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UM board determined to restore order to campus
The American college campus can return to sanity. It won’t be easy, but Ann Arbor is showing how this can happen.
Washington, DC—The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) yesterday sent a letter to all members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, urging them to query secretary of education nominee Linda McMahon on a number of crucial questions as she seeks to lead the $80 billion agency. Since 1995, ACTA has worked with college governing boards, administrators, federal and state policymakers, alumni, and donors to ensure that all college students are able to receive a high-quality education at an affordable price. Below are several of the questions ACTA posed to the committee.
On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump said that he would “fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” alluding to the nation’s higher accreditation system. Groups like ACTA have criticized the current accreditation process for creating barriers to innovation while failing to ensure academic quality, pointing to the appalling number of accredited institutions—including public and nonprofit—with four-year graduation rates under 20%.
Q: Should you become Secretary, what would the Department’s stance toward accreditors be?
After finding clear evidence that colleges and universities are raising tuition rates to cover billions of dollars of spending on amenities and administrative bureaucracies, ACTA declared that “the student debt crisis is fundamentally a spending crisis.”
Q: Do you agree that institutions are responsible for raising the cost of college beyond what the average American family can afford? If so, how will you hold universities accountable for driving their students into debt?
For decades, numerous surveys have shown an alarming decline in civic literacy rates in this country. Just last year, a survey by ACTA found that one-third of college students believe that U.S. senators serve four-year terms. We are also seeing a trend of schools and centers being created at colleges and universities, such as the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, to combat this growing problem.
Q: Should you be confirmed to serve as Secretary of Education, would you make civic literacy a priority?
Read the full letter here.
The American college campus can return to sanity. It won’t be easy, but Ann Arbor is showing how this can happen.
Higher education has taken a beating lately. The industry has been roiled by seemingly endless crises on topics ranging from affordibility and student debt to free speech and antisemitism. It is hardly surprising that public confidence in higher education has plummeted, as over two-thirds of Americans now believe it is headed in the wrong direction.
Launched in 1995, we are the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives an intellectually rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.
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