The public has grown weary of secrecy, tired of government stonewalling and corporate obfuscation.  They react with head-shaking disbelief as backroom dealings are brought into the light, exposing sweetheart contracts and revelations of failing financial institutions lavishing exorbitant bonuses on executives in reward for gross mismanagement. “Where is the accountability?” the public asks while demanding greater institutional transparency – and an unfiltered view into hitherto closed-door practices.

That fervent charge toward transparency has breached the walls of academe, spearheaded by the 2006 report of the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education.  As Bill Pepicello, president of University of Phoenix, explains, the study, known as the “Spellings Report” after its progenitor, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, bemoaned the “less than inspiring realities of postsecondary education” in the United States.  It depicted higher education’s aversion to transparency and its resistance to revealing deep data to stakeholders, students, taxpayers, faculty, and alumni.  The commission envisioned an open culture of shared information, with colleges and universities joining in the creation of “a consumer-friendly database featuring useful, reliable information” that would allow institutional performances to be easily tracked and compared. 

Such calls for transparency have continued under the administration of President Barack Obama, who has made transparency a cornerstone of his ambitious plans to reform America’s colleges and boost graduation rates.  He’s called for the need to track and assess student progress and publicly compare performances, to ensure the nation that institutions are producing the skilled workers needed for a productive future.  And he’s pushed for increased availability of student financing, putting college within reach of an ever-widening group of learners but placing even greater pressure on higher education institutions to respond to a growing diversity of needs.

Before Obama and Spellings, the quest for transparency was ignited by the Higher Education Act of 1965, when colleges and universities receiving federal student financial aid were first required to report certain information — enrollment, graduation rates, student-to-teacher ratios, and other basic figures — to the Department of Education for entry into the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS.  The intent was to ensure that colleges and universities receiving federal financial aid were using the funds in a fair and honest manner —and with a measurable return on the investment of public dollars.  

IPEDS’s scope would be expanded by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, yet, as Pepicello notes, the data collected by IPEDS still offers an incomplete view of higher education.  “IPEDS focuses on first-time, full-time students with no prior college experience,” says Pepicello, “even though that group of so-called ‘traditional students’ has become the minority on campus.”  Indeed, according to figures from the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 70 percent of all undergraduates today are classified as “non-traditional” students: adults, working full-time, many with families, and who, for whatever reason, delayed their pursuit of higher education.  “It’s the traditional students that are still being measured in national reports,” says Pepicello, “yet they are not representative of the majority of the student population, either nationally or specifically at University of Phoenix. Only 7 percent of our students can be called ‘traditional.’”    

Says Adam Honea, university provost, “We’re a purpose-driven organization that grew out of a social mission to provide open access to higher education for working adults, who have been long underserved by higher education.”  In the 1970s, when the university was founded, there simply were no alternatives for people seeking a higher degree while trying to balance work, study, family, and social life.  Today, the university enrolls more than 350,000 students both online and at nearly 200 campuses and learning centers around the country. With more than 100 degree programs at the associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels, covering in-demand employment areas from business and technology to health care and education, the university has transformed itself from a degree-completion school into a comprehensive institution of higher education, actively responsive to the demands of a changing workplace. “Our institutional success,” says Honea, “derives directly from our academic success, which is the result of being steadfastly focused on helping working students obtain the education they desire.”

For such a wide and varied institution, transparency, to be meaningful, must go beyond mere reporting of enrollment and graduation rates.  Other measures are needed to identify who exactly is being educated, and how that education fulfills a school’s stated mission. “We need to develop a broader definition of transparency,” says Pepicello, “one based not only on disclosing relevant information to the public, but also on providing a much more detailed explanation of the content and depth of a school’s institutional offerings in light of the population it aims to serve.”.

The university’s first attempt at creating that new model of transparency appeared at the end of 2008, with the release of its inaugural Academic Annual Report — a pioneering study that formed a solid framework for presenting a more complete portrait of today’s working learner.  “The report is an open look at the variety of ways in which the university measures itself in relation to its mission and social agenda of inclusion,” says Honea.  The structure was suggested by the Spellings Report, which identified four key areas for evaluation: access, accountability, quality, and affordability.  

To a large degree, the annual report was generated from an internally developed dashboard of key indicators — a “robust set of measurements,” says Pepicello.  The report contrasts profiles of students measured under the IPEDS system — those who start at one institution and complete their entire degree at that same institution —and students at University of Phoenix, most of whom have accumulated varying degrees of college credits at other institutions before enrolling at the university.  In fact, until the advent of the associate degree program at the university, students with zero transfer credits were a rarity.  Moreover, because of the university’s open-access admissions policy, a large number of students enter with multiple risk factors beyond the national norm, ranging from the stress of full-time employment to the pressures of parenthood, all of which impinge upon student success.

Once this population had been clearly defined, the next step in the assessment process —and in transparent reporting — was to delineate the expected outcomes for these students as articulated in the university-wide “learning goals”: professional competence and values, critical thinking and problem solving, communication, information utilization, and collaboration.  These overarching goals are applicable to each student in every program at all degree levels.  And to ensure students are meeting the goals, each college within the university system has developed its own assessment matrix that outlines specific outcomes aligned to the learning goals, with multiple methods identified to assess each outcome.

The university’s inaugural academic report places student performance in a national context through the application of external measures of success, including the Educational Testing Service’s Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (MAPP).  The assessment revealed that, while the university’s open access policy resulted in students entering the school with lower scores in general education areas as compared to more exclusive schools, by the time of graduation its students perform at levels comparable to seniors at other institutions.  Furthermore, comparative data from the Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (SAILS) was also reported, showing that university students performed comparably to or better than students at other institutions surveyed. 

Ultimately, says Pepicello, the assessment process provides a roadmap to continuous improvement and that, thus armed with accurate information, the university can effectively reallocate, adjust, and reinvest its resources to enhance the student learning experience and bolster student success. And through the transparency of its reporting, the path of those improvements can be openly tracked.

As Pepicello explains, the temptation facing administrators is to disclose only information that puts their institutions in a good light.  Such practices run contrary to the public’s need for reliable information about performance.  “Higher education has a professional obligation to disclose information relevant to students making decisions about college,” Pepicello says, “and a responsibility to give an account of that data whether positve or negative.”  The university’s report revealed, for instance, that its bachelor’s degree completion rate, when matched against national figures, fell short by five percentage points (38 percent versus 43 percent).  “We want people to know about the good things we’re doing, as well as those areas needing improvement,” says Pepicello.  “Institutions should look at themselves critically and say ‘This is where we need to be better and this is what we need to get there’.”  With the baseline data presented in the academic report, the university offers the public the means of charting progress in subsequent assessments, the next of which is due out at the end of 2009, while presenting a model of transparency for other institutions to consider.  “Why not be open about it?’ asks Pepicello.  “When colleges and universities reveal deficiencies, they strive to be better.  And when institutions of higher education improve, everyone benefits.”