Lori Patton (center) of the University of Denver with her co-author Shaun Harper (University of Pennsylvania) and Frank Harris III (San Diego State University) at the 2009 ASHE Institute for Participatory Critical Action Research.

What are the greatest challenges facing America's higher education system?

A recent Huffington Post article posed this question to seven professors specializing in issues affecting the quality and direction of U.S. universities and colleges, among them Center for Urban Education co-director Alicia C. Dowd.

Dowd spoke to the need to improve transfer and basic skills education without cutting off access for African American and Latino students. Saying that accountability in higher education was "too important to get wrong," she pointed out that colleges can use data very intentionally to improve equity. Links to CUE's Equity Scorecard™ work in Wisconsin and Benchmarking for Equity workshops in California community colleges provided examples of the ways researchers can get involved with colleges to "be problem solvers."

University of Denver professor Lori Patton was another of the experts featured. She spoke to the need to improve retention of students of color in engineering and science departments. "Institutions can be very cold," Patton said. "Students drop out of the sciences and the overall goal gets lost because the retention effort in higher education isn't working very well." A past participant of the Institute on Participatory Critical Action Research, Patton is one of over 100 scholars around the nation who is a member of CUE's growing community of equity-minded faculty, researchers and policy analysts.  

Supported by the Ford Foundation, the action research institute was one of the ASHE Institutes on Equity & Critical Policy Analysis, which were directed by CUE co-director and professor Estela Mara Bensimon. The Institutes created networks of scholars who bring a race-conscious lens to improve educational policies and practices.