All my online searches told me was that it honestly doesn't seem like anyone, other than Rick Perry (Governor of Texas) is taking higher education reform seriously.Barack Obama's most recent state of the union address alluded that he has higher education in his plans for this term so hopefully something will get done. Obama was quoted on February 20th saying, “Taxpayers can’t keep on subsidizing higher and higher and higher costs for higher education,” Obama said. “Colleges must do their part to keep costs down, and it’s our job to make sure that they do.” Obama's supreme goal is to ensure that all students can afford a college education.
There many articles and books that discussing a faltering higher education and in addition a means as to which the United States can go about Higher Education reform. For example http://www.citizensleague.org/what/policy/highered/index.php discussed higher education reform and the possibilities of it. There are also great books that discuss the problems and possible solutions of higher education. One of them is titled
Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It.
While searching I came upon some ideas for my research. I believe that I will focus on the current attention on higher education reform, what more can be done to create more attention and consequently more action and in addition, I will speculate why perhaps there is not as much attention on the topic and what can be done to reverse that.
You should look at a specific political controversy regarding higher education. You could analyze the language of both sides and how the different political groups assumed polarized positions on the topic. But politics is odd. It is not always about reality. Sometimes it is just about spin. Rick Santorum called Obama a "snob" for pushing for more students to get college degrees, but that seemed less like a real political position on his part than a chance to create a sound-byte that would resonate with his constituency.
ReplyDeleteThe Rick Perry example you give, in my view, is one where the Texas governor is trying to hijack the accountability movement (which is designed to hold colleges -- especially for-profits -- more accountable to actually educating students) in order to push colleges away from their focus on critical thinking and more toward the service of business. His interest seems mostly driven by ideology to me. The accountability movement troubles me personally because it seems to push for more testing -- and my observations of how well testing has worked out for K-12 education suggests that it would not be a good thing for college. A focus on testing makes it harder to teach real critical thinking and writing skills (which the book Academically Adrift argues may be the most important growth areas for college students in the 4 years they go to school). You end up just teaching to the test.
Most accountability movements are state based. My own observation is that most also have a local political agenda. So that might be an interesting topic. Certainly it is interesting that somebody is actually talking about academic quality and learning. But there are a lot of questions about whether politicians should dictate what is taught in college or how it is taught, especially where states are cutting their funding and therefore would seem to have less right to call the shots. And you always have to look at how much of the political debate is real and how much is spin for a particular constituency.