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As most readers of this volume know, the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education is a federal program housed within the U.S. Department of Education, designed to promote innovation in teaching and learning at the postsecondary level with modest amounts of venture capital.
This is the third volume of Lessons Learned from FIPSE Projects. Like its predecessors, it is essentially an exhibition of self-portraits of projects that received funding from FIPSE. In the case of each portrait, the grant has ended, at least some of the results are in, and the campus people who worked on the project are summing up. Did the innovation work? What went well, and what didn't? Has the innovation survived at the original site? What do the innovators have to share with those who want t o consider adapting the innovation on their own campus?
As with all self-portraits, here too the biases of the sitter cannot be discounted, but there are grounds for confidence. Above all, these reports have been scrutinized, probed, drafted and edited by FIPSE's evaluation specialist, Dr. Dora Marcus, in collaboration with program officer Dr. Eulalia Cobb and consultant Dr. Robert Shoenberg, and with the able technical assistance of Susan McGraw. To them we owe thanks for the most useful of these volumes yet.
Part of what makes this volume so useful is that FIPSE's approach to project evaluation has matured over the past decade. But part of its usefulness is context. American higher education is in the middle of a revolution, or more exactly, two. On the one hand, large social and economic forces are pressing new austerities on higher education. Particularly in state legislatures, there is great resistance to the historical pattern of budget increases for colleges and universities. These austerities make "change by addition, rather than substitution" less feasible than in richer times, and even a phase of local experimentation is often unaffordable.
But at the same time, complacency about the status quo has suddenly become difficult to sustain. There are major new demands that colleges and universities document performance for the public. More than half the states have decreed that public institutions report on performance annually, often in dozens of categories, ranging from faculty contact hours to alumni satisfaction to graduation rates. (Interestingly, the idea of assessing student learning outcomes, which was the parent of this multi-factor performance reporting movement, has not grown along with its offspring; indeed in many states student learning outcomes are a quite minor part of the performance reports required from the institutions.)
It is the very coincidence of these two revolutions that makes this third volume of Lessons Learned so timely: the fact that higher educators can no longer afford to reinvent the wheel, combined with the new premium being put on demonstrable success. It is time, then, that public and private foundations, public funders, and others concerned about postsecondary education began to focus on helping higher educators everywhere learn from each other's successes. By spreading the word about an interesting set of attempted reforms in several key categories, this volume makes a worthwhile contribution.
However the challenge should not be underestimated. Previous Lessons Learned volumes have been in high demand by institutions of higher education, and many thousands have been sent out. But the step from knowledge to action is another story. Research by Vanderbilt University economists has recently shown that innovations spread much more slowly in higher education than in business or agriculture, without resolving the reason why. FIPSE's own experience confirms and expands on this result: colleges and universities often ask FIPSE to support innovations, but they much less often ask FIPSE to support adaptations of innovations already established elsewhere, even when special solicitations are issued.
A natural conclusion is that the series of Lessons Learned volumes ought to continue, and that they should be part of a broad strategy aimed at lowering non-informational obstacles to the dissemination of education reform.
Charles H. Karelis, Director
Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education
[Title Page] [Table of Contents] [Overview]
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