Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 34

al government can't and shouldn't judge how well a university teaches particular subjects like linguistics, anthropology, or
chemical engineering, it can prevent abject failure. There's no
such thing as a good college where the vast majority of students
drop out, can't find jobs, or default on their loans. Colleges that
consistently fail by these measures would be ineligible for government grants.

he second major pillar of the plan would be a set of research investments and policy changes designed to connect all of the participating colleges into a network of
learning- and student-focused institutions. It would begin
with a simple but profound change in the way colleges relate
to one another: credit transfer. Every college in the network
would be required to accept credits from every other college
in the network.
The existing college credit system is a disastrous remnant
of the time when most students could only take classes from
the single college they were admitted to. Today, assembling a
degree from credits earned at multiple colleges is a nightmare

The current system
presupposed that state
governments will continue
to sustain and expand
public colleges and
universities. That turns
out to be deeply mistaken.
of bureaucratic uncertainty. Millions of hours and dollars are
lost every year when colleges routinely refuse to accept grades
earned by students who earn credits from multiple institutions,
a common occurrence for adult, part-time, and other "nontraditional" students who now make up the majority of undergraduates. Countless students end up borrowing and paying to
take the same classes twice. Under this system, that wouldn't
be a problem.
Individual institutions would retain the discretion to
set standards for what courses count for academic majors,
including, if they chose, a mandate that all courses that
count to the student's major be taken at the college granting the degree. Colleges and academic departments have
different approaches to disciplinary learning, and that
autonomy and diversity should be respected. The same
would be true for colleges that maintain an authentic core
curriculum-not a vague set of "Pick two from Column C"
distribution requirements, but actual courses that all students are required to take. That said, most undergraduate
credits are not earned in pursuit of majors or core curricula.
34 September/October 2020

For all other degree requirements, students in the network
would enjoy complete credit reciprocity.
Because nearly all colleges now offer online courses, this
would give students the best of traditional in-person and online
learning-the kind of intense socialization, peer and faculty relationships, and mentoring that in-person education provides,
with the freedom to choose from among the best online courses offered by thousands of course catalogs nationwide. It would
inspire colleges to improve their online technological tools and
pedagogical skills. Since everyone in the network would use the
uniform fee schedule, the cost would be the same.
Over time, this would give colleges powerful incentives
to cooperate and specialize. In the current cut-throat, statusdriven market system, every college is an island. Even in the
face of an existential threat in the form of global pandemic disaster, colleges are not working together. (If you won't do something even though not doing it might literally kill you, you're
never going to do it.) This culture of extreme educational individuality is replicated at the course and instructor levels. A
typical full-time professor may have dozens of colleagues at institutions around the world with whom she is in constant, ongoing communication and collaboration on scholarship and
research. These powerful networks are stable even as scholars
move among institutions. Yet when it comes to teaching, there
is nothing similar. Every lecturer stands alone.
The combination of scaled-up credit reciprocity across a
huge network serving millions of students would create strong
incentives for colleges to pool their resources and offer outstanding versions of the high-volume courses commonly taken
by many students. The price tag for a single luxury campus fitness center that has become table stakes for competing in the
market for upper-middle-class students is far more than colleges currently spend on developing, say, a world-class sequence of
undergraduate courses that could be used and adapted by many
different colleges, in person and online.
The new system would also fundamentally change the
terms of college competition. Instead of being trapped in a
price-discounting and high-end-amenities arms race, colleges
would have good reasons to create great courses that attract
some of the millions of potential students within the network.
College accreditors would serve as watchdogs to prevent unscrupulous schools from lowering standards to sell easy credits.
Cooperation across the network would be bolstered by a
large new investment in research and development. The federal
government gives higher education $30 billion annually to conduct research in nearly every field of inquiry one can imagine,
but very little on higher education itself. Every year, millions of
students take hundreds of thousands of courses, almost none
of which are subject to the kind of careful scientific inquiry that
universities themselves specialize in conducting. This new research effort would take advantage of the size of the new college network to conduct ongoing research on best educational
practices and promising innovations.
The system would create its own kinds of competitive
pressures-more centered on academic quality than the cur-

Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

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