For Student Success, Stop Debating and Start Improving

I have seen up close the multiple challenges that face higher education in these times of budget cuts and increased public concern over the value and cost of college. Yet in my experience, three broad but unproductive areas of debate distract us from solving the central challenges. Here's what ought to be happening:
1) Institutions should improve student success by focusing on practices within their control instead of blaming external factors.
2) Give students more-structured academic programs that accelerate their progress toward degrees.
3) Accept that preparing for work and pursuing a liberal-arts education are not mutually exclusive.


What are we learning about the best path forward to solve the real problems? While critics worry that the Gates Foundation may try to force its agenda on higher education, we see our role as funding diverse approaches that allow higher education to create its own solutions. With that in mind, I suggest the following priorities for our concerted attention:

• Optimize the rich higher-education "ecosystem" we've got. America's vaunted higher-education system is not just about public and private nonprofit four-year colleges. Community colleges are an underresourced asset for states and students. The best for-profit institutions offer nimbleness, capacity, and innovation that the rest of higher education can learn from. We need a range of institutions, with better connections among them.
• Fundamentally rethink how we as a society finance the public good of higher education. The disinvestment in public higher education over the past two decades has shifted greater costs and risks to students and their families, and has especially hurt the open-access two- and four-year colleges that educate the majority of college students. Restructure funding streams to motivate institutions to offer, and students to achieve, high-quality credentials, at a reasonable cost and time to degree completion.
• Break the tyranny of the credit hour and ease transfers among institutions. We need the best researchers and the most gifted teachers in higher education to focus on these challenges—like Harvard's Eric Mazur, who has radically redesigned his physics course based on research showing that students in the traditional lecture format had not learned as much as he thought.
• Use all means to increase personalization and student success. The most powerful forms of technology are not simply putting traditional education online but are transforming the process to maximize learning and retention. The tools need not be high tech: Mentors dedicated to helping students navigate their degree programs, like those at Western Governors University, help students persist and succeed. That kind of differentiated role will especially be needed in an "unbundled" world of free course content, where added value will come from figuring out how to support student motivation and progress.
• Accelerate innovations aimed at increasing value while decreasing cost. The Gates Foundation's third Next Generation Learning Challenge attracted strong proposals to create delivery models that can serve a minimum of 5,000 students at a cost of $5,000 or less, with completion rates of 50 percent or more.
• Build organizational infrastructures to guide colleges through this crucial transformation and develop a new breed of leaders to support it. Unlike K-12, which has a wide array of organizations and leaders dedicated to reform (New Leaders for New Schools, new approaches to talent development, technical-assistance providers), this is nascent in higher education.
• Welcome data and be transparent about results. You can't get better unless you know where you are. Institutions and states should focus first on using data to learn how to drive improvement, rather than move to premature accountability systems.

Rather than top-down reforms, social movements may have more to teach us, for the matter is not so much about external pressure but about changing hearts and minds. We need to build common cause among communities of practice (faculty, courageous leaders) who can change the belief system in higher education, and to convince faculty, administrators, and trustees that it is everyone's job to improve every student's success.
 
Hilary Pennington is an expert on postsecondary education, most recently serving as director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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