For decades, the higher education policy debate in the United States has focused on increasing access to colleges and universities. While this emphasis on access has led to significant gains in enrollment, far less attention has been paid to whether students ever receive a degree. As other industrial democracies have caught up with--and in some cases surpassed--the United States in the percentage of young adults with a college degree, some observers have begun to push for policies that emphasize college completion and create incentives for institutions to better serve their students. Three years after the Spellings Commission called for greater transparency and accountability in American higher education, however, there is still little consensus on how policymakers should reform the postsecondary system to ensure that colleges and universities are held accountable for retaining and graduating their students. This lack of progress reflects both the magnitude of the challenge and the failure of previous efforts to examine how the various pieces of the system—from measurement of student outcomes and data quality to faculty productivity to cost to accreditation and quality control—may facilitate or hinder meaningful accountability.

In response to this challenge, Mark Schneider, visiting scholar at AEI and vice president at the American Institutes for Research, and Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, have commissioned ten pieces of new research, each of which explores elements of the multifaceted accountability equation in higher education. The research highlights how the components of the system fit together and how reformers might rethink current policy and existing institutional arrangements. At this AEI conference, leading higher education researchers and practitioners will present their findings and, together with discussants from across the policy and practitioner community, explore the findings’ implications for designing and implementing effective accountability systems for higher education.