This op-ed by Secretary Margaret Spellings appeared in the Houston Chronicle on September 28, 2006.

American colleges and universities have long been incubators of great ideas, birthplaces of great inventions and testing grounds of great individuals. And—as never before—they are the key to the American Dream.

But while the American Dream has grown increasingly dependent upon college, for many, college has grown increasingly out of reach.

Last year I formed a bipartisan Commission on the Future of Higher Education to launch a robust national dialogue on the vital issues of accessibility, affordability and accountability.

Now, wait a minute, you might say. Our higher education system is the finest in the world. But at a time when 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs will require postsecondary education, we cannot lapse into a dangerous complacency.

What the commission found should shock us out of that complacency:

• Inadequate academic preparation has become a major barrier to college access, particularly for minority and low-income students.
• Tuition has outpaced inflation, health care costs and family income, leaving graduates with five-figure debts.
• Many college graduates have "not actually mastered the reading, writing and thinking skills we expect of college graduates," according to the commission.

Higher education is a public as well as a private good. Parents, students and taxpayers pick up the vast majority of the tab for higher education. Over the years, we've invested tens of billions of dollars and just hoped for the best. It's time to ask what we are getting for our money.

To this end, we plan to take the following actions in response to the commission's findings and recommendations:

• Accessibility. Improved access begins long before freshman orientation. Freshmen should be ready to learn from Day One. But when 40 percent of all college students have to take at least one remedial course—at a cost of more than $1 billion annually—far too many are not.

  The No Child Left Behind Act has brought high standards and accountability to our elementary and middle schools, ensuring that a student in fifth grade actually receives a fifth-grade education. We propose expanding those principles to our high schools.

  We will work with states and school districts to align high school standards with college-level expectations. And we will work with Congress to enact President Bush's proposal to train 70,000 additional teachers to lead Advanced Placement-International Baccalaureate math, science and critical-need foreign language courses over the next five years. These are the courses that ensure success in college.

• Affordability. We must simplify the time-consuming and sometimes bewildering federal financial aid process. We will partner with states to use existing income and tax data to help students complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, in half the time. We will also notify students of their eligibility for Pell Grants before the spring of their senior high school year so families have more time to plan and prepare.

  Finally, we will work with Congress to stimulate and provide new funds for need-based aid within the federal financial aid program. States strongly committed to helping families of modest means afford an education should be encouraged and supported.

• Accountability. The commission found "a lack of clear, reliable information about cost and quality" and a "remarkable absence of accountability mechanisms" in postsecondary institutions. As a result, parents who want to know about actual tuition costs or the likelihood of postgraduation employment are often kept in the dark.

  We will develop a voluntary, privacy-protected higher education information system that longitudinally analyzes performance. About 40 states have similar systems in place. We must connect these islands of data and make the information available to everyone. We propose providing matching funds to states and institutions that collect and publicly report information on student performance. And we will use the findings to redesign the Department of Education's college search Web site into a more user-friendly search tool.

Like many parents, while helping my daughter apply for college I found it almost impossible to get clear, comprehensive and comparative information about schools—and I'm the secretary of education! Shopping around, I found plenty of guidebooks on the best party schools and "schools that rock," but none on, say, the highest earnings after graduation or prospects for continued study.

The commission wrote that "higher education must change from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance." I could not agree more. To succeed, this effort must be led by the colleges and universities themselves. We must be careful not to harm the autonomy and creativity that has made them the envy of the world.

But we must act now. Our goal is nothing less than full access to the American Dream by every American who chooses to pursue it.

Spellings, a former Houstonian, is U.S. secretary of education.