Colleges have never been very good at demonstrating how their education programs prepare their graduates for jobs, or how their research might create new jobs.
That’s partly because the connection is not so easy to quantify—and partly because many of the people who run colleges and who teach there are still a tad uncomfortable thinking of themselves as cogs in America’s work-force-training and economic-development machine.
But with high unemployment levels still dominating the nation’s political and business discourse—even President Obama, at this month’s White House jobs summit, exhorted American universities to better prepare workers for the jobs of today and tomorrow—college leaders are realizing that they need to do more to measure and document their impact on the economy as well as actually help it along.
A lot of this recent measuring activity is voluntary, although no doubt it’s inspired by a hearty dose of political realism.
Perhaps the most far-reaching of these efforts is the ambitious project being developed by two leading community-college organizations and the College Board to come up with measures of two-year colleges’ effectiveness in academic and economic-development realms. With an expected $12-billion infusion from the feds over the next decade, the colleges realize that they need to show they are worthy of the money or are serious about becoming so. (For more on this project, listen to my recent podcast with the leader of the community-college system in Louisiana.)
Then there’s the study for a proposed “Institutional Economic Engagement Index” by the Association of University Technology Managers. The association, whose members manage academic inventions, has been eager to find ways to assess technology transfer with metrics that don’t focus so much on royalty revenues.
A third project is the large-scale effort by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities to establish a consensus on the kind of data that colleges should collect to best measure their impact on job creation. Dennis Hoffman, an economist at Arizona State University and a leader in this project, says it is necessary because “the way that universities measure their value is suspect.”
Failing to measure the right things also can lead to false expectations and unintended consequences.
I was reminded of the pitfalls of using the wrong measures at a recent conference in Washington on university start-up companies. Colleges love to tout the volume of their start-ups, based on academic research, as a measure of economic-development success. But venture capitalists at the conference said the innovations they are most likely to invest in are the ones that improve productivity and build wealth, not necessarily the ones that create jobs. (After all, innovation just as often eliminates jobs as it creates them.)
Pam York, attending from the University of Iowa, where she is executive director of the Research Foundation, says that lesson is one she’s trying to press at home.
For universities, “the focus needs to change from creating jobs to creating an environment” where companies and people will want to be, she says. That’s not only realistic but also mindful of the broader mission of the university as something bigger than a jobs engine.
It also fits well with the nuanced approach that the land-grant universities are taking with their project, aiming to measure such factors as how a college can affect the level of local wages and can contribute to social benefits such as levels of civic activism. It’s “very defensible” for public colleges to seek public support for their contribution to the social and economic good, says Arizona State’s Mr. Hoffman, but “we’ve got to prove it.”
Costs Justified?
In a different context, suspicion is playing a role in another set of discussions about colleges and jobs—a series of negotiations over rules that will govern how for-profit colleges take part in federal student-aid programs. Federal regulators are questioning whether the amounts the colleges charge students for job-oriented degrees and certificates (for which many students go into debt) can be justified by the higher salaries they can command once they graduate. The Education Department is considering policies that would deny federal student aid for college programs for which the cost can’t be justified, although it’s not clear what the final rules will look like when they come out next year.
The for-profit colleges aren’t happy with the proposals—some officials decry them as an intrusive government attempt at price controls. But it’s hard to argue with the essential logic: If a college’s stated purpose is to prepare students for careers that will change their lives for the better, it should be expected to provide some assurances that the students will end up with gainful employment.
For students at traditional colleges, where the stated mission is typically broader, the social contract is far more multifaceted than job readiness. But as labor economists like Georgetown University’s Anthony Carnevale contend, ever since it became clear in the early 1980s that the changing economy would continue to reward people who have college degrees with better-paying jobs, for many students and their parents the chief purpose of college has become employability.
If college didn’t help people get jobs, Mr. Carnevale says, society would view a higher education as “about as important as opera and Shakespeare.”
Traditional colleges themselves have embraced the “wage premium” argument in their bid for more money and public support.
It’s easy to imagine where that might lead, particularly when lawmakers and the public are already demanding greater accountability for rising costs and lackluster graduation rates. If colleges aren’t thoughtful about the expectations they set with their measuring sticks, how long before those “gainful employment” expectations extend to all sectors of higher education? And at what cost to the other values inherent in a college education?
