Is Higher Education’s Value a Real Question?

As president of an accrediting agency, I wanted to understand whether our institutions were delivering on the promise of a better future. We gathered outcomes data from our member institutions and made it publicly available — to students, families, taxpayers, policymakers, and the institutions themselves. Not six or ten years after the fact like most data that people talk about, and not after the information had become too old to help a student make a decision or a college change course. We gathered current data on how students are succeeding, where they are struggling, and where institutions need to improve.

The goal was not to prove that every college is succeeding. The goal was to make the evidence visible.

Where are students completing courses? Where are they persisting? Where are they graduating? Where are they transferring? Where are they passing licensure exams? Where are they finding employment? Where are institutions moving students toward opportunity, and where are they falling short?

Transparency matters, but transparency alone is not improvement.

The work did not stop with dashboards. The data became a tool for action. We looked for bright spots. We asked which institutions were improving, which practices appeared to be making a difference, and how those practices could be shared. We worked with foundations and institutional leaders to identify, support, and replicate efforts that were moving the needle for students.

We pushed institutions to do better, not by pretending that value was automatic, but by insisting that value must be demonstrated through student outcomes.

The results have been encouraging, and they have also been ignored in the national conversation about “value.”

Across ACCJC institutions, recent reporting shows gains in enrollment, course success, credential attainment, transfer, and workforce outcomes, while institutional ROI metrics indicate that many students recover the cost of their education in a relatively short period of time. Institutions are paying closer attention to whether students are making progress, completing what they start, and reaching the goals that brought them to college in the first place.

This is exactly the kind of work that critics of higher education have long said they wanted: better evidence, more transparency, stronger accountability, and a clearer connection between public investment and student success.

Yet when the data became public and the outcomes improved, the response from many of those who had demanded this kind of accountability was a long and deeply disturbing silence.

There was no real engagement with the evidence and little recognition of the progress. No meaningful acknowledgment that institutions serving some of the nation’s most complex and economically vulnerable students were showing measurable improvement.

As a former professor of clinical psychology, I can tell you that silence is revealing.

If the question of higher education’s value is real, then the evidence should matter. Improvement should matter. Transparency should matter. Progress should matter, even when it complicates a story that higher education is simply too expensive, too ineffective, or too disconnected from the needs of students and society.

Criticism of higher education is not only fair, it is necessary. Colleges and universities should be challenged on cost, completion, debt, quality, transfer, workforce outcomes, and whether students are better off because they enrolled.

But skepticism becomes something less useful when it is unmoved by evidence.

If improvement is ignored because it does not fit the narrative, the conversation is no longer about accountability. It is about cynicism. And cynicism is not a strategy for serving students. It is a tactic.

A serious conversation about higher education’s value should begin with several commitments. We should be honest about cost. We should be clear about outcomes. We should distinguish among institutions rather than treating all of higher education as a single enterprise. We should recognize that value is not measured only by salary, though earnings matter. We should insist that colleges improve where students are not succeeding. And when improvement happens, we should be willing to say so.

That last part is important.

Public accountability cannot be a one-way exercise in condemnation. If the only acceptable conclusion is that higher education is failing, no amount of evidence will matter. If data are demanded but disregarded, transparency becomes a performance rather than a tool. If institutions are criticized for poor outcomes but receive no recognition for better ones, the incentive is not improvement. It is resignation.

Students deserve better than that. We all deserve better.

Students deserve institutions that are honest about their results and relentless about improving them. They deserve policymakers who ask hard questions and stay engaged long enough to hear the answers. They deserve a public conversation that understands both the failures and the promise of higher education.

So yes, let us ask whether higher education delivers value.

Let us ask it seriously. Let us ask it with evidence. Let us ask it with enough humility to recognize complexity, enough courage to confront failure, and enough fairness to acknowledge progress.

Otherwise, we are not really asking a question.

We are performing a conclusion.