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CED or the Committee for Economic Development has released a report on boosting performance of post-secondary education. Sadly, the authors of the report have not acknowledged and pointed out to the unrealistic business plan of trying to boost performance substantially without boosting investment.

If they had done so, they would have played a significant role in bringing about affordable, high quality education by stimulating genuine growth.  In three regards, CED however has played a major role.

The report firstly lays stress on broad access institutions. This means institutions such as for-profit colleges, technical and community colleges, affordable and less selective private, public and regional colleges.

Flagship publics are the only institutions featured by policy makers making it look like our future depends on them. If we wish to prepare professors and create new knowledge, it is essential encouraging research universities especially in professional and graduate education.

However, privileges are offered by public policies only to institutions that are already advantaged. Four year access institutions, on which our success hinges, are completely ignored even by the Obama administration which focuses a lot on community colleges.

Some policy makers claim that for-profit universities are efficient and unfortunately, the CED report endorses their claim. This is not efficiency. If anything, it is false and misconstrued. Both for the government and students, this education sector are sinfully expensive.

They charge exorbitant tuition fee and enjoy enormous amounts of federal student aid. At the government’s expense, many students default on their loans. Tab on the loan defaults in other words are picked up by the government which means by the taxpayers.

The report also emphasizes the importance of state policy’s focus in going beyond the approach that deals with one institution at a time. This takes into account the fact that higher education is a highly valuable asset that determines our future and must not be considered only in terms of cost. Most of the states have failed to devise strategic methods to divide labor among institutions rationally and to offer higher quality education at affordable rates.

The report rightly points out that standard policy cannot fit all states as each one has to be dealt with in a different manner depending on specific issues. Through implementation and initiative, a wide latitude should be provided for institutional innovation and strategic plan should be developed towards achieving this.

Colleges and universities think in terms of net tuition revenue and this is taking higher education further away from our low income students. This business mentality is a barrier to our country’s growth demographic.

It seems CED report has let go a major opportunity to point out relevant issues. Our country needs enlightened academic, business and government leaders to realize that nothing can be achieved only through vision and policies. We need more resources to develop further.

The report concludes that in keeping with the realistic situation of severe budget constraints, post-secondary education must be fine-tuned to boost performance mainly through innovation and productivity gains without relying on money.

Rather than getting the large corporations and the affluent to invest in boosting quality, affordable higher education access to all, the burden will only further shift to lower and middle income families.