Chronicle of Higher Education
Pondering Higher-Education Accountability
July 2, 2009, 5:59 pm
By Kevin Carey
Let’s say you’re a governor or a legislator or a member of Congress or you run a large charitable foundation or you’re just generally interested in American higher education, and you have some kind of agenda or goal you want to pursue. Maybe you’re concerned about access for low-income students. Maybe you want graduation rates to be higher. Maybe you wish more people were getting degrees in math and science. Or something else entirely. Whatever it is, you wish things were different, that colleges and universities would collectively be more focused and diligent and effective at pursuing whatever goal you care about most. What should you do?
You could write a manifesto or letter to the editor generally exhorting the higher education sector to improve. “This is important!” you would say. “Our future depends on it!” But I think you’d be disappointed. Things are the way they are for a reason. Simple appeals to the better angels of our nature flatter the appealer, but they tend not to change the world all by themselves.
Alternatively, you could be heavy-handed and pursue an aggressive regulatory strategy. If colleges aren’t doing something you want them to do, or are doing something you don’t want them to do, work the political process and pass a law to make them change, whether they like it or not. This path will also disappoint, I think. First because it’s hard to accomplish — colleges and universities are famously good at working the political system, particularly when they’re playing defense — and second because it’s inappropriate. American higher education is decentralized and diverse and that’s been a winning combination for a long time. The government isn’t nearly smart enough to successfully tell thousands of institutions with distinct missions and