Originally published on the National Journal Education Experts Blog.
In proposing to add or subtract federal aid for student loans and other programs on the basis of how well colleges and universities do things like successfully enroll and graduate low-income students, deliver quality education, and help students find jobs and repay debt, President Obama has put his finger on something big: A major contributing factor to the skyrocketing cost of college is the virtual absence of the concept of value in the higher education marketplace.
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. There are plenty of colleges that are both good and less expensive.
But higher education consumers—students and their bill-paying parents—are mostly in the dark about such schools because there’s scant information available to them about what would seemingly matter most: whether colleges and universities educate their students successfully. There’s plenty of information about colleges’ status and resources available in commercial guides like U.S. News and World Report’s America’s Best Colleges, because the magazine’s ratings are based largely on things like spending per student, schools’ reputation among college administrators, and incoming students’ SAT scores.
There’s some information on results, such as graduation rates. But good luck trying to find out how much students actually learn over the course of their college careers. If such information were available to students and parents, many of them would select schools that offered the best education for the money—and thereby pressure other colleges and universities to provide more for the tuition they charge, which is what the Obama administration is demanding.
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. It would bring the concept of value front and center in higher education and help make our vast national investment in higher education far more rationale 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.)
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. Colleges participating in NSSE give students an extensive Web-based survey about their college experiences, focusing on teaching practices and out-of-class qualities that research has found to correlate with learning—things like the number of books and lengthy papers assigned in their courses, how much of their coursework involves applying theories to practical problems, how much homework their teachers assign, and how often they discuss coursework outside of class with teachers and classmates. Since its founding, NSSE has gathered information from over three million students in the U.S. and Canada and spawned a similar survey of community college students. The organization says it has found little relationship between having a prominent brand name and teaching students well.
Another, more direct measure of the quality of undergraduate teaching is the Collegiate Learning Assessment, developed by the non-profit Council for Aid to Education and launched nationally in 2004-05. It gauges progress in students’ critical thinking skills over a college career by having them analyze documents, critique arguments, and synthesize information in longish essays. Like NSSE, the CLA has used technology, including computer-scored essays, to make its assessments affordable. Colleges and universities can measure the teaching and learning in their classrooms with a substantial degree of accuracy for $6,300 per campus.
The problem is that CLA and NSSE can’t report their findings publicly. Colleges and universities administer the tests voluntarily and have control over the results. And most are loath to put them on public display because, as NSSE has revealed, reputation doesn’t necessarily align with results. If they were smart, the vast majority of the nation’s 4,300 colleges and universities would happily shift the “best colleges” debate to a discussion of where students learn the most, because they lack the big endowments, brand names, or selective admissions to compete successfully in the U.S. News wealth-fame-exclusivity sweepstakes. But so far, only a handful of schools have publicized their NSSE and CLA results.
If the Obama administration really wanted to shake up the cost equation in higher education, it would push for the public disclosure, school by school, of the sorts of information captured in measures like CLA and NSSE.