Washington – The University of Colorado has made a dramatic turnaround in credibility but is threatened by a growing lack of confidence in higher education, CU president Hank Brown said Monday.
Brown told the National Press Club that reforms during his tenure, such as streamlining the staff, have eased the problems with state funding and improved the quality and diversity of CU’s student body.
But Brown, who will leave his post next year, said CU remains vulnerable to crisis unless universities begin to provide detailed data about student performance and progress to alleviate public concerns about the quality of college education.
“A revolution is on the way on how we rate institutions of higher education, based not on inputs, but based more and more on measures of what students learn,” he said.
Brown said the renewed confidence would come by tactics that include states releasing now-private results of scores on tests such as the certified public accounting exam.
It’s an idea encompassed in a 2006 federal survey termed “the Spellings report” that critics slammed as a formula for testing overkill.
Brown countered that students already take many tests and that accountability is the only way to increase the long- term funding stream.
In the past decade in Colorado, the percentage of state funding for higher education fell from 17 percent to 9 percent. At the same time, CU has dealt with negative publicity from professor Ward Churchill’s remarks about victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks and from allegations that the school recruited athletes with sex and alcohol.
After restructuring the tenure system, toughening penalties for alcohol abuse and implementing other reforms, CU witnessed a 13 percent increase in applications this year and private donations are at an all-time high, Brown said.
“What leapt out at me is how far the University of Colorado has come,” said Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., who attended Monday’s speech.
Brown emphasized that Colorado constitutional measures effectively limit the money available to higher education. And there is a national trend of declining university revenue at a time when higher education is in need of a broad fix.
