WASHINGTON – Veteran higher education leaders, sparring over whether the U.S. workforce will need to increase its production of college graduates to remain a “world class” economic power, found common ground in urging that universities be held more accountable for providing a high-quality education that prepares students for the labor market. During a live Internet broadcast, the debaters, including United Negro College Fund president and CEO Dr. Michael Lomax and former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings as partners, waged vigorous defenses of their respective positions but found agreement on how higher education’s historic lack of accountability has hindered U.S. college and university productivity.
Hosted by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs this past Friday, debaters considered the resolution: To remain a world class economic power, the U.S. needs more college graduates in the workforce. Lomax and Spellings spoke in favor of the resolution. Dr. Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and an economics professor at Ohio University, and George Leef, director of research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education in Raleigh, N.C., argued against the resolution.
“One of the things we failed to ask of higher education is some accountability,” Spellings said.
Universities need to “get a handle on costs, productivity, efficiency and quality—and we are not going to do any of those things without information,” she said, urging that universities begin publishing their graduation rates. Serving as U.S. Education Secretary from 2005 to 2009, Spellings now leads a public policy consulting firm in Washington
“We don’t ask, ‘What did you know when you got here?’ and we don’t measure how much you learned; the degree is a proxy for that,” Lomax said. “I think it is up to government to hold them to a standard, and part of that standard should be around persistence and completion and graduation.”
Lomax formerly served as president of Dillard University and taught literature at Morehouse College, Spelman College and the University of Georgia.
“We don’t measure them,” Vedder said. “How do we know what students at the University of Virginia knew last year, compared with [what they knew] 10 years ago or 20 years ago? We don’t know.”
