No Young Adult Left Behind--Some of the Players

Outside pressures are mounting, and colleges are being reduced to metrics. 

People have always had opinions about education. As time progressed, so did the organization of those opinions. You form a group, you create a crisis (or magnify a small one), and you call for change.  This change usually takes the form of other people doing what you want.
For years, corporate interests (like Pearson Higher Education--mentioned here off-hand) have worked to infiltrate higher education from the lower grades. Today they are joined by "reformers" that also gain a fair amount of wealth through their efforts. This has been slowly gaining for two or three decades, but the pace has seen an uptick.
In 2011, things ignited in the “reform” camp when Academically Adrift was published.  The book—using a standardized test as its basis—determined that 45% of college students didn’t learn much the first two years…and 36% didn’t learn much in four years.  This set off a flurry of people and groups that called for higher education reform.

This situation tends to follow 2000 and 2001 in “public school education.”  I’m not quite sure how to term the typical elementary school-middle school-high school experience, anymore.  It morphed from K-12 to P-12 to B-12 to B-16 to B-20 to B-80 at one point.  That’s right.  It was the dream of some to follow people from birth to age 80 to determine the worth of their educational experiences.

Outside pressures are mounting, and colleges are being reduced to metrics.  First, it was U.S. News.  Then, accreditation bodies started curriculum mapping and student learning outcomes.  Graduation, retention, and earnings are all becoming public in a database.  Thus, a growing number of institutions are hiring “experts” from outside the campus community.  The Education Advisory Board is one of the biggest players in this market.  EAB does some pretty wonderful things, at times.  Here is a picture of a group exercise at their annual conference.  This kind of exercise does an effective job of showing audience members (and EAB staff) the chief concerns of colleges and universities.

Unfortunately, the exercise is labeled as the application of String Theory to higher education.  That’s right…  You can also download an infographic that offers over 200 best practices for student success.  This begs the following question:

With so many practices labeled as “best,” what does that term even mean to anyone? 

Other groups make their money indirectly. These usually come in the form of think tanks, allegedly under the guise of nobler motives.  Unfortunately, a lot of disinterested people make a lot of money complaining about the work of interested parties. They approach this on two levels--one to satisfy conservatives, the other to satisfy liberals.

Apparently, your tax dollars are being wasted by…by…OK, we’ll start with for-profit colleges—that need to be held “accountable.”  Did you catch that word?  Yep.  Right there.  We need some accountability from these colleges and universities.  After all, these are our tax dollars. It led President Obama to speak of “bang for the buck” when discussing college costs.

Think tanks also are expanding their outreach to include the “inner-city college student” as the new victim of the education system.  I'm not completely opposed to helping poor college students.  For that matter, I'm not excited about wasted tax dollars.  But the same approach that was used to promote public school education reform is being used in higher education. Find the most egregious aspects of something and start beating a drum constantly. Poor kids are getting a hard deal.  We need to change that.  “For-profit sharks” are preying on poor kids. You now have the perfect victimization of a sub-sub group by a sub-sub group of institutions that justifies collective hit of universal victimization at that hands of disinterested parties.

Here’s one saying the current governmental structure is making it impossible on students. 

Here’s another from the same think tank/problem child that set 15% as the minimum graduation standard, as well as the minimum number of poor kids a college has to accept.

Here’s a “humdinger” from another think tank proposing “alternative accreditation” for higher education.
Here’s a brand new set of benchmarking standards  from a group looking to assess social and environmental impact.  Don’t worry, it’s all voluntary.  I’ve heard that before… The company has obviously lifted “business practices” and added higher education as an addendum.

Every four years, the Lumina Foundation comes up with a new plan to increase college graduates to 60% of the U.S. population.  What they come up with is a pile of numbers in the millions and calls to break down the higher education system we have and rebuild it in their image.  For this, they get approximately $1.4 BILLION in donations. The latest iteration of their "strategic plan" was announced with this gem of a quote:

We must move from a system that is centered on institutions and organized around time to one that is centered on students, organized around high-quality learning and focused on closing attainment gaps. In short, we must build a true system of postsecondary learning from the disconnected and fragmented pieces we have now.

It’s not a strategic plan for them, really.  It’s a strategic plan for everybody else.  In four years, they will chastise everybody else for not following their plan. 

And who better to do this than the “experts” at the Lumina Foundation?  After all—they have opinions! In fact, they have 1,400,000,000 of them.

With enough voices, enough times, with enough money behind them--these voices begin to dictate policy.

Now that you have an idea of some of the players, it will be easier for you to see what is happening in education and why it is happening.  That is the next entry of this blog series.