Education secretary assails state of colleges

Saying that U.S. higher education had slipped behind its global competition, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Tuesday laid out her plans for an overhaul, including creating a federal database to track students' academic progress and revamping the financial-aid system.

Spellings, responding to a national commission report that called for a broad shake-up of higher education, also urged the nation's nearly 4,000 colleges and universities to cut costs and do a better job of monitoring — and proving — what they give their students.

"Our universities are known as the best in the world, and a lot of people will tell you things are going just fine," Spellings said. "But when 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs require post-secondary education, are we satisfied with 'just fine'?"

She said it was not satisfactory, for instance, that the rise in college tuition in recent years has outpaced the rate of inflation, that fewer and fewer students finish their undergraduate degrees in four or even six years, and that growing numbers of students graduate with significant debt.

"None of that seems 'fine' to me," Spellings said.

She said she wanted to increase students' access to college by improving their academic preparation during high school and by aligning high school standards with college coursework. That would come, she said, by working with Congress to extend the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law into high schools, an idea Congress had greeted coolly thus far.

Spellings also said she would work with Congress to increase the amount of federal financial aid available for needy students, although she stopped short of endorsing a specific increase in the amount of the Pell Grant, the basic building block of federal aid for low-income students.

Spellings' proposals came in response to a report submitted last week by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which criticized rising tuition costs and what it said were signs of "unwarranted complacency" on some college campuses.

Spellings appointed the panel of higher education and business leaders a year ago and asked it to determine whether U.S. colleges were producing students capable of competing in the global economy.

In too many areas, its final report said, "Americans just aren't getting the education that they need — and that they deserve."

The report proposed that colleges and universities regularly test their students to learn whether schools are meeting their goals and promises. Those results would then form part of a national database that would help students and their parents learn about and choose colleges.