Demanding Accountability in Higher Education
Americans are shocked by the cost, waste and inefficiency of the healthcare system. No such shocks with higher education - because the information is all carefully concealed from the public.
California students organized protests this week to demand more public money for education.
Not such a good idea, argues Kevin Carey in the left-tilting magazine Democracy:
[T]he biggest problem with American higher education isn’t that too many students can’t afford to enroll. It’s that too many of the students who do enroll aren’t learning very much and aren’t earning degrees. For the average student, college isn’t nearly as good a deal as colleges would have us believe
In America's less selective colleges, graduation rates average below 45%. And those who manage to graduate have not learned much:
A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31 percent of adults with bachelor’s degrees are proficient in "prose literacy"–being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for example. More than a quarter have math skills so feeble that they can’t calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalogue.
Americans are shocked by the cost, waste and inefficiency of the healthcare system. No such shocks with higher education - because the information is all carefully concealed from the public. While the systems and data exist to allow students and parents to do rational comparisons of costs and benefits, that information is secreted by universities with the connivance of government.
The most reactionary education lobby in Washington, D.C., isn’t located at the 16th Street headquarters of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union. It’s less than a mile away, at 1 Dupont Circle. That’s where the American Council on Education (ACE), the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), and a host of other alphabet-soup organizations conspire to maintain higher education secrecy at all costs. Long-established colleges that enjoy the benefits of the existing, information-starved reputation market dominate 1 Dupont.
Three recent examples illustrate the lengths to which they’ll go. To get colleges to participate in their surveys and tests, NSSE and the CLA had to strike a bargain. Colleges would control the results–the data would remain secret unless colleges chose otherwise. Then, in 2006, Mark Schneider, the commissioner of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, proposed adding some new questions to the annual survey all colleges are required to fill out in exchange for federal funds. Colleges would be asked if they participated in surveys and tests like NSSE and the CLA. If the college answered "yes," and had already chosen to make the data public, it would be asked to provide a link to the appropriate Web address. It would not be required to participate in any test or survey not of its choosing, or disclose any new information. It would just have to tell people where to find the information it had already, voluntarily, disclosed. One Dupont Circle rose up in anger and the proposal was summarily squashed. For his temerity, Schneider was nearly fired.
That same year, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings convened a high-profile "Commission on the Future of Higher Education." In the course of its deliberations, the bipartisan commission bemoaned
a lack of clear, reliable information about the cost and quality of postsecondary institutions, along with a remarkable absence of accountability mechanisms to ensure that colleges succeed in educating students. The result is that students, parents, and policymakers are often left scratching their heads over the answers to basic questions, [including] which institutions do a better job than others not only of graduating students but of teaching them what they need to learn.
The commission went on to recommend upgrading an archaic federal data collection system to take advantage of newly developed IT systems, including electronic student records, under the aegis of existing federal privacy laws that prohibit the release of any personal student information. When the topic was broached in mid-summer, the president of NAICU issued a press release denouncing it as "Orwellian" and "an assault on Americans’ privacy and security in the shadow of the Fourth of July." When the Commission persisted, 1 Dupont Circle ran to Congress, which obligingly passed a law making the new information system illegal.