Tight Budgets and Accountability

It's funny what a budget shortfall does to perspective. In January of 2007, the University of California (UC) system, one of the largest and most symbolically important systems of higher education in the country, released its latest accountability document. At 40 pages, it was remarkable, for such a highly regarded system, for its lack of breadth, specificity, and all-around vagueness. It mentions its institutions, including such prestigious places as UC-Berkeley and UCLA, just once each, in an entirely unhelpful table on the number of transfer articulation agreements each school had made with the state's community colleges. All reported identical figures.

Flash forward a year and a half to last September, when the UC released a 211 page accountability "discussion draft." It had a lot more information, this time presented in attractive tables and charts and separated for each individual institution. After releasing all this formerly private information, the sky didn't fall (except in the state's budget), and the UC has followed up with an even better system of relaying information about its institution's performance to the public.The new Web site has 15 "chapters" that each contain multiple measures presented in easily digestible graphic form.

These things matter, because they easily show the public how well their institutions are performing. The LA Times ran a piece this weekend on students who want to pursue bachelor's degrees but opt to start the process at community colleges. The article was informative but generic, and it provides a perfect example of how a good accountability system could be used.

In 1960, California codified how it would educate a growing mass of baby boomers. The University of California system would award doctoral degrees, conduct most of the research, and educate the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates. California State University institutions would educate the top third of high school graduates, focus on the undergraduate experience, and be responsible for training the state's teachers. This left everyone else to the community colleges.

The community colleges were designed to be open access, free for all students, and a cheap route for state policymakers to educate the masses without paying UC or CSU prices. Then, if the students proved themselves at the community colleges, they would have clear routes to transfer and be on their way to bachelor's degrees at the more prestigious four-year schools.

The UC's new accountability system shows that it has held up its end of the equation. First, users can see that transfer applications from California community colleges have risen over the last 15 years, but that admits and enrollees have pretty much kept pace. Transfers have a lot of competition to get into either UC-Berkeley or UCLA, but they have really good chances of being accepted to one of the UC schools in Davis, Irvine, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara, or Santa Cruz.

But it's not just about getting in; transfers are able to graduate as well. The two-year systemwide graduation rate for transfers is now above 50 percent (which is actually quite good), and nearly 90 percent of transfers have earned a degree four years after transferring. The numbers vary by campus, which we're now able to see.

This new information tells us a lot. Without it we might blame the UC admissions offices for unfairly rejecting qualified applicants. But the newly revealed information suggests that low transfer rates from the community colleges is not the fault of admissions policies, but rather needs to be addressed with increasing the pool of transfer-ready students. That requires an entirely different set of policy responses. And it's just one more example of how new, better accountability systems can inform the public to make better decisions.