Straight Talk from a Friend

Lamar Alexander is a friend of American higher education. So when he spoke earlier in the week about the need for higher education to communicate more clearly to its various constituencies, the representatives of higher education should listen. Alexander was speaking to two groups including the coordinating group of accreditation in the country. Over the last decade Congress has added a raft of new requirements for higher education designed to improve "accountability." The gist of all of these requirements is to produce some standardized information about the thousands of institutions - the first came with the University and College Accountability Network(UCAN) (which I helped to design) and the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA). In my opinion the next step that needs to be taken is to promote some standardized definitions about financial issues which can be made available in the same way that the student information in UCAN and VSA has been made available.

Alexander told the group “Congress simply doesn’t understand the importance of autonomy, excellence and choice, and the higher education community hasn’t bothered to explain it in plain English to members who need to hear it and understand it. The genius of our system is it is a marketplace of 6,000 autonomous institutions.”

What he did not say, and could be added, is that if higher education does not produce these information sheets, Members of Congress certainly will - and their definitions are always going to be worse that that which could be produced by higher education - but there are still some people in the higher education community who argue that institutions are so unique that standardized data is a bad idea. That, of course, is nonsense. What Senator Alexander said was not.