administration was not seeking to shape the reauthorization process, but, rather, to take a “big picture” look at higher education’s future. “Reauthorization deals with workaday meat-and-potatoes issues,” she said at the panel’s first meeting here last October. “This group is about the 10- to 20-year horizon.”

But some college lobbyists still wondered why an administration that had shown little interest in higher education during its first term was suddenly so concerned with its future. Some speculated that the administration was trying to divert attention from its unpopular No Child Left Behind Act, the 2002 law that imposed testing on the nation’s elementary and secondary schools; others suspected that it was seeking to extend that law’s reach into the college classroom.

To the suspicious, the secretary’s choice of a commission chairman seemed proof of a plot to institute standardized testing at colleges. Charles Miller, a millionaire investor and close friend of both Ms. Spellings and President Bush, was best known for devising a Texas public-school accountability system that became the model for No Child Left Behind. He was also associated with accountability testing at the University of Texas System, where he led the Board of Regents from 2001 to 2004.

At first, the blunt Mr. Miller said little to allay such anxieties. In interviews he quipped that his middle name was “accountability,” and at a meeting in December in Nashville, he hinted that the commission was considering requiring colleges to test their students as a condition of receiving federal financial aid or accreditation. “We’re looking for leverage points,” he told reporters after the meeting. “Funding is one, accreditation is another.”

But after at least two commissioners — Charlene R. Nunley, president of Montgomery College, and Robert M. Zemsky, chairman of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania — wrote to him to express their concerns with standardized testing, he sent an e-mail message reassuring the panel that he would not seek mandatory testing of college students. “There is no movement, no intent, no expectation of a mandated test at the federal level,” he wrote in a March message titled “Standardized Anxiety.”

Meanwhile, some groups complained that the commission included five corporate executives but only three professors and no students. They worried that the business leaders would meddle in colleges’ curricula, reshaping courses to meet their work-force needs.

A Report Evolves

In that atmosphere of fear and mistrust, the commission began its work, with the meeting here in October. Between then and April, it held six meetings and public hearings across the country.

To inform the continuing discussion, Mr. Miller asked his staff and several paid and unpaid consultants to draft fifteen “issue papers” on such topics as accreditation, cost, adult learners, and higher-education regulation. In April the panel took its first tentative steps toward drafting a report, holding a series of votes to identify members’ top five goals for higher education.

But when the commission met a month later in Washington to begin what Mr. Miller called “the sausage-making phase,” it became immediately clear that it was going to be difficult for the panel to coalesce around a final report. Faced with hundreds of potential recommendations, the panel members became mired in minutiae, struggling even to define what they meant by “affordability” and “access.”

Meanwhile, a handful of commissioners were becoming increasingly uneasy with the prominent role that consultants were playing in the commission’s work.

At the April meeting in Indianapolis, those panel members had confronted Mr. Miller with their concerns. Now some of those same commissioners were worried that the report would reflect the consultants’ views and not their own.

For some, those fears materialized in late June, when Mr. Miller circulated a partial draft report written by commission staff members and a consultant, Ben Wildavsky, former editor of U.S. News and World Report’s annual college rankings.

In addition, some members were outraged with the report’s tone, describing it as hostile, confrontational, and even nasty. They said the report should begin with higher-education’s strengths, rather than its weaknesses.

Not all the commissioners were unhappy with the report, however. Richard K. Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University, and Sara Martinez Tucker, president and chief executive of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, described the report, respectively, as a “good starting point” and “remarkably complete.”

With the cracks in the commission beginning to show, some members feared that the panel was on the verge of splintering. “I’m very concerned for this commission right now,” said Ms. Tucker in an interview after the first draft was released to the public. “I’m really worried about all of us staying together through this entire process.”

But when members emerged from a closed-door meeting here two days later, Ms. Tucker was feeling more optimistic. She and other commissioners described the meeting as cordial and constructive, and said members had reached consensus on many of the key issues facing the panel.

Two weeks later, commission staff released a revised draft report that omitted some of the most stinging criticisms of higher education and included a new section on its economic and social benefits.

As the commission headed toward a vote on August 10, several members signaled that they would support the final report. The one known holdout was David Ward, who as president of higher-education’s umbrella lobbying organization, the American Council on Education, was in the awkward position of having to balance his members’ competing interests. He also had to contend with the fact that his refusal to sign the report could lend credence to the chairman’s claim that higher education was resistant to change.

In the end, Mr. Ward left his name off the report. He said it projected a “false sense of crisis” and blamed higher education for problems with multiple origins. He also said it failed to recognize the diversity of higher education and seemed to suggest a “one size fits all” approach to improving it.

“Change in higher education is needed, but we need to get it right and above all do no harm,” he said in a written statement circulated at the meeting. “I believe I can be more effective in this continuing dialogue if I am free to contest some aspects of this report.”

Mr. Zemsky, who voted for the report, said he sympathized with Mr. Ward’s concerns. He argued that by focusing on higher education’s flaws — particularly in the early versions of the report — the commission had alienated academe.

“You don’t get people moving in your revolution by first telling them that they are on the wrong side of good,” he said. “There are a lot of people out there who no longer believe in us.”

Disappointment and Relief

Mr. Ward’s decision came as a disappointment to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the only one of the “big six” higher-education associations that did not release a statement criticizing the report. The association’s president, Constantine W. Curris, supports the commission’s call for increased accountability through assessment, and was pleased that the report endorsed the creation of a so-called unit-record system to track individual students’ educational progress.

Mr. Curris, along with M. Peter McPherson, president of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, has responded to the report’s call for testing by urging his member institutions to develop a voluntary approach to assessment.

Edward M. Elmendorf, senior vice president for government relations and policy analysis at Mr. Curris’s association, said he could not see how signing the report would have prevented Mr. Ward from contesting its recommendations going forward. In an e-mail message, he contrasted Mr. Ward’s decision to dissociate himself with the report with Mr. Curris’s efforts to engage it, saying “Real leadership is facing your apprehensions and working through them, not walking away.”

But Mr. Ward’s refusal to sign the report was welcomed by many college presidents, particularly those at private institutions. While the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities did not pressure Mr. Ward to reject the report, according to David L. Warren, the association’s president, the group made its concerns clear at commission meetings and at the monthly meetings of Washington’s higher-education lobbyists.

From the start, Mr. Warren has vigorously opposed the creation of a national unit-record system, calling it “chilling” and “Orwellian,” and has warned that dismantling the federal student-aid system, as the commission proposes, could lead to an overall reduction in federal student aid.

Reaction to the report from the other three major lobbying groups has been mixed. Robert M. Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities, offered the most comprehensive critique, submitting a seven-and-a-half-page letter outlining his concerns. In it, he complains that the report fails to differentiate among the many types of institutions, neglects graduate and professional education, ignores many of the factors contributing to rising college costs, and overlooks the experimentation and change already taking place on college campuses.

Mr. McPherson, of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, raised many of the same concerns in his letter to the commission. He also urged the commission to make student assessment voluntary, rather than state imposed, as the report had suggested. The commission responded at the 11th hour by quietly stripping from the final report a clause that called on states to require testing.

And the American Association of Community Colleges said in a written statement that while the report, “on balance,” is positive for higher education, it “does not adequately address the role that state and local funding ... play in the health of community colleges.”

Given their many reservations about the report, some college lobbyists privately expressed hope that its recommendations would be forgotten as the election season heats up.

But Ms. Spellings, who has yet to officially receive the report, has already made it clear that she does not intend to let her commission’s work collect dust.

Just over a week after the commission voted to approve the final report, she announced that her agency would hold a series of regional public hearings starting in September to discuss how it might enact some of the commission’s recommendations administratively. Following the hearings, the department would begin a negotiated rule-making process to carry out the commission’s recommendations as well as changes contained in a deficit-reduction bill that cleared Congress last February.

The swiftness of the secretary’s response took some college lobbyists by surprise. They said the administration’s announcement, which appeared in the August 18 edition of the Federal Register, signaled that the secretary did not want to lose any momentum for change created by the commission’s deliberations.

So far, the administration has given few clues about which recommendations it might consider as part of the negotiated rule making — a process by which federal agencies work with affected parties as regulations are drafted.

The Federal Register notice says only that the rule making will act on “any recommendations for reducing regulatory burden” or “improving the administration of” federal student-aid programs. That could include the commission’s recommendation that the administration conduct a “comprehensive review of financial-aid regulations” and shorten the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, which the government uses to assess a student’s financial need.

Still, there are significant limits to what the administration can accomplish through regulation, since Congress exercises considerable control over the federal student-aid system. The department could not, for example, “eliminate federal financial-aid regulations that differentiate between traditional semesters and nonstandard terms,” as the report proposes and for-profit colleges have requested, nor could it decide to analyze student need “through a simple criterion such as family income,” another commission suggestion. Any substantial restructuring of the federal student-aid system would also require legislation.

“They may be able to tweak around the margins, but most of these recommendations would require Congressional action,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “The complexity of the Fafsa is a Congressional creature.”

Some fear that the administration may also use the rule making to carry out plans that have proved unpopular with federal lawmakers — such as the creation of the unit-record system. The department first proposed such a system in 2004, but it was roundly rejected by members of Congress from both political parties.

“My suspicion is that they are going to try use this report as an excuse to try and implement a whole bunch of ideas that the administration liked to begin with,” said Neal P. McCluskey, an education-policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “Now they can say, We’re doing what the commission asked us to do.”

An Education Department official denied that the agency was using the rule making to circumvent Congress.

“If we were trying to go the back-door route we would never enter into negotiated rule making,” said the official, who did not want to be identified because Ms. Spellings has yet to receive the report. “This is a very public, open, transparent process.”

Congressional Response

Congress, meanwhile, has not yet responded to the report. An aide to Sen. Michael B. Enzi, chairman of the Senate education committee, said the Wyoming Republican had not received the final report, but had reviewed draft versions and did not plan to file new legislation to put in place the report’s recommendations. However, he said that the chairman may try to attach some of the recommendations to the pending Higher Education Reauthorization bill when it comes to the Senate floor for a vote.

“Our focus now is getting the reauthorization bill out of the committee and on to the floor,” the aide said.

A spokesman for Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, the California Republican who heads the U.S. House of Representatives’ education panel, said it would be inappropriate to comment until after the report was formally submitted to Ms. Spellings in mid-to late September.

But some observers are already raising doubts about how much traction the report will get in Congress, given that the reauthorization bill — the most likely vehicle for its recommendations — has been stalled for months and is unlikely to advance before the November elections.

Others say budgetary constraints make it unlikely that lawmakers will be able to support the substantial spending increases that the report proposes. Along with a significant increase in need-based aid, the report calls for an expansion of the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education; more money for education in mathematics, science, and engineering; “federal support” for early intervention efforts; and incentives to develop accountability systems.

Even the commission’s own chairman has said he would not necessarily look to Congress to solve higher education’s problems.

“I wouldn’t run to Congress and say, What do you do with this?” Mr. Miller said. “We need to have a national debate first — and not in Congress. If we don’t engage the public, I don’t think we’ll come up with the right solutions.”

Ultimately, however, the responsibility for many of the recommendations lies with institutions themselves. And it is colleges, some say, that will determine the success or failure of the report.

“The degree to which this report makes a difference is the degree to which the higher-education community takes it up,” said Travis J. Reindl, director of state-policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. “If we ignore it or set it aside, it will be just another eloquent statement that goes in the dustbin. We have to take ownership for the pieces that are ours.”

http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 53, Issue 2, Page A1