Our Education has long focused on the need to engage young people in the conversations and policy decisions that affect their schools at the K-12 level. But it is becomingly increasingly clear that the need for change may exist every bit as much on the higher education level, despite popular misconceptions about the quality of America's colleges.

As this Washington Post editorial notes, there are some serious problems with the quality of undergraduate education that even the most elite of our nation's colleges offer. To begin with, while nearly three-quarters of young people will enroll in college, only half of those students will actually graduate. And of those who do graduate, merely 38% of them are able to perform simple tasks like comparing two differing viewpoints in a newspaper editorial, according to the American Institutes for Research. These problems are ever more striking when one considers that students are going into record amounts of loan debt in order to afford tuition... in exchange for what appears to be a poor quality education in all to many instances.

The causes of these troubling statistics appear to be numerous. For starters, many universities and colleges suffer from a similar problem as do middle and high schools in low-performing districts, which is that many of the students enter their classrooms already lacking in important skills. A 2003 US Department of Education report found that more than 40% of students at two-year colleges and 20% of students at four-year colleges enroll in at least one remedial course in their first semester alone. Of course, this reason is never sufficient cause for a school to throw its arms up and say it can't do any better, but it's important to recognize that improvement in K-12 education will certainly have a corollary impact in higher education as well.

A second reason for poor performance of our nation's colleges and universities is that there is very little (if any) accountability for them. Though there are differing degrees of accountability that have been proposed by those with an eye towards higher education reform and none of them are perfect ideas--from adding standardized testing to stiffening accreditation rules--the truth of the matter is that we have very little information on which schools are preparing undergraduate students well and which are not. A major reason behind this is that the business of higher education is driven largely by prestige, and prestige is almost completely disconnected from the actual quality of education that is provided. US News and World Report's annual college rankings take into account admissions selectivity, SAT scores of incoming freshmen, the size of their endowments, peer-offered scores for prestige, and faculty ratios, but they do not take into account the more nuanced (and important) measures of how much students actually learn during four years in a given school.

The authors of the Washington Post editorial suggest a recipe of increased accountability for student outcomes (particularly among schools receiving public funding), re-balancing schools' preference for graduate research with the need to educate undergraduates, and by investing in ways to measure student learning and the quality of teaching. It's not a simple or eye-catching set of ideas, but they do have value. But the will to bring these changes about will not come from within the institutions themselves; it will have to be exerted from without. And who better than the very students being shortchanged at the colleges and universities to urge their school administrators to do better?