<p>"How greed, incompetence, and neglect led to bad decisions"</p>
<p>The <em>Chronicle of Higher Education</em> suggests some causes for the current financial woes, causes that go beyond the stock market decline.</p>
<p>"Scores of college presidents have written open letters that describe dire finances and make the case for an era of belt-tightening. But missing in many of those messages are explanations of how colleges landed in their predicaments, and who is to blame.</p>
<p>"The Chronicle came up with 13 common mistakes that have put many colleges in the fix they're in."</p>
<p>Most of the points made in the summary are not very surprising, but this one caught my eye.</p>
<p>"12. Overcommitted Their Budgets</p>
<p>"Experts say the most serious mistake colleges made was to commit almost every dollar of their projected income to capital and operating expenses. Institutions that made overly optimistic building plans and other commitments are much likelier to be laying off employees or slashing budgets now."</p>
<p>I'm wondering which of the conditions identified in the article are most likely to change. Absent-minded trustees are, we can hope, a thing of the past. Some of the other issues look complicated and not easy to resolve, especially when the problems are embedded in campus culture or emerge from long-time practices.</p>
<p>Many of us on college faculty are very worried about the accountability issue, because we see how this has transformed K-12 education, and not necessarily for the better. More administrative and less instructor control about what goes on in the classroom. More teaching toward the test. </p>
<p>And as for these assessment tests, of course they are designed to produce some number that is supposed to assess how well you have been educated. </p>
<p>Already this is happening at my public institution, where syllabuses now have to be approved by the provost's office, where our syllabuses are now geared towards the material that will be on the assessment exam, and where instructors have less control over what kinds of material they will present in class because of this.</p>
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The lack of agreement on accountability reporting is particularly damning.
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<p>I do not remember exactly what was in the Commission on the Future of Higher Education proposals, but I do recall being skeptical at the time of a lot of their thinking.</p>
<p>From the article:</p>
<p>"College lobbyists eventually succeeded in killing the commission's proposal to develop a national system to track the progress of each student in the country."</p>
<p>Good. My children do not need to be in a database where they are being "tracked," whatever that means. The privacy issues there look pretty serious.</p>
<p>"They also resisted efforts to make the accreditation process more open and to establish a consumer-friendly database that would allow parents, students, and policy makers to compare institutions. Instead, the higher-education associations decided to build their own online tools except they couldn't agree on a model. So the public colleges created one system, and the private institutions another."</p>
<p>It would have been nice if the two accountability websites had been linked in the article. What are these tools mentioned here? And why would this division occur between public and private schools? What elements of their institutional self-interest caused this lack of agreement on an accountability model?</p>
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Many of us on college faculty are very worried about the accountability issue, because we see how this has transformed K-12 education, and not necessarily for the better.
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</p>
<p>I think you will have the support of many parents who would not like to see a No-Child-Left-Behind style model imposed at the college level, although I'm not sure what parents or the general public can do about it. Suggestions?</p>