KEVIN CAREY Policy Director of Education Sector in Washington, D.C, USA. MARK SCHNEIDER is Vice President for New Education Initiatives at the American Institutes for Research with the American Enterprise Institute and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Stony Brook University, State University of New York, USA.

"The importance of this topic should be self evident in the United States. We no longer lead the world in terms of the share of our young adults with college degrees. Inequality in educational attainment across groups persists in the United States and the groups that are growing the most rapidly are the groups that are underrepresented in higher education. Tuition levels keep rising at rates that exceed the rate of inflation and we worry that increasing college costs are going to prevent us from improving our educational performance. This book will be an important one." - Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics; Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow; and Director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI), Cornell University

• Introduction; K.Carey  & M.Schneider On the Foundations of Standardized Assessment of College Outcomes and Estimating Value Added; J.Steedle Faculty Scholarly Productivity at American Research Universities; L.Martin Student Unit Record Systems and Postsecondary Accountability: Exploiting Emerging Data Resources; P.Ewell Higher Education Finance and Accountability; B.Terry-Long Death of a University; K.Carey What's Governance Got to do With It?; A.Neal, E.O'Connor & M.Black How College Rankings Are Going Global (and Why Their Spread Will Be Good For Higher Education); B.Wildavsky The Politics of Higher Education; M.Schneider Accountability for Community Colleges: Moving Forward; S.Goldrick-Rab Scaling Back Tenure: How Claims of Academic Freedom Limit Accountability in Higher Education; N.Riley Policy Barriers to Post-Secondary Cost Control; B.Smith