Colleges Urged to Embrace Entrepreneurial Reforms

Colleges and universities (and the states that regulate them) need to embrace an entrepreneurial approach to reforms, according to a report issued Thursday by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Among the recommendations:

• States should give higher levels of funding to institutions with better student outcomes.
• Accreditation should "place the fewest possible restrictions on both new and existing providers to encourage innovation." Further, accreditation "should focus much less on inputs and much more on outcome measures, such as student performance and loan default rates."
• Online instruction "should be largely deregulated as long as minimum course-level outcomes are specified."
• Universities "should identify and financially incentivize those professors whose time would be more productively spent in the classroom rather than conducting and publishing scholarly research."