AUSTIN – The Texas Public Policy Foundation today expressed its support for legislation to improve higher education quality and transparency. The two bills were filed by Sen. Brian Birdwell: The Collegiate Learning Assessment Bill (Senate Bill 436) and the College Students' Right to Know Bill (Senate Bill 445).
"This week's Lumina Foundation/Gallup survey is only the latest study to document that a large segment of the American population has serious doubts about both the quality and affordability of higher education. To remedy this, TPPF's Keeping Texas Competitive initiative for higher education calls on the legislature to require universities to post online and applicants performance information on: student academic performance, graduation rates, and post-graduate earnings," said Lindsay.
The Collegiate Learning Assessment Bill would require all Texas public colleges and universities to administer to all students the Collegiate Learning Assessment in their freshman and senior years in order to gauge the extent to which each school and academic major increases students' learning. The second, the Students' Right to Know Bill, would provide information on graduation rates, job prospects, average starting salaries, and the amount of student-loan debt for each Texas public college and university and each major field of study at these institutions.
"The quality of education is in question despite the skyrocketing cost of tuition," said Lindsay. "These two bills speak to the much-needed reforms in today's higher education institutions, in Texas and across the nation."
Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin.