U.S. Higher Education Effectiveness

This volume of RSF presents new evidence about higher education in the United States. As we use the term, higher education is synonymous with postsecondary education and includes twoyear community colleges, fouryear colleges, and universities that offer graduate training in addition to fouryear baccalaureate degrees. As editors, we have been charged with writing an introduction that is more than a summary of the research papers to follow. Instead, we were asked to produce an overview of the key facts and themes about U.S. higher education and its effectiveness that will be important both for specialists and for readers who are new to the subject. This volume focuses on effectiveness, a topic that has not been as prominent in scholarship as we believe it should be. Scholars of higher education have been principally interested in how colleges and universities work and what forces in their environments lead them to change. But most policymakers (and most of the public) do not want simply to understand institutions, but rather to know how to make them work better than they currently do. Because colleges and universities are central institutions in American society, their effectiveness should be considered a topic of national priority. The meaning of effectiveness depends on what society expects to achieve through higher education. We begin by asking the basic questions: What are the functions of higher education in society? What does effectiveness mean in this context? And how can effectiveness be measured once it is defined? After this discussion, we briefly describe the historical development of American higher education and its current structure and challenges. We do so to set a context for the issues explored here, an analysis of the effectiveness of U.S. higher education in relation to systemlevel, campuslevel, and classroomlevel effects. This threefold division based on the primary actors involved in effectiveness policies and practices provides a useful heuristic for dividing the topics we consider in this issue.1 Because we believe systemslevel actions will be of the great-