The President's Forum, a consortium led by Excelsior College of adult-serving higher education institutions, announced on October 22 a new initiative on transparency and accountability. This new initiative, called Transparency by Design, provides a comprehensive action plan aimed at elevating the quality of higher education available to adults. A central component of this plan will be to provide program-specific outcomes data that will help students to make informed decisions about their education investment:
Transparency by Design institutions, which currently number 10 colleges and universities, plan to issue annual Transparency By Design Reports in the first quarter of each year, starting in 2009. These reports will include comprehensive data for each course of study, including student demographics, completion rates, costs, student engagement and knowledge and skills learned. Most important, Transparency By Design Reports will include outcomes at the program specialization level, allowing prospective students to assess how well a program will prepare them for their professional pursuits.
This initiative is obviously one of many recent efforts to create higher education outcomes measures that can be useful to prospective students. What is most interesting about this initiative, however, is that the consortium members are a mix of non-profit and for-profit adult- focused higher education institutions. On the for profit-side are such well known names as Kaplan and Capella Universities, while on the non-profit side one finds the relatively new Western Governors University and the older and well regarded Fielding Graduate University.
This partnership of the for- and non-profit sectors to provide comparative outcomes data strikes me as a landmark event with considerable importance for the evolution of higher education. From my perspective, the sooner we get beyond considering education to be of high or low quality simply based on its profit status, and move to looking at real outcomes, the better off we shall all be.
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