Articles

Assessing colleges proves challenging:
Federal commission calls for ways to measure learning versus cost

Editorial
Atlanta Journal Constitution
August 14, 2006

The reputation of Southern colleges traditionally depended more on completed passes by their football teams than on courses completed by their student bodies. Today, schools and students take academics far more seriously.

Still, the question persists: Are Georgia colleges and universities doing a good job educating students and preparing them for careers?

A report approved last week by the U.S. Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education suggests that better and more transparent measures are needed to make that assessment.

"To meet the challenges of the 21st century, higher education must change from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance," begins the report, which calls for federal collection of data on college costs, admissions, completion rates and "learning outcomes."

The hitch is that educators can't even agree on how to measure performance in elementary and secondary schools, never mind the more complicated colleges and universities. And while U.S. elementary and secondary schools land on the bottom rungs of most international assessments, our postsecondary institutions remain the envy of the world and draw students from across the globe.

So far, colleges have been understandably leery of the federal government evaluating their success or tracking their students for a national database on higher-ed trends. But the federal government has a powerful tool of persuasion: It provides about one-third of higher-ed spending.

And despite the reputation of American universities, there are legitimate concerns about what we're getting for that investment. According to the commission, 40 percent of four-year college students and 63 percent of two-year college students take at least one remedial course. Over the last decade, the commission noted declines in several telling indicators, from graduation rates to core literacy skills.

Not that the public would know about those declines. While college and university brochures highlight campus amenities and study-abroad opportunities, few give prospective enrollees much detail on costs or how well their students fare. Even U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said she had a hard time getting relevant information on colleges when her daughter began to look.

"I found plenty of information on dining hall food, intramural sports, and campus architecture," Spellings said. "I even found one book called 'Schools that Rock' with good tips on which schools have the best music.

"But I didn't find a book on 'schools that engineer' or a book on 'schools that prepare you for the future.' And I didn't find much information on what courses to take, how long it takes the average student to graduate, and whether it's a better deal to graduate from a less-expensive state school in six years or a private school in four."

Practical questions arise about how to measure student learning. Which tests, if any, could be used to determine whether colleges are meeting standards and whose standards would be applied? Would there be a national graduation test, and what would it cover? A student graduating from Georgia Tech with an engineering degree has taken far different courses than one finishing Mercer University with a theater arts degree.

Then there are the big, philosophical questions. Are colleges supposed to be job training centers where students graduate with a set of quantifiable skills? Or is the role of higher ed to stimulate students to think and to see the world through a wider lens?

As the new president of Mercer University, Bill Underwood says institutions ought to be judged on their impact on society and the individual student. But how can that impact be measured?

"The beauty of higher education is that we really believe that nobody has all the answers and that one size can't fit all," said Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College, in a press conference by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in response to a draft of the commission's report. "And the more that we try to bring about a single federalized or national way of looking at each unit, at each piece of the labor force, however these things are measured, the more we're headed to a system of higher education that stifles innovation, stifles competition and stifles our distinctive ways of learning and teaching in the classroom."

But what's also stifling - and seldom mentioned by college presidents - is the escalating cost of higher education, another area that the federal commission says needs reform.

"We believe that affordability is directly affected by colleges' and universities' failure to seek institutional efficiencies and by their disregard for improving productivity, since the current system provides institutions with few incentives to do either," says the report, which urges cost-cutting and productivity improvements and a significant increase in need-based financial aid.

Tuition has outstripped inflation and family income, forcing students from all income levels to go deeper into debt. In 1980, tuition at a public four-year college represented 13 percent of the income of a low-income family. Twenty years later it equaled 25 percent of their income.

The parents of the nation's 17 million college students probably don't really know what they're getting for the $22,000 they pay, on average, in private school tuition per year or the $6,000 they pay at the public ones.

As institutions that believe in the transformative power of information, colleges and universities ought to be willing to give more of it to the students and taxpayers who pay the bills.

– Maureen Downey, for the editorial board (mdowney@ajc.com)

Copyright 2006 Te Atlanta Journal-Constitution. More information: www.ajc.com.

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