The Council for Aid to Education (CAE) is a national nonprofit organization based in New York City.  Initially established in 1952 to advance corporate support of education and to conduct policy research on higher education, today CAE is also focused on improving quality and access in higher education. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is central to that focus, a national effort to assess the quality of undergraduate education by directly measuring student learning outcomes. CAE also undertakes strategic planning for public university systems, states, and foreign nations. In addition, CAE conducts research on and promotes policy reforms in higher education. CAE also is the nation's sole source of empirical data on private giving to education, through the annual Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) survey and its Data Miner interactive database.   An affiliate of the RAND Corporation from 1996 to 2005, CAE became an independent nonprofit in October of this year.  The productive affiliation with RAND fostered the research and development of the CLA.  Now CAE has been reorganized under a new governing board, and RAND and CAE will continue to work closely together on CLA research and development projects.   In partnership with RAND, CAE created a performance-based assessment model and developed direct measures of quality that all of the major stakeholders - university administrators, faculty, students, parents, employers, and policy makers - can use as part of their evaluation of academic programs. With initial support from major private foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, CAE developed measures to assess student ability and learning in critical thinking, writing, and synthesizing quantitative and qualitative data. The measures are focused on skill sets that students will need as they graduate and enter the work force, and are designed to provide clear signals to students, parents, and teachers about college preparation and graduation requirements at much earlier points in the K-16 education system. CAE's continuing work on the CLA is supported by major foundations and partnerships with important higher education associations: A grant from the Lumina Foundation is now supporting a multi-year Longitudinal Study, organized in partnership with the American Association of Colleges and Universities, to track a cohort of students through their college career, measuring their educational progress. A grant from the Teagle Foundation is supporting work with a consortium of liberal arts colleges organized in partnership with the Council of Independent Colleges. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation was a major support to the former Missouri Consortium for measuring Value Added Student Learning. The Ford Foundation, along with CAE's corporate supporters, funded implementation of the CLA to benchmark minority student learning, especially at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and predominantly Latino-serving institutions. Johnson and Johnson has supported scale-up implementation of the CLA.

CAE President Roger Benjamin