An Iowa businessman who is now working in the U.S. Department of Education says the agency is trying to refocus on the importance of universities.
David Barker served on the Iowa Board of Regents for six years before being appointed as the Assistant U.S. Secretary for Postsecondary Education. Barker joined the head of NASA as they toured facilities at Iowa State University Tuesday and says education in general and STEM education in particular is important for the research going on at I-S-U and the things NASA is doing.
“But unfortunately, national confidence in higher education has fallen over the last several years. Higher education is at a crisis point in some ways because of that loss of confidence,” Barker says. He says the Secretary of the Department of Education gave a call to action to universities around the country last month to refocus on the importance of those schools. “There’s several items on that, but they all are focused on putting students first and making sure that the whole country receives the benefits of higher education. And the focus really is on quality, affordability, and fairness,” he says.
Barker says that covers several areas and they are focused on putting students first. “Fairness in admissions, fairness in the presentation of ideas so that students are exposed to a variety of ideas. Affordability, we’re trying to reform the student loan system so that we don’t continue to drive tuition to unaffordable levels,” Barker says.
Barker says they want to make sure that higher education programs actually deliver value for all students. “We’re going to be evaluating all higher education programs, for-profit programs, not-for-profit programs, public, private universities, and programs that do not deliver value, that do not produce graduates who earn more than a high school graduate, will lose their federal funding,” he says.
Barker says they are also working on promoting research integrity to make sure that the research that is done in higher education is of the highest quality and that there’s no cheating in research, which he says we’ve seen too much of that done in research. And he says the Department is trying to prioritize American interests.