Why we need charter public colleges

OPINION:

In 2014 state community colleges and four-year colleges taught more than 13 million students, or about 76 percent of all college students in the nation. But these public institutions are in serious trouble.

An astonishing 43 percent of public four-year college students don’t graduate within six years, and only about 20 percent of community college students gain a degree or certificate in a comparable period of time. And college administrators, to their shame, can’t or don’t control their costs, and for that reason, students pay ever-increasing tuition and often end up with an unmanageable load of debt.

We desperately need to rethink this costly and ineffective educational model. Given such consistently poor results, governors and legislators should recognize that it’s time to experiment with radically new ways of providing quality higher education at affordable prices.

State governments can and should create a handful of charter four-year colleges and community colleges to develop and test new, productive and affordable models.

The path to reform is right before our eyes. Governors and lawmakers need only look at the K — 12 charter school reforms that began in 1991. Since then, 42 states have authorized charter schools, and now more than 6,700 public charter schools enroll more than 2.9 million students from coast to coast. With some exceptions, the charter movement is a thriving reform effort that has improved the standardized test scores of its students and their graduation rates. Charter schools have delivered these results at significantly lower costs.

Some might argue that existing colleges can reform themselves. But the existing college establishment appears to be hopelessly addicted to swollen bureaucracy, outdated pedagogy, hidebound traditions, entrenched faculty, inflexible unions, departmental silos, unbending orthodoxy, and a hundred reasons not to change.

What the nation needs is some creative experimentation in building from scratch and operating a handful of no-frills public colleges. The mission of these colleges would be to graduate students on time, with job-ready skills and degrees, and little or no debt. Achieving that purpose would require that the colleges control costs relentlessly.

What might a charter college look like? A charter college would focus exclusively on education and training in a frugal setting: no school-supported extracurricular clubs, sports, theaters, museums or orchestras. A low-cost charter college would typically meet the frugal and pragmatic needs of the majority of students who don’t play sports or act in a campus play, students of modest means, and most adult students.

How would a charter college operate? To accommodate students’ traditional and nontraditional learning needs and to accelerate progress toward graduation, charter colleges would offer both classroom and online courses and degrees.

Charter college faculty would teach full-time year-round and they would have no research obligations. As in well-managed K — 12 charter schools, faculty compensation would be based on great teaching and on the success of students in standardized testing, graduation and job placement.

As with most K — 12 charter schools, charter colleges must avoid faculty unions and their adversarial, obstructionist culture.

Rigorous evaluation of this new charter experiment is crucial. Each charter four-year college should have measurable goals, such as accelerated three- to four-year bachelor’s degree programs that set out clear standards of student performance and institutional accountability, high graduation rates, and a cap on student expenses of about $11,000 for a bachelor’s degree. Charter community colleges can specify such measurable goals as minimum completion or graduation rates for specialized training, certificates and degrees, and the completion, in one to two years, of an Associate in Arts or Associate in Science degree at a cost of roughly $4,500.

In addition to traditional degrees and certificates, charter colleges can and should guarantee student proficiency by means other than a vague and often unreliable letter grade — for example, standardized subject-matter exit exams and nationally recognized assessment tools such as competency tests, academic badges, and WorkKeys so students graduate with a portfolio of demonstrated skills that employers can rely upon.

Finally, path-breaking charter colleges should establish close working relationships with job placement companies such as Manpower and Kelly Services to maximize the likelihood that students will get a good job upon graduation.

With the new charter colleges, governors and state legislators, as well as students and parents, will have hard data on the extent to which students can graduate on time, at an affordable price, and with a portfolio of measurable learning and skills. The accomplishments of the new experimental charter colleges can be used to compare charter colleges with more traditional colleges in their responsiveness, quality, cost and productivity.

With new blood and fresh ideas percolating through Congress and the states, it’s time to rethink the college education process and bring to post-secondary education many of the innovative reforms that are improving K — 12 education, health care, nonprofits and businesses. It’s also time to make affordability a top priority.

• James Fay has been a dean and academic vice president at both public and for-profit four-year and community colleges. Jane O’Neil is a former academic administrator, economist and higher education consultant.