New Leadership Actions

Since our goal is nothing less than a comprehensive, broadly based effort to address the vital issues of transparency and accountability through rigorous attention to the performance of our colleges and universities, we commit ourselves to take specific actions and to encourage our colleagues throughout higher education to join with us in improving student learning.

1. We will present these principles to our members and others and encourage a vigorous discussion with the goal of implementing them on campuses as fully as possible in the near future.
    
2. We will disseminate this document as widely as possible and encourage broad discussion of it.
    
3. We will keep pressing for the highest possible standards and expectations for student learning at every level. We will work with our members and others to help each college and university develop, articulate and make public its mission and educational goals, and to encourage the full realization of student potential through higher levels of student engagement, learning, and achievement.
    
4. We welcome the progress various associations of colleges and universities have made in developing widely agreed upon templates that will provide college applicants, their parents, legislators, and the general public with important data about demographics, admission and completion information, costs and financial aid, student engagement, and other relevant information. We will continue to give high priority to making such important information readily accessible.
    
5. We will encourage our members to augment such templates with clear descriptions of their educational goals for student accomplishment and with information about the practices they use to foster, assess and report student attainment of those goals.
    
6. We commend those organizations and their philanthropic supporters that have in recent years developed promising means of assessing important outcomes of higher education. Understanding that standardized measures currently address only a small part of what matters in college, we will work with foundations and campus partners to substantially expand the array of educationally valid and useful means — qualitative as well as quantitative — of assessing the full range of learning outcomes envisioned in this document.
    
7. Recognizing that setting high standards is not the same as standardization, we also support and encourage the development of assessments of student attainment that are anchored in the curriculum that faculty teach. Excellent work of this sort is already underway on many campuses, through assessments of common assignments, student portfolios, senior projects and similar efforts. We applaud these institutions and their faculty for taking the lead in creating and adopting ever-improving forms of evaluation. We will publicize their efforts and provide support and active assistance to help others do the same.
    
8. We will regularly report to the public on the overall progress made in achieving these actions. We stand ready to be judged by the high standards this document sets for American higher education. Our students deserve nothing less.