The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, subject to the authority and counsel of the 13-member Board of Higher Educa ... tion, ensures that Massachusetts residents have the opportunity to benefit from a higher education that enriches their lives and advances their contributions to the civic life, economic development, and social progress of the Commonwealth. To that end, the programs and services of Massachusetts higher education must meet standards of quality commensurate with the benefits it promises and must be truly accessible to the people of the Commonwealth in all their diversity. The current work of the Department of Higher Education is largely driven by the Vision Project, the public agenda for higher education in Massachusetts, which seeks to ensure Massachusetts' position as the home to the best-educated citizenry and workforce in the nation by focusing efforts of the Department and the public higher education system on the areas of college participation, college completion, student learning, and workforce alignment, with an emphasis on eliminating disparate outcomes in all of those areas. read more