Feeling each other's pain

From today's Inside Higher Ed, reporting on the OECD's biennial higher ed conference.

The financial cutbacks for publicly supported colleges come even as government leaders...ask increasingly more of their postsecondary institutions in terms of expanding access for students, driving economic growth, and contributing to their countries’ social and cultural development.

Those ever-growing demands on colleges and universities are prompting politicians in many places to ask harder questions about postsecondary...productivity, quality, and performance. OECD officials have in recent years taken to talking about governments doing their “steering” of higher education “at a distance....I wonder whether that distance may be getting a little bit shorter.”

That idea is certainly likely to resonate with college officials in the United States, who have watched the last two federal government administrations aggressively reconsider higher education’s system of peer-reviewed quality assurance and, now, craft a brand-new mechanism for assessing the extent to which vocational programs prepare their students for jobs.

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Such searching for new metrics is also taking place in countries like Denmark, where government leaders have typically embraced “output-oriented numbers” such as the production of graduates to hold universities accountable....” Roos said that he is seeking to prod the conversation in a direction that would better measure how graduates of institutions like his contribute to society - such as “how much our students pay in taxes."

Yojana Sharma, a London-based writer on higher education, said she believed that institutions would (or at least should) increasingly be judged by clearer measures of what institutions contribute to their graduates. “We need to be capturing what it is that adds value to those students, for that really is the value of universities as well,” she said. “We have all these students coming off a conveyor belt with ‘B.A.’ stamped on their heads, and what really distinguishes them from each other?”

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Shinichi Yamamoto, of Hiroshima University's Research Institute on Higher Education, echoed that call, saying that in an increasingly knowledge-based society in which universities are expected “to play a more important role, why should we accept the reality” that higher education should make do with less? “Do we need to do more to appeal to the importance of higher education?” Why is our voice so small? he wondered.

Aims McGuinness, senior associate with the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, said the answer to that question is attributable in part to the lack of sophistication of political leaders in many countries, where the audience for that message “is more like a parade than a fixed entity.” Significant turnover and short-term political thinking require college leaders to make their arguments to “people who don’t have a clue about a long-term agenda” for economic and social development.

But higher education leaders themselves are also responsible because too often they fail to show how their institutions are “really connected with the quality of life and long-term economy” in their states, regions or countries. Cash-strapped colleges are “ignoring access in their own area in search of paying students elsewhere,” he said. That, together with strategies at research-intensive institutions that too often focus on interests other than their communities’ needs, may make politicians think, “Why would you put the money down that kind of enterprise?” McGuinness said.

And now, for the rest of the story...