Ralph K.M. Haurwitz: U.S. education chief backs panel's call for college reforms

U.S. education chief backs panel's call for college reforms: Margaret Spellings, visiting Austin, supports financial aid boost, increased accountability
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
The Austin American-Statesman

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, visiting Austin over the weekend, all but endorsed a special panel's sweeping recommendations to increase financial aid for college students, measure student learning with standardized tests and require colleges to disclose data on graduation rates, spending and other matters.

Spellings, in town to address community leaders at a luncheon and attend the football game between the University of Texas and Ohio State University, said that none of the panel's recommendations had given her pause, including a much-criticized proposal to create a national database for tracking individual students' progress through higher education. She said she was prepared to seek a significant increase in the federal government's $80 billion annual outlay for financial aid, provided that colleges and universities become more trans- parent about their operations.

The remarks were the most detailed Spellings has offered publicly on the recommendations since the Commission on the Future of Higher Education issued the last in a series of draft reports a month ago. A final report with only minor changes is expected shortly, and Spellings said she plans to outline a plan for acting on the recommendations at a news conference in Washington on Sept. 26.

"I think the commission's work obviously was high quality, very much on point," she said. "It did exactly what it was supposed to do, and that is frame the big issues and precipitate discussion and interest. I consider this kind of the beginning of the beginning of all the discussion on higher education. And it's high time and overdue."

Spellings formed the commission a year ago in an effort to improve the affordability, accessibility and consumer friendliness of higher education. She named Charles Miller, a Houston investor and former chairman of the UT System Board of Regents, to lead the panel. A friend of President Bush's, Miller was something of a mentor to Spellings when she served as Bush's education adviser during his term as governor of Texas.

Miller, who accompanied Spellings in Austin, said he took issue with some leaders of private colleges and universities who have criticized the report, especially a provision calling for a national "unit record" database to track students' progress and thereby hold schools more accountable for fulfilling their educational mission. Critics say such a system would endanger students' privacy.

Miller and Spellings rejected that argument, asserting that names and Social Security numbers would be protected. Miller said private colleges "are afraid of transparency, and yet they take a huge amount of federal money. What do they have to hide? A private college doesn't have any more right to that data than the government does."

Spellings said the database would help assess higher education outcomes, because current records only track first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students. The proposed database would also track cross-state transfer students and returning students.

To Read the Rest of the Report