Education Leaders Join with Council for Aid to Education to Promote Wide Use of Collegiate Learning Assessment

The Council for Aid to Education, which has been part of the RAND Corporation since 1996, has become an independent nonprofit organization to better promote wide use of its Collegiate Learning Assessment, an innovative series of tests designed to help colleges measure and improve the quality of their instruction.

RAND and CAE announced the action today and said that a group of nationally prominent higher education leaders headed by former Yale University President Benno Schmidt will join a new CAE Board of Directors to help guide the major new initiative. CAE's goal is to move the Collegiate Learning Assessment from its development and testing phase into wide use among the nation's 4,000 two-year and four-year colleges and universities.

The Collegiate Learning Assessment is a national effort to assess the quality of undergraduate education in the United States by directly measuring student learning. The performance-based assessment is designed to be a model that university administrators, faculty, students, parents, employers and policymakers can all use to evaluate academic programs and to improve student learning.

The assessment is focused on the general education skills students need as they graduate and enter the workforce, and is designed to provide clear information to students, parents, teachers about how much students are gaining from their college experience.

“The Collegiate Learning Assessment has the potential to improve the quality of college instruction by giving educators objective measures of the performance of their institutions in helping students learn,” Schmidt said. “This will give colleges and universities better information than they have ever had about their effectiveness as teaching institutions.”

“Being a part of RAND has been an ideal situation that allowed us do the research that provided the basis for the Collegiate Learning Assessment,” said Roger Benjamin, president of CAE. “But as we move out of the pilot stage to widespread adoption, it's important for us to have a governing board composed of recognized leaders in higher education, with a broad spectrum of perspectives.”

“This change represents an important step as CAE goes from creating and testing the Collegiate Learning Assessment to broad implementation in higher education,” said RAND Executive Vice President Michael Rich, who has served as chairman of the CAE Board of Directors since CAE became part of RAND and will continue to serve on the new CAE Board of Directors. “The talented and experienced group that has come together to oversee the CAE will set a practical and effective action agenda and help CAE succeed in its important new mission.”

In addition to Schmidt, other prominent education leaders who have joined CAE's new governing board include:

• Richard Atkinson, past president of the University of California.
• Douglas C. Bennett, president of Earlham College in Indiana.
• Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University.
• Michael Lomax, president and CEO of the United Negro College Fund.
• Katharine Lyall, former president, University of Wisconsin.
• Eduardo Marti, president of Queensborough Community College, part of the City University of New York.
• Sara Martinez-Tucker, president and CEO of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.
• Ronald Mason, president of Jackson State University in Mississippi.
• Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the California State University system.
• Michael Rich, executive vice president of RAND.
• Carol Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

“The Collegiate Learning Assessment represents a major step forward that will help colleges and universities better address the educational needs of all their students,” said Lomax, former president of Dillard University in New Orleans. “Wider use of the assessment also should show K–12 educators how to better prepare students for college.”

Currently used by about 100 colleges, the Collegiate Learning Assessment is designed to measure the effectiveness of a higher education program by testing critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and writing ability.

The Collegiate Learning Assessment is comprised of several Web-based tests each lasting a total of 30 to 90 minutes that are given each year to a sample of a college's or university's incoming freshmen and graduating seniors. The assessment avoids multiple-choice questions in favor of exercises that require students to write essays based on materials provided as a part of the test.

The scores of the freshmen and seniors are adjusted for background factors, such as incoming SAT scores, and then compared to provide an assessment of how effective the institution has been in improving it's students' skills.

Institutions that participate in the testing program can use the information to critically evaluate their undergraduate programs over time and to compare themselves to other institutions that subscribe to the program.

While RAND has turned control of CAE over to the new governing board, the two nonprofit organizations plan to maintain ties that will allow collaboration on future research projects to improve higher education.

With support from major private foundations—including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, ExxonMobil Foundation, Ford Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation—CAE developed the Collegiate Learning Assessment and tested it at approximately 100 colleges and universities across the nation starting in 2002.

CAE expects to add to its staff in New York City as the number of institutions using the Collegiate Learning Assessment expands, Benjamin said.

CAE was originally established in 1952 to advance corporate support of education. For more than 40 years, CAE has conducted the widely cited Voluntary Support of Education survey, which tracks trends in private giving to higher education and K–12 institutions. CAE will continue to produce the survey and pursue a research agenda related to higher education.

Topics

• Education Policy