On November 2, 2005, the Lumina Foundation for Education, in partnership with the James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy, convened a national summit in Washington, DC to develop solutions to rising college costs. Sponsors included nearly 60 associations (including CIC), foundations, and other organizations. More than 350 higher education leaders participated. CIC President Richard Ekman and Executive Vice President Russell Garth represented CIC. Major presentations were given by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman; U.S. Senator Richard Lugar; Tom Luce, assistant Secretary, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education; and former governors James Hunt (NC) and John Engler (MI).

The Lumina Foundation began its work leading to this summit more than a year ago with a policy brief, Collision Course: Rising College Costs Threaten America’s Future. This document sketched a range of ways to address the challenge of rising college costs and solicited papers that could provide detailed proposals or descriptions of solutions to the problem. The Foundation has made the papers that it received available to a wide audience in Course Corrections, Experts Offer Solutions to the College Cost Crisis. It can be found at the following website: http://www.collegecosts.info/project. The proposed solutions ranged from technological innovations to tuition reimbursement to outsourcing and more. Areas of special interest included approaches to reduce the amount of time students take to earn four-year degrees (many are now taking six years or longer) and higher education delivery systems that improve efficiency and lower costs.