The Quiet Crisis: How Higher Education is Failing America
Peter Smith, Anker Publishing, 2004
Reviewed by Lion F. Gardiner, Rutgers University-Newark

The Quiet Crisis is a critique of American higher education and urgent call for change. It provides fresh and intriguing ideas for change on campus and beyond to transform our country into a learning society. It is written not only for policy makers but for all of us with a stake in learning, including faculty members, parents, and students, and is intended to help us develop plans for action. Peter Smith (http://csumb.edu/administration/smith.html) is founding president of California State University—Monterey Bay (http://csumb.edu). In 1971 he founded and served as president of the innovative Community College of Vermont (http://www.ccv.vsc.edu). He has been a state senator, lieutenant governor, and U.S. Congressman, and is well acquainted with higher education policy from both academic and political perspectives.

The book has three themes, the first being that institutional "'success' rates are confused, misleading, and misunderstood." Our institutions may be the best in the world, but overall, the success rate for American schooling is appalling. Over a lifetime a person with a baccalaureate degree will earn about 100 percent more than a high school graduate. Yet, of every 100 ninth grade students as few as 17 and no more than 34 percent, depending on the state, will earn a bachelor's degree. Yet for people of color, other than Asian-Americans, who are in the lowest 60 percent of income range, the opportunity to earn a BA is profoundly limited. Yet this sector of our population will account for 80 percent of the increase in school enrollments in the years ahead. This pattern holds enormous social, civic, and economic implications. Large numbers of American citizens will be unable adequately to understand, participate in, or contribute to society.

The second theme is that "schools stifle learning." Because higher education has not adopted modern, research-based educational methods it is unable to respond to individual learning needs. Higher education "is uninformed—structurally and professionally—by what we know about how people learn. As a result, millions of people…fail to thrive in our schools, not because they lack the capacity to learn, but because our schools and colleges lack the capacity to educate" (p. xi).

The book's third theme is that technology can contribute powerfully to solving our problems. Today, technology permits high-quality learning "anywhere, anytime, for anyone" (p. xii), but the assumptions we traditionally make about "time, space, and responsibility" prevent us from utilizing technology effectively to improve learning. Smith's message is that if we do not make profound changes in the way we do business, "our current ‘success' in higher education will evolve into a national crisis" (p. xii).

These are daunting, complex problems; how can we get reform moving? Smith enumerates six "new core values for policy and practice" (p. 148), and for each one provides specific examples of changes we could make. His three decades of involvement in higher education policy suggest we should listen carefully to what he says. First, we will need a policy climate that rewards experimentation and change and that emphasizes learning rather than teaching—the outcomes of learning and high-quality processes can produce them. The government must invest substantially more in education research than it does today. Smith points out that Federal support for health-related research constitutes 74 times as much and NASA 24 times as much as the "pittance" invested in education research. He emphasizes the necessity of assessment research, particularly development of "individual learning profiles" comparable to personal histories taken by physicians prior to diagnosis and treatment that would recognize and reflect learners' past learning and unique needs to guide our educational efforts more rationally.

Second, we need to develop partnerships for the delivery of education services such as community-based education cooperatives that could broker as well as provide opportunities for learning and permit local governments, businesses, museums, and hospitals to pool their substantial and often-underutilized talents and facilities to support college students and learning.

Third, we must improve delivery of education opportunities in an age of global learning. People in the workplace, in their homes, and in their communities "are the largest target of opportunity for educators and entrepreneurs" (p. 153). Hundreds of millions of them need support services such as assessing their accumulated knowledge, helping them continue their learning, and validating their knowledge so they can benefit from important but otherwise unattainable credentials that reflect their learning.

Fourth, government should support methods that foster engaged, active learning consistent with empirical research. For example, important service to communities—"the seed corn of our democracy"—can be provided by service learning: "A national policy on service-learning is a critical element of the learning age" (p. 155).

Fifth, financial aid must be rethought. Millions of Americans cannot participate in higher education because of financial and structural—convenience—obstacles.

Finally, current accreditation policies and practices have not ensured that college graduates are highly educated. Smith proposes a second advanced, elective level of accreditation that would involve credible evidence that a college or university, or perhaps other provider of education opportunities, "employs best practices and adds significant value to the learner's life" (p. 158). Based on valid measures—Smith suggests the National Survey of Student Engagement (http://www.iub.edu/~nsse) as an example—this second level of accreditation would convey a level of credibility similar to that of the Baldridge National Quality Award (http://www.baldridge.org). Aside from much needed accurate information for prospective students and their parents, legislators, and others as to an institution's capacity to produce learning, this new level of accreditation would "democratize status and prestige" (p. 158) based on demonstrable institutional effectiveness and quality. This outcome is of no small value in a status-obsessed industry where prestige accrues more often from age, wealth, or faculty research accomplishment than capacity to produce learning.

The Quiet Crisis is a powerful call for change coupled with fresh ideas for specific actions we can take to transform American higher education so it can serve modern society's needs. Teachers and administrators should read this book and use its ideas to promote change on their own campuses and in their states.