WASHINGTON — Despite the largeness of the audience they addressed this week at the NAICU annual meeting, all of the fresh-faced Congressional staffers and Obama Administration officials who spoke about federal efforts to hold colleges accountable declared their remarks “off-the-record.”
But to the extent that you can trust that a room full of college presidents and other senior administrators were listening intently, you can still get a good sense of where these young politicos were coming from — or at least where their “bosses” were coming from — based on the responses from the attendees, including some who indicated they were former Congressional staffers themselves.
“As I listen to you and listen to your agenda, I’m beginning to hear a centralizing, top down force out of the concern that we all share for affordability, for student success, for graduation rates, for giving students the ability to thrive in their lives after they arrive (on campus),” Marlboro College President Ellen McCulloch-Lovell told the speakers during the Q-and-A session of the panel talk, titled, “Holding Colleges Accountable: A View from Key Capitol Hill and Administration Staff.”
McCulloch-Lovell said the Congressional staffers spoke as if “we have to solve a problem” in higher education.
She was joined in her criticism by C. Todd Jones, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Ohio, who noted how most of the student loan defaults and lackluster completion rates the staffers lamented were “primarily and disproportionately” concentrated among for-profit colleges, not the private nonprofits that were represented at the annual meeting of NAICU, an acronym for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.
Statistics support that view.
According to “The Condition of Education,” an online resource maintained by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, the six-year graduation rate at private nonprofit institutions was 65 percent, compared with 56 percent at public institutions and 28 percent at private for-profit institutions.
