Perhaps the most widely accepted belief about higher education today is that our nation will need more college- educated people in the future than we have now or than we are on track to produce. This belief, given greater urgency by the most recent economic recession, has increasingly led to calls for transforming higher education and for embracing a wide variety of “innovations.”
Without question, improving higher education to expand access and student success should be a goal of everyone–the public, elected leaders, businesses, and those who work to provide that education.
But as conversations about specifics develop, it is crucial for discussion about change to be guided by principles that will lead us toward real improvement in American higher education. Wholesale embrace of change without careful thought and deliberation can take us in the wrong direction–not toward reforming higher education but, in fact, toward deforming precisely those aspects of American higher education that have made it the envy of the world.
There are surely no simple answers, no one model, and no “magic bullets” for meeting America’s needs for broadly accessible quality higher education; but we believe that the following principles can provide a helpful framework for developing and assessing proposals for innovation or restructuring in the future.
1) Higher Education in the 21st Century must be inclusive; it should be available to and affordable for all who can benefit from and want a college education.
Demographic projections make it clear that the United States will not return to world leadership in higher education attainment without increasing higher education opportunities and success for all sectors of our increasingly diverse society. A vigorous democracy and a thriving economy in the future demand that we give this principle full attention when we consider proposals for change, seeking out changes that will enhance educational opportunity and success for all students, including low-income communities and communities of color, and rejecting any proposals that may have unintended negative consequences for access and success.
We simply cannot risk a return to earlier times when education was rationed on the basis of race and economic status.
