Report Brief
Beyond Dead Reckoning: Research Priorities for Redirecting
American Higher Education
PURPOSE
This report was issued by the National Center for Postsecondary
Improvement (NCPI) in 2002. It promotes a set of research priorities
identified by NCPI that will enable those most responsible for American
higher education to shape the enterprise in more purposeful ways. The need
for such priorities is based on the belief that higher education is less
than it should be. The report provides a research agenda for policymakers
and institutional leaders that will enable higher education to exert a more
forceful voice in the national dialogue about societys goals and ideals.
KEY FINDINGS OF THE REPORT
- The report asserts that the fundamental question facing higher
education researchers is Access to what? It is meant to encourage an
examination of access in light of the content and quality of education
provided to students and the institutional impact on their learning and
later achievement.
- The research agenda highlighted in the report includes three
priorities, the need for which grew out of a set of themes that call for
systematic inquiry into neglected issues at the heart of higher educations
societal obligations:
- higher education receives broad public support
- despite some notable progress on the frontiers of reform since the
1960s and 1970s, higher educations core practices remain largely unchanged,
rendering the enterprise less than it should be in todays environment
- higher educations performance for the most part has fallen short of
fostering an engaged citizenry
Research priority one: Improving educational quality and institutional
performance
- Most colleges and universities have not developed institutional
definitions of educational quality
- Few institutions actually use assessment results
- Serious questions exist about the quality of instruction and advising
that students receive
- Dramatic change in the academic workforce, the increased press for
accountability, the need for a more diverse faculty, changing student
demographics, uncertainty about funding priorities, and the decline in the
proportion of tenure-line faculty contribute to the transformation of
academic work and who does it
- The question Access to what? leads to additional questions:
- How can colleges and universities become more effective
learning organizations?
- How can they link knowledge about learning to the practice of
teaching?
- How can they manage the changing academic workforce?
Research priority two: Balancing market forces with higher educations
public purposes
- During the past three decades policymakers have increasingly
allowed markets to replace direct public investment as an instrument of
achieving the public good
- Higher educations system of cross-subsidization makes it all but
impossible to understand how an institution actually spends the money
received in the name of undergraduate education
- Colleges and universities find it increasingly difficult to be both
mission-centered and market-smart absent strong counter-pressures, the
institutional pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunity can turn institutions
into holding companies in which the center has diminished capacity to shape
the activities of its own perimeter
- Higher education requires a strategy that enables institutions, even as
they are increasingly privately funded, to remain publicly
committed
Research priority three: Drawing new maps for a changing enterprise
- The framework that has shaped the federal governments program of
data collection for colleges and universities was created in the 1970s and
its definitional framework has been overwhelmed by shifts in patterns of
student enrollments and institutional practices
- Terms of reference have come to mean different things to different
people
- Colleges and universities of all types are extending their reach into
new collaborative agreements without precedents to guide them
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PRACTICE
This report calls for an end to the disjunction between societal
necessity and institutional inertia.
It asserts that higher education is led with guesswork and suggests that
the research priorities it defines will assist policymakers and
institutional leaders in fulfilling the fields promise of providing high
quality higher education to all. Recommendations include:
- The development of a culture of evidence an environment
characterized by a willingness not only to create measures and collect data
on outcomes, but also to use this information to redesign practices for
improving quality
- Making progress on the learning agenda by addressing the learning needs
of all students hence the importance of incorporating learning assessment
techniques into the practice of teaching.
- Investment in research to:
- understand more clearly how the changing workforce can
be organized and prepared more effectively
- examine the impact of the revenue-generating imperative on campus
management practices and across academic fields
- create new maps for a changing enterprise, without which higher
education institutions will continue to lack a reliable frame of reference
for understanding how and when things have changed or when and how to chart
a new course
REFERENCE
National Center for Postsecondary Improvement. (2002, October). Beyond
dead reckoning: Research priorities for redirecting American higher
education. Stanford, CA: Author.
Submitted by Leah Ewing Ross, March 2004. This is a report summary and
excerpts are quoted directly from the text.
