Arthur Levine: The Truman Commission Redux
[Arthur Levine is president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.]
In his previous post, Jamie Merisotis makes a compelling case for the importance of seeing American higher education in the context of higher education worldwide, and for treating our system of higher education as an imperiled competitive advantage.
As Jamie notes, U.S. educational attainment “has remained flat for 40 years” -- a fact all the more worrisome in light of rising college enrollments , with too many students failing to complete degrees. Getting more students from an increasingly diverse school-age population to and through college has become a national economic imperative. If we are going to get back to #1, it is time to give the nation’s colleges and universities some close, serious systematic attention.
It is time, in fact, for a second Truman Commission on Higher Education. In 1946, President Truman convened a commission to chart directions for higher education in America in the post-war era. The Commission’s plan, laid out in its 1947 report, Higher Education for Democracy, has guided the nation’s colleges and universities for more than 60 years.
The far-seeing Truman Commission identified barriers to access in higher education that needed to be surmounted: race, religion, gender, income, and geography. It called for the radical expansion of two-year colleges, which it labeled community colleges, and stated that 49 percent of the population was capable of higher education. It recommended a program of financial aid and a renewal of general education. It described the years after the war as “a time of crisis” and saw education as “the biggest and most hopeful” potential remedy.
A little more than a decade later, Clark Kerr led the creation of the California Master Plan, built largely on the Truman Commission recommendations. The plan defined the mission of higher education in the state and created three distinct sectors to assure both access and excellence. It also provided choice, so that students could attend the sector of higher education best matched to their interests and abilities. The model was deemed so important that TIME magazine put Kerr on its cover for this work.
Five years later, with the Higher Education Act of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson provided the financial aid programs to make these goals, to a great extent, realities. And so, because of the work of the Truman Commission and the models it spawned, access, choice and excellence have been the guiding principles of American higher education — at least rhetorically — for over half a century.
Today, with the promises of access and choice fading and excellence threatened, we need another Truman Commission to help American higher education face challenges offered by the global marketplace, as well as major economic, demographic, and technological shifts...
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed (blog)
In his previous post, Jamie Merisotis makes a compelling case for the importance of seeing American higher education in the context of higher education worldwide, and for treating our system of higher education as an imperiled competitive advantage.
As Jamie notes, U.S. educational attainment “has remained flat for 40 years” -- a fact all the more worrisome in light of rising college enrollments , with too many students failing to complete degrees. Getting more students from an increasingly diverse school-age population to and through college has become a national economic imperative. If we are going to get back to #1, it is time to give the nation’s colleges and universities some close, serious systematic attention.
It is time, in fact, for a second Truman Commission on Higher Education. In 1946, President Truman convened a commission to chart directions for higher education in America in the post-war era. The Commission’s plan, laid out in its 1947 report, Higher Education for Democracy, has guided the nation’s colleges and universities for more than 60 years.
The far-seeing Truman Commission identified barriers to access in higher education that needed to be surmounted: race, religion, gender, income, and geography. It called for the radical expansion of two-year colleges, which it labeled community colleges, and stated that 49 percent of the population was capable of higher education. It recommended a program of financial aid and a renewal of general education. It described the years after the war as “a time of crisis” and saw education as “the biggest and most hopeful” potential remedy.
A little more than a decade later, Clark Kerr led the creation of the California Master Plan, built largely on the Truman Commission recommendations. The plan defined the mission of higher education in the state and created three distinct sectors to assure both access and excellence. It also provided choice, so that students could attend the sector of higher education best matched to their interests and abilities. The model was deemed so important that TIME magazine put Kerr on its cover for this work.
Five years later, with the Higher Education Act of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson provided the financial aid programs to make these goals, to a great extent, realities. And so, because of the work of the Truman Commission and the models it spawned, access, choice and excellence have been the guiding principles of American higher education — at least rhetorically — for over half a century.
Today, with the promises of access and choice fading and excellence threatened, we need another Truman Commission to help American higher education face challenges offered by the global marketplace, as well as major economic, demographic, and technological shifts...