University Business - September 2009 - (Page 51)

RADICAL REFORMER A new book offers provocative ideas on how to change higher education. BY TIM GORAL ROBERT ZEMSKY WANTS TO MAKE UP FOR A MISSED OPPORTUNITY. Zemsky, chairman of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education, based at the University of Pennsylvania, was called to serve as a member of the Spellings Commission on the Future of , Higher Education during the Bush administration and to participate in the national dialogue on ﬁnding solutions to higher education’s most vexing problems. His new book, Making Reform Work: e Case for Transforming American Higher Education (published this month by Rutgers University Press), in his words is “in a way, doing penance for the Spellings Commission.” e commission “had a whole bunch of really smart people, and it was convened at the right time,” Zemsky says, “but the people running it had no idea how to actually change higher ed.” He’s thought about that a lot since and believes the only way change will occur is through a series of “dislodging events” that he outlines in the book. One of those is to make the standard undergraduate degree a three-year baccalaureate. Zemsky says the senior year of high school, which for many students is just passing time, could be put to better use as the equivalent of the freshman year of college, with students acquiring college-ready skills. As an added beneﬁt, an undergraduate education would cost 25 percent less. Another approach would be an overhaul of the federal ﬁnancial aid system to support participation, invest in motivation, and reward institutions that use aid money eﬀectively. A third idea: Change the rules on tax-free endowments, which have become like hedge funds, by diﬀerentiating the commercial from the educational. at is, dividends, interest, capital gains, and so on would be taxed at current rates but could be oﬀset by how endowed funds are used to support educational programs. Zemsky recently spoke with University Business about the book’s overarching themes. Part of your frustration with the Spellings Commission is that it never came up with a working strategy for achieving its goals. Right. You really have to be able to change the whole system simultaneously. You can’t just change a part of it, you can’t shout at it, you can’t shame it, you can’t embarrass it. You need a strategy that changes the whole thing simultaneously. I call those things dislodging events. What would essentially break the gridlock that now characterizes higher ed? I’ve been a faculty member for 42 years now. ere’s not a lot of pressure on me to change. ere’s pressure on me to be productive, to be clever and all that, but not to fundamentally change what I do. We’ve got to ﬁgure out a way to get people like me positioned so we will, as a natural consequence of events, think about doing things diﬀerently—working diﬀerently, working smarter. You talk about the role that genuine anger and frustration play, and you hint that the public hasn’t risen to the occasion. Is that changing now? It seems we ask that every ﬁve years. Are they angry yet? e truth is, the public has this very funny idea about higher education: It doesn’t know what we do, and therefore it doesn’t know to be universitybusiness.com purposely angry. ere’s this gray “glob” that seems to be important, but they have no idea how it actually works, and therefore they have no idea how to change it. For all the polls in which people say they are angry over price, when you look at the purchase patterns, they uniformly choose the higher-priced option, not the lower-priced one. eir anger is a kind of rhetorical anger, but it is not a behavioral anger. ey want to shout at us, but they still pay our prices and send their kids to the best institutions they can get into. Part of that is clearly driven by the notorious ranking systems. Many schools concur on the futility of these rankings, yet they still go to great lengths to place high on the lists. It seems they are trapped in this nonsensical scheme with no way out without losing face. I’ve argued for more than a decade now that this market is only going to change if we get good consumer data, something like Consumer Reports. I would have thought that someone would have ﬁgured out that there’s a big market there. Apparently the people who look at it think that what the public wants is not consumer data but ranking data. ere are lots of September 2009 | 51 http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - September 2009

University Business - September 2009
Table of Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Behind the News
Viewpoint
Money Matters
Human Resources
Data Lockdown?
Getting Press
Multicampus Planning: Behing the Scenes
Radial Reformer
Community Colleges
End Note

University Business - September 2009