For years, critics have complained that the U.S. News & World Report college rankings measure “inputs,” such as median student SAT scores, rather than “outputs,” in the form of how much students have actually learned after four years. From an equity standpoint, the U.S. News rankings are also troubling because they create a perverse incentive for colleges to take the very highest-scoring students who may have had everything given to them, rather than students with somewhat lower scores who have overcome obstacles in life.
If we instead evaluated colleges based on actual outputs, might that create healthy incentives to focus on how much learning goes on in a school? And if the measures could gauge value added, might that create an incentive to admit low-income students whose full potential is not reflected in entering scores but could shine with the right supports?
Last week, I attended a private forum sponsored by The Atlantic and the Endeavor Foundation to examine these sorts of questions. The discussion featured a small group of university and college presidents, academics, think tankers, and journalists, and was centered around the themes of a provocative and lucidly written new book by Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh, entitled We’re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education. (The discussion was “on background,” so I won’t cite the comments of specific individuals).
The book argues that while the college access and completion agendas that are at the center of our higher-education discussions are important, we should refocus attention on the degree of actual higher learning that goes on in college. The authors argue that colleges and universities need to develop a clearly articulated set of goals of what students should know and be able to do and a path for getting there. Of course, many educators have long been concerned about quality, but We’re Losing Our Minds is well-timed for a number of reasons.
First, with the publication last year of Academically Adrift, which documented low levels of learning in higher education, colleges and universities need to focus more urgently on quality, or they will likely sustain a downward spiral. The danger is that the widespread publicity surrounding Academically Adrift will be used by legislators as an excuse to cut funding (students aren’t learning much, so why should we support colleges?) These cuts, in turn, will only lead to less learning in college.
Second, higher education needs to focus on developing high-quality standards and assessments if it wants to avoid the fate of K-12 schooling, where the No Child Left Behind Act has imposed poor quality tests and demoralized a generation of teachers. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) is doing some interesting work to develop high quality standards and assessments—including portfolios and capstone projects—as is St. Olaf College in Minnesota. As a way of jump-starting this process, some are asking, would it make sense for four to five leading universities to pick a discipline, such as physics, and develop a reasonable set of outcomes and ways of measuring student progress?
Third, students and their parents may become increasingly concerned about quality as prices continue to rise. More and more, parents are likely to demand “value”—evidence of quality to justify spiraling college costs.
Fourth, some worry that the current trends in education among policymakers—a focus on cutting costs and simplistically counting completion rates—may jeopardize quality even more in the future. The legislative push for more inexpensive adjunct teachers, more reliance on poorly constructed online classes, and a push for students to complete degrees in three years, may all threaten student learning. And, as Carol Geary Schneider of the AACU has noted, the college-completion agenda—while certainly important—could, if poorly implemented, result in “enhanced degree production” that would “deplete rather than build educational quality.” If unwisely structured, the completion agenda could also create a perverse incentive to shift low-income students into certificate programs, away from associate or baccalaureate degrees.
By contrast, a focus on quality could, if designed properly to measure value added, be a boon not only for learning but also for equity and social mobility. Today, the U.S. News rankings based on prestige, exclusivity, and high entering test scores, give the wealthiest colleges an incentive to take the easiest cases—the students who are already best prepared, and lavish on them additional resources. But if colleges were judged by how much value they added, they might actually have an incentive to take bright low-income students whose entering scores don’t fully reflect their entire potential. That is, a focus on learning gains might provide colleges with a self-interested rationale to promote social mobility—something which is a big part of what American education is supposed to be all about.
