Pursuing Quality, Access, and Affordability: A Field Guide to Improving Higher Education

Whether they recognize it or not, virtually all colleges and universities face three Grand
Challenges:

• Improve the learning outcomes of a higher education: A large majority of college graduates are weak in capabilities that faculty and employers both see as crucial.
• Extend more equitable access to degrees: Too often, students from underserved groups and poor households either don’t enter college or else drop out without a degree. The latter group may be worse off economically than if they’d never attempted college.
• Make academic programs more affordable (in money and time) for students and other important stakeholder groups: Many potential students believe they lack the money or time needed for academic success. Many faculty believe they don’t have time to make their courses and degree programs more effective. Many institutions believe they can’t afford to improve outcomes.

These challenges are global. But, in a higher education system such as that in the United States, the primary response must be institutional. This book analyzes how, over the years, six pioneering colleges and universities have begun to make visible, cumulative progress on all three fronts.

Stephen C. Ehrmann has received two national awards for hiscontributions to distance education research. He previously served as ViceProvost for Teaching & Learning at the George Washington University;Associate Director for Research and Evaluation at the Kirwan Center forAcademic Innovation at the University System of Maryland; Vice President of thenon-profit Teaching Learning and Technology Group; Director of the FlashlightProgram for the Evaluation of Educational Uses of Technology; Senior ProgramOfficer for Interactive Technologies with the Annenberg/CPB Projects; ProgramOfficer with the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE); andDirector of Educational Research and Assistance at The Evergreen State College.He might be best known as the co-author of the 1996 article, "Implementingthe Seven Principles: Technology as Lever." He has a Ph.D. in managementand higher education from MIT.

Jillian Kinzie is Associate Director of the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Institute. She is also a senior scholar with the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) project.