Public Statements

Statement on Draft Report from Secretary Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education

June 27, 2006

The draft report released yesterday by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education echoes several themes and phrases from various AAC&U writings on liberal education, including our 2002 report Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College. Unfortunately, the authors of this draft seem to have missed the central and constructive point of AAC&U’s ongoing work to develop practices and programs that better prepare ALL college students for the new challenges of an interdependent and innovation-fueled world.

Commission staff members have emphasized the problems while ignoring the many ways that colleges and universities across the country are implementing new solutions to these problems.

Through the Greater Expectations initiative, AAC&U—working in concert since 2000 with hundreds of colleges, community colleges, universities, and state systems—has both urged and provided a clear description of the most important aims and outcomes of college learning in the 21st century. AAC&U shared this description with the Commission in a letter sent March 14, 2006.

In addition, Greater Expectations and other partner projects such as the DEEP Initiative (Documenting Educationally Effective Practice) have highlighted the emergence of purposeful and integrative practices, curricular and pedagogical, that can help today’s peripatetic students actually achieve the learning they need for a complex world.

As new studies from both NSSE and the Wabash Center for the Liberal Arts attest, these educationally effective practices are especially beneficial for students from less advantaged backgrounds, the very students that the Commission most wants to assist.

We regret that the Commission staff has entirely overlooked this emerging body of 21st practice. Moreover, some of the recommendations included in this draft will actually compound rather than resolve the problem of educational fragmentation and underachievement the Commission rightly decries.

American higher education has already entered a period of significant educational transition. Campus leaders and faculty members are already investing huge amounts of time and the academy’s own scarce dollars in these needed reforms.

The Commission has an historic opportunity to help the academy accelerate and scale-up educational changes that campus leaders have already begun. But the recommendations included in this draft fall far short of taking advantage of this historic opportunity.

The Commission is correct that some existing assessments of student learning reveal significant shortfalls. But once that obvious diagnosis is made, testing itself cannot be the solution.

Far from exhibiting complacency as this draft implies, many campuses are already working hard on needed educational reforms. On behalf of AAC&U’s 1100 member campuses, we urge the Commission to acknowledge, examine, and learn from their pace-setting efforts.