No Conspiracy To See Here

I went to the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) annual meeting over the weekend, to present a paper on a panel focused on college classification, rankings, and peer grouping. Afterwards I was chatting in the lobby of the Louisville Marriot with a nice fellow who worked for an academic publishing house. We agreed on a lot of issues including the need to provide colleges with better incentivs to focus on undergraduate education, but when I mentioned the recent Commission on the Future of Higher Education convened by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, he basically said, "Yeah, but that's just a bunch of Republicans from Texas trying to undermine public higher education so they can please their corporate masters," or something along those lines.

It's important to understand that this is not true. At all. I spent a fair amount of time attending meetings of the Commission over the last couple of years, presenting testimony, reading reports, and talking to various folks involved, including the Chairman, Charles Miller, who's from Texas and raised a lot of money for the Bush campaign. It's all on the up and up, there's no hidden anti-education agenda. Really.

(This just shows one of the unfortunate side effects of the Bush Administration--over the last two or three years, a whole lot of intellectually lazy and half-paranoid conspiracy theories about things like warmongering and destruction of civil liberties and what have you turned out to be more or less true. Which gives credence to other facile theories that aren't true. I realize this isn't nearly as problematic as the actual foreign policy fiascos, assaults on the Constitution, etc., but it still makes my life difficult.)

Miller and I co-wrote an op-ed on higher education funding and reform that appeared in yesterday's Houston Chronicle. It begins:

It's an article of faith that free markets have given America the greatest higher education system in the world. Unlike K-12 schools, colleges and universities have to compete for students and resources. As a result, the thinking goes, we're blessed with vibrant institutions that operate relatively free of government control and provide a crucial advantage in the global contest for economic supremacy.

Unfortunately, this is wrong on all counts. When it comes to their most important mission — helping students learn— American colleges and universities are badly underperforming and overpriced. That's because they don't operate in anything like a true free market. And the solution to this problem isn't less government involvement, but a stronger role of a different kind.

You can read the rest here.