As Congress looks to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan Monday outlined the department’s intent to shift the focus in higher education to addressing issues around student success.
At a panel discussion hosted at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Duncan said that the focus on student success is “not just an economic imperative, but a moral necessity.”
“Ensuring the opportunity of college success for all students who are willing to work hard is a core tenet of the American covenant,” he said. “Unfortunately, for millions of … students, our higher education system isn’t delivering what they need, or deserve. As a nation, we can change that—and we must.”
“The challenge we face is easy to articulate, if not to solve. Today, the critical ticket to the middle class is a degree. … The simple fact is every hardworking student in this country must have a real opportunity to achieve a meaningful, affordable degree. America’s prosperity, our democracy and our identity as the land of opportunity and social mobility depend on it. … The idea for the past century that public education only goes from kindergarten to high school is over,” said Duncan, saying education must begin much earlier—in preschool—and continues through to ensuring post-secondary success.
Duncan acknowledged the skyrocketing cost of higher education, saying “the need is urgent to rein in the cost,” but said that more needs to be done to combat the inaccessibility of a degree for many families and emphasized the critical need for the conversation to not be limited to the discussion of college affordability.
“If we confine the discussion to cost and debt, we will have failed. Because we will have only found better ways to pay for a system that fails far too many of our students,” he said. “We must shift incentives at every level to focus on student success, not just access. When students win, everyone wins.”
In addition to affordability, Duncan said there are two other factors higher education administrators need to consider to help promote student success: “focusing much more on outcomes and … driving desperately needed innovation.”
