IMS Global: Has technology during the past 25 years changed the way in which we learn? And if so, how?

JVL: Technology changes the way we approach the content of education, but whether it changes in some fundamental fashion the way we learn is not clear. For example, when we went from lectures to books, those people who learned best from listening had to adapt to learn from reading. Now that we are moving from books to online, video content, and similar electronic methods, those who learned from text have to adapt themselves to learn (and teach) in different formats.

We old people are sure that the new ways are less effective, because we learned with the old. But the new generation thinks that our focus on linear text misses key elements of the world in which they live and will live. The constant adjustment of education to technologically mediated tools is not new, even if the advent of ever more sophisticated tools challenges our ability to effectively adapt them to standardized long-standing curricular learning goals. Technology changes the way we learn in that it forces us to use the new tools, even if we use them to do what we've always done in teaching and learning.

IMS Global: This being a campaign year, if you could sit down and have a meaningful discussion with the next president of the United States, what would you suggest should be his or her priorities with regard to improving higher education in the U.S.?

JVL: Improving higher education is very simple: generate more money. While it is surely true that we should be efficient, effective, and accountable, it's a fiction that better management can substitute for highly inadequate funding. It is possible to do badly even if well funded, but it is exceptionally difficult to do well with poor funding.

Obviously the higher education community needs to find ways to demonstrate its effectiveness, but at the same time, colleges and universities need to insist that different institutions with different populations and different missions have different metrics. If an elite residential college with a huge endowment does not graduate almost everyone, it's probably not doing a good job. If an urban college with a high proportion of under prepared, part-time, and working students, graduates 30 percent of these students after six years, it is probably doing an exceptional job. What students know when they graduate is also something that requires our attention, and the responsibility for defining what they know and determining whether they know it is a faculty and institutional responsibility that should not be delegated to centralized agencies who always create inappropriate measures.

So I'd tell the president, invest money, require accountability, but try to stay out of control or regulation.

IMS Global: Your scholarly discipline is Latin American History. Based on your experience, how would you say American higher education compares with those of other nations? What best practices should we be emulating? Is there opportunity for greater collaboration between countries?

JVL: The biggest change in international higher education has been the recognition around the world that high powered academic institutions produce major economic and social benefits for the countries that sustain them. The U.S. Land Grant movement, the success of public and private research universities, and the widespread commitment to access to higher education opportunity in the U.S. has demonstrated the power of this combination of commitments. We now see countries throughout the world becoming increasingly competitive in recruiting scholars, students, and support, recognizing that there is no substitute for high quality international academic performance. The result has been a proliferation of investments in institutions around the world, many of which now have internationally competitive programs in many fields of science, engineering, the professions, and the social sciences and humanities. This is good for the world, but it challenges the American higher education industry to be even more competitive.