Conference Papers

Public and private investment in higher education, the significance of higher educational attainment for individual life course outcomes and the presumed role of human capital formation for economic competitiveness has led to increasing interest in measuring college quality. It is thus not surprising that while metrics of institutional quality in higher education have existed and have shaped organizational orientations and practices for decades, something has changed in the organizational environment facing colleges and universities.

Any project aimed at re-conceiving broad-access higher education must address the for-profit sector - the highest positioned lightning rod in the edifice of academia. A tell-tale sign of the sector’s unique predicament is that while the many failures of public and private U.S. colleges and universities are being investigated primarily by academic researchers with minimal exceptions, writing addressing for-profit institutions has been left primarily in the hands of their founders or executives, investment analysts, think tanks of the left and right, and the national media.

Regarded by some as the most successful industry in the U.S., the sector of higher education in this country has succeeded in important ways. A 2008 study conducted in China evaluating 500 of the world’s universities found that 17 of the 20 most distinguished research universities were in the U.S., as were 40 of the top 50! (Cole 2009). In popular discourse, the sector is often treated as if it were entirely composed of research universities (e.g., the Harvards, Michigans, and Stanfords) and the elite colleges (e.g., the Wellsleys, Oberlins, and Reeds).

Americans are largely unaware that local school boards, as well as local superintendents and individual schools have been losing influence over education programs for some time to state and federal officials and other interests.. The reforms brought by the Progressive movement from 1900-1920 created control and trust of professional educators, and a politics preferred by pedagogues (Iannaccone, 1967). Certified School administrators once dominated education policy with little intrusion by federal or state authorities. Teachers were docile and not organized.

Kirst (2010) describes the evolution of policies in K-12 education that have “reached beyond the classroom door to alter what students are taught.” Not only has there been no such reform in higher education, but such changes seem even now to be unthinkable. Yet, to make major changes in higher education around the goals of progress, learning and completion, states and the nation as a whole may need to contemplate policies that would impact higher education in previously unheard-of ways.

The focus in this paper is on the finances of public access institutions – the public community colleges and masters’ institutions that collectively enroll about half of all students in US postsecondary institutions, including the majority of low income and working adults.

One of the great strengths of American higher education, a quality that has helped make it the envy of the rest of the world, is the diversity of its institutions. . Americans expect our colleges and universities to fill a variety of critical societal roles, from equipping the next (or even the current) generation with the skills and abilities necessary for work and citizenship to pushing the limits of human understanding. What’s more, our highly decentralized system allows many different kinds of institutions to flourish.

In 1973, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) first published its basic classification of degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. Building on a long history of earlier efforts to survey and evaluate the diverse organizational forms in American higher education, a commission under the leadership of Clark Kerr sought to differentiate these institutions into five broad categories, as well as a number of more nuanced sub-categories (Carnegie Commission on Higher Education 1973). Kerr’s own philosophy, adopted from John F.

There have been many contributions from the Economics of Education literature to build understanding about the demand side of higher education. Numerous studies have examined how background and various inputs, policies and other factors affect student behavior (Long, 2007). However, little is known about the supply side of the equation: the thousands of postsecondary institutions. Related to this is the paucity of information on how to produce better student outcomes and/or alter the incentives colleges face with the goal of improving student persistence and completion.

Two related themes currently dominate discourse on open-access colleges, particularly community colleges: increasing college-going and degree attainment, and improving the performance of postsecondary institutions with respect to producing graduates. Largely missing from this discourse, however, is cogency concerning the innumerable ways in which students use open-access institutions and the ways in which students’ patterns of use interact with institutional policies and practices to influence the outcomes that they experience.