Almost a year after assuming leadership, the administration of Barack Obama has taken on enormous tasks in confronting the recession that has gripped the U.S. economy. Americans have watched tentatively as the president has extended federal powers into handling corporate bailouts, overseeing the rehabilitation of banks and General Motors, laying the groundwork for reshaping national energy and climate change policy, and leading the charge for national health care reform.
Experts say the administration’s ambitious approach to federal intervention and national policy reforms has proven no less determined in what it has prescribed for American higher education. Last February, Obama announced to a joint session of Congress that “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” Introducing a national community college initiative this past July, Obama invoked the lofty legacy of federal involvement in U.S. higher education.
“Time and again, when we have placed our bet for the future on education, we have prospered as a result…. That is what happened when President (Abraham) Lincoln signed into law legislation creating the land grant colleges, which not only transformed higher education but also our economy. That is what took place when President (Franklin) Roosevelt signed the GI Bill, which helped educate a generation – and usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity,” Obama told an audience at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich., during the announcement of the American Graduation Initiative.
Scholars, academic administrators and higher education policy officials have largely interpreted the administration’s pronouncements, more than $100 billion in education stimulus funding and the community college-focused American Graduation Initiative, as markers of a significant shift in federal higher education policy and the making of a credible push for an expanded federal role in American higher education. It’s also significant that the “Race to the Top” initiative, the administration’s K-12 education reform effort, focuses on school districts getting more students prepared for college, experts note.
“The federal role has been traditionally to support economic access through need-based student aid, through loans and grants, and through some categorical programs. But it’s not had a policy role, particularly around the agenda of (college) completion and increasing overall attainment,” says Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability.
“They’re talking about more access, more degree completion. It’s a tremendously important extension of where the federal government has been historically.”
Adds Dr. Michael McPherson, president of the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation and co-author of Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities, “Shifting the goal to not just getting in, but getting through, or ‘crossing the finish line’ does suggest some adjustments in how education programs will work.”
