This is the first in a three-part series on accountability in higher education. I think that there are three important questions we must ask of accountability systems if we are to insure that they provide the foundation for any kind of innovation in American higher education. The first is "To whom are these systems asking higher education to be accountable?" The second, "What are we holding colleges and universities accountable for?" And finally, "How should colleges and universities demonstrate that they are accountable?" The three questions--Accountable to whom?, Accountable for what?, and Accountable how?--will each be explored in a separate blog entry over the coming weeks.

While not new to higher education, accountability efforts have popped up everywhere in the last few years, fueled in part by former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Accountability is being taken up by national associations, as with the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universites (APLU) and American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), the University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN) from the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), and the Voluntary Framework of Accountability (VFA) by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). Versions of accountability systems are being developed by state legislatures as foundations for performance-based funding efforts, as with Louisana's GRAD Act, and Massachusetts's Vision Project.

To whom are colleges accountable when implementing these programs? Some would say they are having to be more accountable to government (state and federal) and tax payers. Others would say that accountability efforts should help institutions answer to the consumer—prospective college students and their parents. Institutions themselves want to be accountable to whomever is providing their funding—whether it be students through enrollment or the tax payers through state appropriations and other funding mechanisms. 

The most consumer-oriented of the initiatives seems to be NAICU's U-CAN web site. The data collected and displayed on the web site are clearly geared toward students and parents researching best colleges. U-CAN does the best job of trying to be accountable to the consumer—clearly laying out data that can help a prospective college student get a sense of which institutions might be best match. While this is helpful, sites like this and the College Navigator site from the National Center for Education Statistics fall short by not doing a good job of providing data along with contextual information. For example, an aggregate figure for student-faculty ratio or class size can be misleading when their are likely big differences in these figures among different majors. To be accountable to consumers, data will have to be more granular and decision tools more flexible, helping prospective students not just look at data but also to ask the right questions. (They also need to be about helping all high school students find college information, not just those who have the cultural capital and parents' college attendance expectations that make them undertake college searches—more on this in the "Accountable for what?" entry.)

Most accountability initiatives end up being about accountability to government. I don't think this is bad, because being accountable to government can mean providing information that helps make good policy decisions and insure that public investments are well spent. The accountability measures listed here, however, are about other goals—namely, avoiding regulation and/or chasing dollars. The Voluntary System of Accountability rose from the threat of increased government scrutiny of college performance generated by the Spellings Commission. Public colleges and universities scrambled to prove that they were doing a good job of self-regulating. Odd since the fact is that American higher education is generally self-regulated pretty well through regional and national accreditation and simply striving to prove this is not a good reason to create systems for being accountable to government.

Neither is chasing funding. The Voluntary Framework of Accountability (VFA) is a direct response to President Obama's American Graduation Initiative, and the community colleges make it clear that they want to be accountable so that they will qualify for more funding. Collecting performance data and making it available toward that end isn't a bad thing. The problem, again, is this as the sole motivator for creating an accountability system. If the answer to the "accountability to whom?" question is "to government and tax payers," then questions about what information is needed to help shape effective policy and to evaluate success of current investments ought to be driving the creation of the accountability systems—not "which data will help us avoid regulation?" or "which performance measures translate into the most dollars?" 

Accountability to whom? is an important question to answer if we want these systems to serve the purposes for which they are intended. A couple of state policy examples provide good illustration of how, on the one hand, things might go awry if we don't answer this question, and how on the other hand accountability might be targeted in the right direction. The Louisiana GRAD Act, it appears, is largely about colleges being accountable only to the state legislature. As with other accountability efforts, this one is about chasing increased revenue for institutions. Sadly, however, public colleges in Louisiana do not get this revenue in the form of increased state appropriations in exchange for good performance. Instead, the law allows for colleges to implement tuition hikes if they perform at expected levels. There can be little benefit to prospective college students, or to public policy and the tax payers more generally, when an accountability effort operates in direct opposition to the interests of prospective students, in this case by increasing their college-going costs.  

I don't know if the Massachusetts higher education stakeholders who helped shape that state's Vision Project accountability effort spent time reflecting on the "accountable to whom?" question, but the law seems to provide innovative answers to that question that others may want to consider. First, the law implies accountability to the secondary education system by giving colleges points for increased college-going rates among high school graduates in their service areas. To make this happen, post-secondary institutions will have to work more closely with high schools, and that's accountability that holds promise for real change in access and opportunity. The Vision Project also makes higher education in the state more accountable to the broader mission of advancing colleges and universities by making them accountable to one another. Aggregate measures across the state that are compared to other states' metrics mean that the institutions in the state must work together to achieve performance gains (as a former administrator at a public college in Massachusetts, I know this will be no easy feat).

We need clear logic models that show how accountability systems themselves result in the outcomes we seek. If these outcomes are only increased enrollments  , holding regulation at bay, or growing state and federal appropriations, we're not doing a very good job of answering the "accountable to whom?" question, are we?

At HELIX, we're interested not only in pointing out the places where innovation and leadership are thriving in postsecondary education, but we also hope to shine a bright light on those dark corners where innovation and leadership are so desperately needed. In doing so, one of our goals is to show how research can inform efforts to lead and to innovate.

A headline in Inside Higher Education recently--"What Adjunct Impact?"--called attention to some new research presented at the American Educational Research Association (AREA) meeting last week in Denver. Finally, it seems, a researcher has found that adjunct faculty do not necessarily have the negative impact on student outcomes that had earlier been highlighted by Inside Higher Education and others. One reason some see a negative impact, says the new research, is that adjuncts are used heavily in teaching remedial courses and there appears to be a negative correlation between starting in remedial courses and student success. The researcher found a positive correlation between enrolling part-time and student outcomes, another finding contradictory to earlier research.

Earlier research on student exposure to adjuncts and outcomes was careful to point out that a negative correlation likely stemmed from the fact that adjunct faculty are paid little and not provided with offices in which to meet students. Other conditions of the adjunct life might also play a role.

What matters here is not which research is right. What matters is that we give a close read to all of the research and we use it to focus attention on the adjunct issue. The research is helpful to have, but if we don't use it to ask questions about how we can leverage positive traits of the adjunct workforce and mitigate potential pitfalls then there is no innovation, no leadership.

Like it or not, the adjunct and contingent faculty workforce will continue to grow at even our most prestigious institutions of higher education. It would be wise of us to spend less time thinking about whether this fact is "good" or "bad" for students, and more time on inventing ways to make sure it is a positive experience.

Are you and your institution finding innovative ways to work with adjuncts? We'd like to hear from you--please comment below.

When it comes to engaging technology, senior leaders of colleges have always been a diverse lot on an island of their own, a somewhat Galapagos zone: swimming lizards, blue-footed birds, and a tropical penguin or two.  Sheltered from the learning curves of the very tools that drive their institutions by landscapes of clerical staff and sycophants, college presidents and the like have been given the easy ride. When queried about this lack of technological engagement, rationalizations abound, typically reduced to a vernacular rich with ‘blue sky’ and ‘winds of change’ metaphors. Often is heard that senior leadership is much too busy with the governance of the institution—after all, senior leaders are hired for vision and all other abstract things deemed intellectual. Engaging with technology, a utility tethered to users by a keyboard umbilical, always appeared somewhat clerical and as such, delegated without a moment’s reflection. And given the 24/7 responsibilities that come with such jobs, this is not surprising. Sure there are a some college leaders who are techno junkies, but they are few and far between. In many cases, those who have come around to engaging the technology do so on their own terms—creating folklore for college IT departments who’ve had to retrofit almost everything in the toolbox to align 21^st century technology with 20^th century skills and strong personal preference. So has been the mashless state of technology integration in most of the Academy’s executive suites for the last 25 years. An unhealthy, frustrating state. 

When senior college leaders keep at arm’s length from technology, innovation is pinched to a slow crawl. Budgets incorporating innovative technology integration and development are often eclipsed by those delivering tangible meat and potatoes products. This gives rise to the dumbed down tech proposal that sacrifices innovation for ease of comprehension and a garnish of concrete deliverables. Such proposals, while not exactly DOA, seldom make it back into the creative canopies that hatched the out-of-the-box thinking. There is also a lost in translation factor to contend with here. Typically, senior leaders filter decision making through a technology consigliere, who may have their own agenda or are themselves one of the retrofits whose exploits are celebrated in song at the IT beer bust.

But things are changing…when centenarians text you, imoms tweet to their tweeps, and third graders foursquare for wildlife, you have to be very sleepy, Rip Van Winkle sleepy, not to see that everyone, yes everyone, is now connecting to someone in some meaningful way through social media technologies. In addition, the portability of information, via the cloud, and the portability of hardware, via smart phones, has fueled this engagement with technology at many different levels with many different stakeholders. Such innovation presents new opportunity for both institutions of higher education and their busy senior leadership. Like the imoms, college leaders are extremely pressed for time with multiple demands imposed on them by multiple constituencies. But what we've learned from groups like imoms is that social media means that everyone can be an online learner--in fact, we can conclude that we are all online learners, and higher education leaders are no exception.

The fact that we are all currently engaged in online learning on a day-to-day basis, creates many new opportunities for innovative technology integration on campus, with an important caveat: in the spirit of Web 2.0 technologies, all stakeholders (especially students) bring ideas to the table. Over time this group could, and in fact must, include the college’s senior leadership. As they embark on their own online learning adventures with Social Media, we will see a much more engaged set of higher education leaders who will naturally move more and more to the center of on-campus technology debates. They will weigh in on matters relating to Web 2.0 applications for learning, marketing, and internal communications from a much better informed (or practitioner's) perspective. This new voice will be a welcome addition, allowing for a more direct and open engagement with technology innovation on campus. Already I have had the opportunity to follow several college presidents on twitter (Hal Higdon—Ozarks Technical Community College, Linda Glasscock—North Lake College, Karen Stout—Montgomery County Community College), reading their tweets and retweets as they go about their day. The social media are new for many of them but they are embracing it as part of their day-to-day communication routines. Finally the foundations of common ground between senior staff and the campus technocrats are being poured by external factors, where all players initially engage on an equal footing. Now is the time to engage college leaders and begin having real discussions about the innovative use of technology and its benefits to both learners and the daily operations of a campus. More and more, through their actual participation in social networks, college leaders are becoming better aquainted with the collaborative powers of technology and better equipped to fold such powers into the fabric of the institutions they lead. And that is a good thing.