Colleges Not Above Being Judged
Posted on: Wednesday, 25 June 2008, 03:02 CDT
A couple years ago the president of Princeton University, responding to the national push to make colleges more accountable, said that measuring success with students shouldn't come down to exit tests. A college can't really know whether it has succeeded until a class' 25th reunion, she said.
Wow, was she out of touch -- even granting she had a certain point.
That argument is just not going to fly in a world where students are taking out loans that they'll be paying, oh, probably at least until their 10th reunion. Nor are politicians -- who are depending on higher education to turn out the thinkers who will fill and create the jobs of the future -- going to settle for such a delayed evaluation.
The most elite institutions may be among the last to come around, but Ohio's public colleges are going to give policy makers, students and parents a measure of their quality, voluntarily or involuntarily. Eric Fingerhut, who is the overseer of Ohio colleges, has decreed that four-year schools must participate in a national effort called the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA). (Wright State University, incidentally, was an early participant, even before the order came down.)
To be part of VSA, colleges have to commit to creating a template called a "college portrait" that allows prospective students to make apples-toapples comparisons among schools in a consumer-friendly format.
Want to know how many freshmen come back for their sophomore year? How many graduate in six years or in Arabic studies? Interested in what extracurricular activities draw the most students? Looking to calculate what a four-year degree from an institution will cost and what its average financial aid award is? Curious whether achievement tests show students come out of school smarter than when they arrived?
All this and more will be on the portrait.
Much of this statistical information already exists. But often it's not accessible or publicized, and schools can choose to measure and report their counts differently. It's for these reasons that standardizing a format is a big step forward.
Not shockingly, the most controversial aspect of the plan is measuring how well students think. Giving tests to exiting grads isn't common, and publicizing the results is pretty much unheard of.
Really, though, the decision has been made. In 2006, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education called for a national assessment. That lit a fire under college presidents because they know that if their institutions don't come up with a credible method of their own, Congress will act for them.
The last thing the colleges want is a collegiate No Child Left Behind Act.
Like all good things, the portraits and assessment tests are more easily talked about than executed. That effort will take time. But Chancellor Fingerhut has given Ohio's colleges deadlines for various reporting obligations.
The task that will be hardest -- with one measure replacing another and then another -- will be assessing academic achievement. There is a genuine debate to be had, because colleges do cater to different kinds of students and turn out different kinds of graduates.
Still, the problem really can be solved. And colleges can't very well complain about achievement tests being required for their students when most of them require -- or at least look at -- ACT or SAT scores as a condition for admission.
Ohio is committed to getting more people into and graduating from college. One possible outcome of that drive is schools lowering their standards just to make sure they're seen as doing their part toward that goal. Especially in an environment where this pressure is on, having an objective check on quality is the smart and right thing to do.
Ohio isn't doing anything others aren't coming around to supporting. If its colleges get there early, that will be a good for the state and for anyone who ever writes a pricey tuition check.
(c) 2008 Dayton Daily News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Dayton Daily News
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