Our national discourse is broken, and elected officials squander their limited time in office. Policymakers focus too much on a few divisive issues while neglecting achievable, modest wins that would help students if policymakers were more focused on what they are for, rather than whom they are against. As a result, our major institutions increasingly fail to serve us— exemplified by the cost of postsecondary education and the difficulty of connecting people and careers.
For example, the fight over whether to make college “free,” seldom considers the fact that colleges and universities have every incentive to raise prices but often lack the ability to limit borrowing for things like student living expenses—even if they might want to. There are also strong feelings about whether an education in the liberal arts or career preparation is better, but the debate rarely focuses on whether it makes sense to have one law to fund “higher education” and a separate one for “workforce development,” each written decades ago and managed by a separate cabinet agency.
One reason that we may be struggling to make necessary improvements to these systems is that our public policy pipeline fails to connect policy research with policymaking. Policy researchers—whether in academia, think tanks, or the private sector—tend to offer ideas in the form of dense policy papers. Such efforts are often necessary to fully flesh out a concept and offer evidence for why a certain course of action is the correct one. All too often, though, the published product is not be relevant to the current work of policymakers.
Meanwhile, policymakers—those who work for a governor or member of Congress, for example—rarely have the time or inclination to read academic products. This is understandable given that a policy staffer may be responsible for many different policy areas and often must spend much more time on the mechanics of policy enactment or negotiating over small details rather than blue sky ideation.
When an elected official identifies an opportunity to make improvements to higher education finance, for example, he will direct his staff to prepare a package of concrete ideas, which staffers may have little time to generate. Drawing these ideas from dense think tank publications, which generally lack a clear roadmap to specific policy changes, is cumbersome work. While policymakers are often unable to go deep into the literature or data justifying a given change, policy researchers rarely get specific enough to tell policymakers which provisions of law should be changed to implement their ideas.
The consequences of this disconnect can be immense and often fall upon the students that both researchers and policymakers seek to benefit with their work. Because researchers fail to articulate their ideas in ways that are easy for policymakers to access and understand, policymakers are more likely to resort to the simplest or most fashionable solutions when crafting policy, not necessarily those that are best or most tied to evidence. This may result in negative consequences that neither researchers nor policymakers intend, with students, universities, or taxpayers forced to cope with the unintended consequences of imperfect policy choices. This further erodes trust in our elected officials and key institutions, making it even more difficult to solve new challenges that arise.
The flaws in this process make it clear that a space for open collaboration is essential for both researchers and policymakers. Platforms like the Higher Education Policy Catalog, an interactive repository of policy ideas developed through months of conversations hosted by the American Enterprise Institute’s education policy studies department, may constitute a step towards filling this void. Through the Policy Catalog, policymakers can easily view and share policy ideas that are specific, actionable, and, most importantly, based on high quality research.
Most agree that Americans deserve a diversity of productive pathways after high school that prepare them for work, productive family life, and citizenship. That promise will not be realized until we fix our troubled education and workforce systems. And those fixes cannot occur until we are better at translating strong research into concrete policy ideas. Tools like the Higher Education Policy Catalog cannot by themselves fix our policymaking procedures or our national discourse. However, we hope that it can help us focus more on specific solutions and possibly unearth unexpected areas of agreement. At the very least, it will give Americans an opportunity to express what they are for, while focusing less on whom they are against.
Michael Brickman is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on higher education and cutting-edge innovation in education reform.
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