A Few Bad Apples: Diploma Mills and Fraudulent Academic Credentials MS Word PDF - Although diploma mills claim to be institutions of higher education, they exist for profit only and grant fraudulent degrees, diplomas or other academic credentials without requiring degree recipients to obtain proper qualifications. Both students and employers need to have some protection. Protections for consumers and protections for employers are highlighted in this ECS State Note. (Mallory Dose, Education Commission of the States, June 2009)...

Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success - Education Sector has created a new, comprehensive measure, the "borrowing-to-credential ratio." For each college, authors Kevin Carey and Erin Dillon have taken newly available U.S. Department of Education data showing the total amount of money borrowed by undergraduates and divided that sum by the total number of degrees awarded. The results are revealing. (Education Sector, August 2011)...

Who Wins? Who Pays? The Economic Returns and Costs of a Bachelor's Degree - This study examined starting and estimated career-long salaries for bachelor's degree recipients from a range of institutions, including proprietary, public and private nonprofit colleges and universities at varying levels of admissions selectivity. The authors then calculated the net cost or net financial gain to students and to taxpayers. (American Institutes for Research, May 2011)...

Performance Incentives to Improve Community College Completion: Learning from Washington State's Student Achievement Initiative: A State Policy Brief - This brief calls particular attention to a number of policy choices that the Washington community and technical college system faced as it designed and began to implement the student achievement initiative across its 34 colleges. (Community College Research Center and Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy, March 2011)...

The Degree Qualifications Profile - The "Degree Qualifications Profile" is a tool that can help transform U.S. higher education. A degree profile--or qualifications framework--illustrates clearly what a student should be expected to know and be able to do once they earn their degrees, at any level. The tool proposes specific learning outcomes that benchmark the associate, bachelor's and master's degrees regardless of a student's field of specialization. (Lumina Foundation for Education, January 2011)...

Grading Higher Education: Giving Consumers the Information They Need - Attending college is a costly and uncertain endeavor which also requires one to make a complicated set of decisions that must be done in the appropriate order and at the right times. These decisions include whether and how to prepare, where to apply, which institution to choose and how to finance the costs. There are numerous resources to help students understand and improve their preparation for college, but there are far fewer tools or aids to help families navigate the college selection process. (The Hamilton Project, Center for American Progress, December 2010)...

False Fronts? Behind Higher Education's Voluntary Accountability Systems - Two major voluntary efforts to measure and report colleges' cost and academic effectiveness are considered by some to be inadequate and lacking in their ability to provide parents and students with the information to make informed decisions. Higher education will have to be more accountable and more open to consumers about the actual cost of attending a college in order to succeed as the nation's economic engine, according to the authors of this report. (Andrew Kelly and Chad Aldeman, Education Sector/American Enterprise Institute, March 2010)...

Squeeze Play 2010: Continued Public Anxiety on Cost, Harsher Judgments on How Colleges Are Run - Highlights from a series of national surveys tracking public attitudes on higher education, conducted by Public Agenda for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Among the findings: Six out of ten Americans now say that colleges today operate more like a business, focused more on the bottom line than on the educational experience of students. The number feeling that way increased by five percentage points in the last year alone and is up by eight percentage points since 2007. (John Immerwahr, Jean Johnson, Amber Ott and Jonathan Rochkind, The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, February 2010)...

Assessment, Accountability, and Improvement: Revisiting the Tension - Many of the tensions that characterized the accountability and improvement purposes of student learning outcomes assessment when the assessment movement began in the mid-1980s still exist today. The author outlines the major relevant changes affecting the assessment movement that have occurred in higher education over the past two decades. (Peter Ewell, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, November 2009)...

Changes in Postsecondary Awards Below the Bachelor's Degree: 1997 to 2007 - This Statistics in Brief presents changes in sub-baccalaureate awards in the decade between 1997 and 2007,using 2002 as a midpoint. It describes changes in the number and types of awards conferred. The report also examines changes in the types of institutions conferring the awards and differences in awards by gender and race/ethnicity. These results can serve as a baseline against which to measure future changes. (Laura Horn and Xiaojie Li, Thomas Weko, National Center for Education Statistics, November 2009)...

Ready to Assemble: Grading State Higher Education Accountability Systems - In 2008 and 2009, Education Sector conducted a comprehensive analysis of higher education accountability systems, analyzed thousands of documents, policies and laws to answer two question: 1) What information do states collect on their higher education institutions? 2) How do they use that information to affect institutional improvement. Based on the research they graded accountability systems in 21 categories on a three-level scale. (Chad Aldeman and Kevin Carey, Education Sector, June 2009)...

The European Quality Assurance Register: Enhancing Transparency and Trust in Quality Assurance - EQAR is an information tool supporting the development of the European Higher Education Area by increasing transparency of quality assurance. It will provide a list of credible, reliable and trustworthy quality assurance agencies that operation in line with a common set of principles for quality assurance. (European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education, October 2008)...

Learning Accountability from Bologna: A Higher Education Policy Primer - This study explores the core features of change in Europe that have been created jointly by higher education administrators, faculty, students, and national ministries of education. (Clifford Adelman, Institute for Higher Education Policy, July 2008)...

New Leadership for Student Learning and Accountability: A Statement of Principles, Commitments to Action - The primary responsibility for achieving excellence falls on colleges and universities themselves. To that end each should: develop ambitious, specific and clearly stated goals for student learning; gather evidence about how well students in various programs are achieving; and provide information about its basic characteristics, clearly communicate its educational mission and describe its strategies for achiving its educational goals and their effectiveness. (Association of American Colleges and Universties, Council for Higher Education Accreditation, 2008)...

College and University Ranking Systems: Global Perspectives and American Challenges - Ranking systems for colleges and universities are widely used but debates have emerged over the methodology that is used to construct them. In this report the Institute for Higher Education Policy has put together three papers that analyze ranking systems around the world and the lessons that those systems could provide to the United States. (Institute for Higher Education Policy, 2007)...

College Rankings Reformed: The Case for a New Order in Higher Education - U.S. News and World Report's annual ranking of colleges and universities has become the de facto higher education accountability system in the United States, despite its deeply flawed ranking system. Instead of ranking institutions on how well they educate their students and how well they prepare them to be successful after college education their students, it ranks them based on three factors: fame, wealth and exclusivity. The author argues that new data and technology offer an opportunity to really measure how well colleges and universities are preparing their undergraduate students. (Kevin Carey, Education Sector, September 2006) ...

A Culture of Evidence: Postsecondary Assessment and Learning Outcomes - This paper argues that postsecondary education today is not driven by hard evidence of its effectiveness, limiting our current state of knowledge about the effectiveness of a college education. This in turn hampers informed decisionmaking by institutions, students and their families and the future employers of college graduates. What is needed is a systemic, data-driven, comprehensive approach to understanding the quality of two-year and four-year postsecondary education, with direct, valid and reliable measures of student learning. The authors propose a comprehensive national system for determining the nature and extent of college learning, focusing on four dimensions of student learning: (1) workplace readiness and general skills; (2) domain-specific knowledge and skills; (3) soft skills, such as teamwork, communication and creativity and (4) student engagement with learning. (Carol A. Dwyer, Catherine M. Millett and David G. Payne, ETS, June 2006) ...

The Need for Accreditation Reform - This paper argues that accreditation of higher education in the United States is a crazy-quilt of activities, processes and structures that is fragmented, arcane, more historical than logical and has outlived its usefulness. Most important, it is not meeting the expectations required for the future. This paper distinguishes between the institutional purposes and the public purposes of accreditation, and suggests an alternative to the status quo. (Robert C. Dickeson, U.S. Department of Education, 2006)...

Holding Colleges and Universities Accountable for Meeting State Needs - This report examines states' annual reports for higher education accountability and recommends that states develop public agendas for higher education. It also describes states' progress on key indicators: higher education graduation rates, faculty salaries and science and research funding. (Alicia A. Diaz, Joan Lord and Joseph L. Marks, Southern Regional Education Board, 2006) ...