Higher education accountability is in the air.

The U.S. Department of Education wants to require campuses to provide new summary data on their students’ performance and on the cost of attendance. This would be in addition to the colleges’ regular reports to a massive database of educational statistics known as Ipeds, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

The feds are requesting that campuses report whether they use standardized tests to measure what students learn, and if they do, to provide links to the Web sites where test results are posted. The department would then link to those URL’s from its own college-search Web site, the College Opportunities Online Locator, or COOL. (Goldie Blumenstyk, “While Awaiting Legislation, Education Dept. May Use Regulation to Get More Information From Colleges,” February 19, 2007)

You bet. Such comparisons would expose the poor performance of some campuses, which the status quo diehards are resisting at all cost — for example, in the form of the “hit job” on Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to which Mark refers below.

Speaking of comparisons, a report last fall from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development indicated the U.S. is falling behind other countries in educational-attainment levels. (Stu Woo, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “U.S. Slipping in Educational-Attainment Levels, Says Report Comparing OECD Countries,” September 12, 2006)

Recent research by the Lumina Foundation for Education reinforces this same conclusion. According to its spokesman, “Other countries are not complacent, and their young people are increasing their educational attainment levels.”

And this is the same argument made by columnist Thomas L. Friedman in his recent book The World Is Flat. Other countries, he writes, are gaining on and even surpassing the U.S. in areas where it formerly reigned supreme, such as technology and science education. (Martin Van Der Werf, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Conference Roundup: American Colleges Seem Ill-Prepared for Foreign Competition and Natural Calamities,” February 20, 2007)

No wonder the increasing federal pressure on our colleges to come clean about the truth of their performance.