Spellings lessons: as the Commission on the Future of Higher Education prepares for phase two of its plan to fix higher ed, some of its members discuss how we arrived at this point.

AS IT HAS WITH PUBLIC EDUCATION, Social Security, Medicare, stem cell research, the national debt, taxes, secular government, the theory of evolution, homeland security, domestic surveillance, FEMA, New Orleans, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the administration of President George Bush has vowed to fix higher education. This begs the question: Shouldn't we all be worried? And as it is wont to do concerning other serious issues such as the intractable war in Iraq and Walter Reed Hospital's long-term care of wounded vets, the administration, in this case U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, formed a commission to investigate the matter.

Kicking off the Commission on the Future of Higher Education in a 2005 speech at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Spellings said, "It is time to examine how we can get the most out of our national investment in higher education. We have a responsibility to make sure our higher education system continues to meet our nation's needs for an educated and competitive workforce in the 21st century.

"We should send students a clear message," she added. "If you work hard, you can go to college--regardless of how much money your parents make." (Secretary Spellings and Undersecretary Cheryl Oldham declined to be interviewed for this article.)

The problems facing higher education in the United States are daunting. From 1995 to 2005, the average tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities rose 51 percent, and 36 percent at private universities. (The figures are adjusted for inflation.) That's a faster rate of increase than that for inflation, health care, and family income. Students who graduated from four-year colleges and universities during the decade racked up a median debt of $15,500 for public schools and $19,400 for private schools. Meanwhile, state funding fell to its lowest level in more than 20 years. While Pell Grants covered 84 percent of the cost of public higher education in 1975, by 2005 they covered only 36 percent. Diminished student aid hinders lower income families, and navigating what The Education Trust calls "a Byzantine financial aid system" is particularly intimidating to first-time students.

That's not all. Wealth plays a huge part. By age 24, 75 percent of students in the top quarter of the income level have a degree. And then there's race. According to 2004 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, 34 percent of white adults had received a bachelor's degree by age 25 to 29, but only 18 percent of African-American adults and just 10 percent of Hispanic adults had. Forty percent of college students took at least one remedial education course (mainly because their high school did not offer necessary preparatory courses), at a cost of more than $1 billion per year. Of the U.S. population between the ages of 25 and 64. more than 60 percent has no postsecondary education.

And let's not forget accessibility. "There is disturbing evidence that there has been no rise in accessibility in recent years," says Richard Vedder, adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University. "In fact, there has been some decline in participation in four-year universities from kids from low-income situations. The progress in that area has come to a halt. The elite schools--Harvard, Yale, Princeton--those schools have become more elite."

That's hardly egalitarian.

"When you look at the entire country and compare us with other nations of the world, our participation rate historically has been very good," says Arturo Madrid, professor of humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. "Now things are not as good as they have been. We prided ourselves being number 1, and now countries in Asia and Europe are surpassing us." In fact, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States recently ranked 12th among nations in higher education attainment.

In her speech, Spellings outlined the commission's task: to look at what skills students will need to succeed in the 21st century, how the U.S. can remain the world's leader in academic research, and how it can ensure opportunities for quality higher education and best jobs are open to all students.

Appointed in October 2005, the commission consisted of academics, captains of industry, and university administrators--19 persons in all. According to Vedder, the commission was bipartisan. One member, former North Carolina governor James B. Hunt, is a Democrat; another, Louis Sullivan, head of the Department of Health and Human Services under George H. W. Bush, is a Republican. But few have strong political ties. The commission's chair, Charles Miller, former chairman of the Board of Regents of The University of Texas system, is a Republican.

"It was obvious that the people running the show, Spellings herself and chair Charles Miller, are politically attuned," Vedder says. "They had to make this fit into the Bush agenda."

The Few, the Chosen

The commission members interviewed don't know exactly why they were chosen. "I know they were looking for a community college president," says Charlene Nunley, president of Montgomery College (D.C.). "I knew of the people, but now I know everyone, except the president."

Some members did offer speculation. Vedder had written a fairly provocative book, Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much (American Enterprise Institute Press, 2004), which he suspects caught someone's eye in the West Wing. "One person said to me, 'Mr. Miller says you have friend at the White House,'" says Vedder, adding that he has no clue to that friend's identity.

According to David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, "The agenda [Spellings] outlined seemed one that overlapped with my interests of equality and accountability." Katie Haycock, director of The Education Trust, believes she was chosen for two reasons. "I'm a strong advocate for paying attention to low-income and minority students," she says, "and because I'm a strong proponent of accountability. This commission was clearly going to explore those issues."

The members got down to business and held a series of formal meetings across the nation, in which, just like Spellings urged, students and community leaders readily gave their opinions. "We probably heard from about 100 different people or more," Vedder says.

Nearly as many students as experts spoke before the commission. "The students told us they were finding themselves $70,000 in debt," says Nunley. "They would like to become teachers, but they wouldn't earn enough to pay off the debt."

Privacy Concerns

The commission submitted its report--signed by 18 of its members--in August 2006. The report offered a broad range of proposals, some that drew wide support and some that led to dissension among members.

One called for the creation of a giant database of every student in the United States--all 15 million students who attend the nation's 42,000 degree-rated institutions. Known as the Unit Record Database, it would create student identification numbers that would anonymously link the students to their transcripts.

Proponents say the information that could be gleaned from it would be priceless. "Can you go online and find what percentage of students go on to graduate in four or five years?" asks Vedder. "You can go online and find it, but a student of mine took a week to do it. What are the crime rates? How many students drop out? What do they learn in college? We don't really know whether they leave college knowing more than they [did when they went] in."

But opponents of the Unit Record Database say it would allow an invasion of privacy on a par with certain provisions of the Patriot Act. To enact such a database, say some, Congress would first have to revise protections guaranteed under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

"Many commission members were concerned about privacy," says Ward. "Creating the data set could signal abuse. Universities might give it to the draft board or to banks." But Ward adds that while the privacy issues are important, his concerns were of a technical nature. Data sets on this grand a scale are difficult to compile, he says, and this was the biggest he had ever seen. (And as the former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he'd come across some massive data sets.) "why are you starting from scratch when 40 states already have this data?" he says. "You can get data from it, but you can also get the same data in other ways." He was the only commission member to refrain from signing the report.

First Aid for Financial Aid

The commission's report calls for simplification of the financial aid process by using existing income and tax data from the IRS to help students complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). "The FAFSA is far longer than the income tax form," says Vedder. "Many people give up and miss out on financial aid and even college. There is a lot of data replication," he adds. "Why should people fill out their federal income tax form and replicate it on another form? We have all that information elsewhere." But it's a legal issue: The IRS is not allowed to turn over the data to the Department of Education.

The commission also said that students should be notified of their estimated aid eligibility before the spring of their last year in high school, in order to help them and their families plan financially. Congress should provide new financial aid funds for low-income students, and an independent review of the federal financial aid system should be commissioned. "Folks in higher ed are comfortable saying it's the fault of the federal and state government," says Haycock. "But I think that colleges themselves are more accountable for aid shifts than the federal or state governments. There's some evidence that they've figured out how to gain in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Students with high SAT scores are good for institutions' rankings, so institutions are buying students away from each other." The net effect is that low-income students with less stellar SAT scores go wanting.

In addition, to promote innovation and productivity the commission called for revitalizing the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education; encouraging organizations that report annual college data to develop consistent affordability measures; evaluating and expanding advanced placement to better prepare high school students for college; and making it easier for students to transfer from one college to another. "Most of the differing required courses don't have much educational value," Vedder says. The report also calls for institutions to increase transparency and accountability, providing students and their families with costs and (in the words of the commission's report), "student success outcomes." Secretary Spellings said she plans to provide matching funds to colleges, universities, and states that collect and publicly report those outcomes.

Next Steps

Following the commission's report, Spellings announced that the Department of Education hopes to increase need-based aid, simplify the financial aid process, and hold costs in line. In addition, she wants to simplify the process of applying for federal student aid by cutting the application time in half and, to help students and their families better plan for the future, notify them of their aid eligibility earlier than spring of their senior year in high school.

"We [also] made a recommendation that has no teeth to it, but it has moral purposes," Vedder says. "Make the tuition fees go up no faster than income. Tuition has gone up faster than income, which is unsustainable." For example, Princeton recently announced that it wouldn't raise tuition for the 2007 class. Whether or not it was a public relations stunt, Vedder hopes that other institutions across the country will follow suit.

Commission members cited Pell Grants as perhaps the most important way for low-income students to take advantage of higher education. And both President Bush and Secretary Spellings have asked Congress for increases in the grants. "I don't think it's going to happen nearly to the extent it needs to," says Haycock. "We advocated a return to the previous level of buying power, but the president's proposal was short of that and it took money away from other needs-based programs. There are not many discretionary funds available."

All in all, the commission members interviewed seem satisfied with their involvement. "I think very highly of Spellings," says Ward. "I may disagree with various issues, such as No Child Left Behind, but as an individual I believe she is genuinely concerned about the quality of education. I disagree in some ways about the means to get there. It's not partisan when you can engage the secretary in the merits and ideals of education and get a good discussion going. That's very healthy."

But as everyone on the commission agrees, the most important part is for the government to put its grant money where its mouth is.

Phil Scott is a New York City-based freelance writer. His latest book is Hemingway's Hurricane (McGraw-Hill). He can be reached at [e-mail].