Link Higher Education and Results

Abstract

High school seniors are eagerly waiting to rip open envelopes and log onto web sites to learn the reaction to the college applications they labored over during the first part of the school year. No doubt they pored over a host of commercial guides like U.S. News and World Report's America's Best Colleges, trying to find out everything they could before making one of the most important investments of their lives. They found lots of information about colleges' status and resources from places like U.S. News, because the magazine's ratings are based largely on such measures as spending per student, schools' reputation among college administrators, and incoming students' SAT scores. But there's precious little for college applicants about what would seem to matter most: whether colleges and universities educate their students successfully. While policy makers have labored to produce increasingly detailed portraits of the performance of the nation's public elementary and secondary schools, they've neglected to provide similar information about the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. And we've failed to comprehend the extent to which the lack of such information has undermined the productivity of the nation's education enterprise. For most college students, who attend non-brand-name public colleges and universities with unselective admissions, the primary thing that their colleges have to offer them (unless they're top athletes) is a high-quality education--a commodity that's in too short supply in higher education today. Seventy-five percent of high school graduates go on to college, but only half of those students earn degrees, the U.S. Department of Education reports. And in many instances the diplomas they win don't represent a lot of learning. One study found that over half of the nation's college seniors can't do such things as compare credit card offers with differing interest rates. Yet colleges and universities have few incentives to address these challenges. They've long favored graduate students over undergraduates and research and publishing over teaching. And the influential commercial college rankings--this year marks the 26th anniversary of the U.S. News Best Colleges guide--only make matters worse by measuring mostly resources and reputation rather than performance. Many colleges seem to spend more energy improving their standing in the U.S. News horse race than on ways to help their students learn more and graduate. Public information about where students are taught the best and learn the most would force institutions to pay attention to results rather than to resources and reputation. And it would introduce the concept of value into the higher education equation. The conventional wisdom about college is that you get what you pay for, that the higher the price tag, the better the education. But that's not necessarily the case. Plenty of colleges are both good and less expensive--and information about how well schools are educating their students would, in turn, help make our vast national investment in higher education far more rational than it is today. (Ironically, the U.S. News ranking system undermines the concept of value. Ten percent of its rating is based on spending per student, meaning that a college that produces strong results at less cost and passes part of its savings on to students in the form of lower tuitions would see its ranking in the magazine decline.) Measuring Results Traditionally, there haven't been many reliable tools with which to measure teaching and learning in higher education; U.S. News focuses on resources and reputation because that's the information it can collect. But that's changing. One example is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), launched with funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2000 and now administered by Indiana University. …