WASHINGTON – In a time of polarization when it may seem that Democrats and Republicans seldom agree, a bipartisan panel came together Monday at the American Enterprise Institute to talk about a shared conclusion: Taxpayers and students should be armed with more information to measure the success of America’s higher learning institutions.
Panelists spent an hour discussing complex questions: What metrics accurately measure success? What should happen to schools that enroll at-risk students but fail to graduate them, or schools that consistently don’t lead to better-paying jobs? And what role should federal policy play?
The panel – co-hosted by think tanks AEI and Third Way – was titled “Promoting accountability in higher education: Finding common ground.” It included panelists Dr. Frederick M. Hess, resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI; Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy and politics at Third Way; Dr. Sandy Baum, professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College and a nonresident fellow at the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute; and Emily Slack, senior advisor in the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education.
The discussion stemmed from a report by a bipartisan group of higher education experts, assembled by AEI and Third Way, about where Democrats and Republicans can converge on higher education policy. The report was released against the backdrop of Congress working to decide what issues to address in the latest reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the legislation governing higher education programs and federal financial aid.
Hess said the goal of the report – and the discussion that followed – was to get scholars on the right and the left “away from the lights, away from the microphones” in order to “see when we just sit down and talk to each other, where can we find that we’ve got some agreements, and where we disagree, can we try to clarify so we understand exactly what we’re disagreeing about?”
One point of consensus was that universities can’t just be measured by the diversity of their incoming classes. Erickson emphasized that it’s also important to track whether universities are giving underprivileged students the support they need to graduate, along with degrees that earn them enough to pay off their student loans.
“We’ve always focused on access, and access is a good thing – we should have access – and yet we haven’t been focusing on after students have enrolled,” she said.
