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?