The Quality of higher education is being challenged across the nation:

• Declining public confidence in the value of higher education includes skeptics from across the public spectrum.

• We can’t just shrug that off. Research strongly suggests that, when it comes to developing student capabilities, a significant fraction of graduating students fail to meet the standards of both faculty and employers. (Here is a detailed summary of evidence bearing on the urgency of improving quality, access, and affordability.)

• Equitable Access - For many reasons, students from underserved groups have less of a chance of persisting and graduating than students from luckier groups. For students from lower income backgrounds who drop out before graduating (for whatever reason) have probably lowered their lifetime income because they tried going to college.

Many of us believe that teaching organized around content coverage and presentation (lecture monologues; textbooks) is biased against students from underserved groups. The evidence: when courses and programs are preconceived around research-validated principles, all students do better; these same practices unshackle students from underserved groups to do just as well by the time of graduation.

When students from poor backgrounds take a risk on higher education, borrow money, and then are filtered out, they’re often worse off economically than if they’d never made the attempt. Physicians often swear to administer only beneficial treatments and to do no harm. Colleges and universities should live by that same standard.

Affordability issues are pretty obvious, especially for students who finish deeply in debt (or who don’t complete the degree but are deeply in debt - an even bigger problem). Colleges and universities must terminate important programs because they can’t afford to offer them. And “burnout” is what happens when faculty and staff feel they can no longer afford the time to do their jobs.