JK: The 2009 recession was obviously a very scary time. The economy was shedding jobs. The top priority for [Obama]was to stop the freefall, start creating jobs and address the financial markets and the housing markets that were frozen and were impediments to growth. Those of us working on higher education policy were trying to help people get the skills that they would need to go into better jobs when the jobs came back.
The situation we’re in right now is quite different. For one, enrollment has fallen, instead of grown. So with enrollment down 700,000 students, we’re asking, how do we make sure this interruption is not a permanent scar on our country’s educational attainment? How do we get those people back on the pathway? There’s also a real sense that something has changed permanently. We’re not going to go back to the way things were in 2019. We’re going forward to something different. There are going to be a lot of aspects to that. We’re going to use technology differently and there’s going to be a different mix of online and in-person learning. Finally, students have lost learning time. They face mental health challenges. So we need to build institutions a little differently to meet what students’ needs are going to be instead of what they were.
RR: To what extent do we face a bigger crisis of people losing the motivation to attend college, because they’re not seeing its value proposition? Is that a problem that’s bigger than the pandemic?
JK: It’s true that enrollments have been declining for a while, though there’s a demographic aspect to that. But in my opinion, there are few institutions that are as important to our country right now as higher education. A college education can do more than just about anything to boost someone up into the middle class, to create equal opportunity, to fight poverty. But it’s also true that we don’t reliably extend those benefits to everyone who enrolls. Our national college completion rate is only about 60%. That is particularly troubling when you think about the number of people who are financing their educations with debt. There are people out there who followed the recommendation to pursue a degree, they took out loans, they went to college and yet they found themselves worse off than if they had never attempted college at all.
We do need to work very hard on that value proposition to make sure that people know it’s not only a good investment, but a safe investment. That if they do go to college, they have a good shot at graduating, finding that job or going on to further education and are not going to be left with debts that can’t afford to repay.
RR: Can the government hold institutions more accountable for the outcomes of the people who attend?
JK: What the federal government has done, and I think successfully, is try to define what an unacceptable outcome is. If you’re setting minimum standards, that can have an impact. What is harder is when you think systemically. Higher education across the board has a 60% graduation rate. How are we trying to move that whole system? You’re not talking about just a couple of low performers.
What we’ve learned over the last couple of years is that progress really is possible. There are colleges out there who have made dramatic strides in their graduation rates, who have closed gaps between black and Latino and white students. So there are lessons out there. The question is, how do you take those lessons and systemically apply them? Our sector is really, really innovative; whatever the problem is, someone has probably solved it, but that solution is often not well known even on their campus, much less across the country. It’s less a question of the federal government defining metrics and imposing accountability than trying to change the culture so that college leaders know that better outcomes are possible. And then it’s a question of whether they want to work to achieve them and recognize that there are ways to be an excellent college that doesn’t involve climbing the U.S. News rankings, but is instead about trying to help a broad swath of their communities succeed.
RR: So that involves incentives. Can you describe what form those incentives might take?
JK: Georgia State, for example, has used data to diagnose why students drop out and has dramatically improved graduation rates. The City University of New York’s ASAP program is another successful model. I think there is a role for the administration to play in highlighting the people that are doing great work out there. We can put money behind those things that work and help colleges expand them, using data and evidence. But it’s not, strictly speaking, a policy problem. We as a higher education community need to come together and say, there’s another set of values, another way of being an excellent college that we can work toward.