Dear Friends and Colleagues,
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes a cave where prisoners have lived their entire lives, watching shadows projected onto a wall by objects just outside their view. The shadows are their entire reality. When one prisoner escapes and sees the real world for the first time, he realizes the extraordinary limitations of a “caves-eye” view and returns to the cave to (try to) persuade his fellow prisoners to take leave.
In some ways, higher education has been trapped in Plato’s cave, relying on college rankings and peverse incentives that focus on a narrow set of highly selective institutions serving a small fraction of students. While the rankings provide one image of excellence, the true breadth of the postsecondary sector’s contributions has remained largely hidden in the shadows.
Fortunately, that is changing. New approaches to postsecondary education are emerging at a rapid clip, and the national appetite to align policy and public capital with institutions delivering student outcomes is growing. Earlier this month, I had the privilege of speaking at the National Conference of State Legislatures Summit with leaders from Western Governors University, the Higher Education Commission for the State of Massachusetts, and Smith College. The discussion reaffirmed the urgency to forge a new social contract between higher education and the American public, rooted in student access, student persistence, graduation and employment. It also reinforced that the most highly valued colleges and universities are those that focus not on prestige, but on performance, engagement and impact.
The good new is pathfinding institutions exist in all corners of the nation. They are large institutions and small, specialized and liberal arts. Their approaches vary widely. They range from Arizona State University to Blackfoot Community College in Montana, Ball State in Indiana, to Champlain College in Vermont. What binds them together is their dedication to student success - to connecting student aspirations, workforce demands, and economic opportunity.
As students return to campuses this fall, our nation’s higher education compass is being recalibrated. The institutions heading true north are the ones demonstrating student success—not status—is the most powerful measure of excellence.
In partnership,
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