Advocate Online

In the Know

Higher Education Commission

The final report of the Spellings Commission, adopted in August, is short on constructive solutions to the challenges facing higher education.

After a year of meetings and hearings, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education scheduled the release of its report for September 26.

The commission's charge was to explore strategies for improving accessibility, affordability, quality, and accountability in the U.S. higher education system. Unfortunately, while the report echoes many noble and critical goals long sought by NEA and other education advocates, its recommendations for achieving those goals are largely a grab bag of non-solutions, self-contradiction, pre-doomed wish lists that run contrary to Administration education funding policy, and wrong-headed indictments of colleges and universities.

In the areas of access and affordability, the commission laudably recommended expanding Pell grants, but declined to offer any realistic assessment of the seismic shift in funding policy necessary to substantively reduce the economic barriers to higher education faced by lower- and middle-income families. (Between 1990 and 2004, unmet financial need for families earning less than $34,000 a year grew by 80 percent, while families earning in the top 25 percent saw financial aid packages triple.) Instead, the commission wandered far from the money trail to tout a simplified financial aid form as a serious step toward improved access.

On education “quality,” the commission wrote that a “lack of innovation on college campuses is at least partially attributable to the heavy regulatory burden with which post-secondary institutions must contend.” The commission’s solution: expanded use of surveys and standardized tests, i.e. more “regulatory burden.”

The commission hopes the report will serve as the starting point for a broad public dialogue on the future of higher education. Ironically, that dialogue could have begun with the advent of the commission itself if it had practiced its own commitment to transparency and access.

Not only were representatives of NEA and other faculty associations excluded from membership on the commission, but the commission took great pains to keep itself behind closed doors, even circumventing open meeting laws to ensure its deliberations were conducted in a vacuum. For a copy of the commission report, visit www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/ hiedfuture/index.html.