Should Colleges be More Accountable?

A few weeks ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education published my article, America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree.

One of that article’s contentions is that each college’s student recruitment materials be required to include a report card containing such information as graduation rates and average student growth in thinking skills, writing, etc. disaggregated by SAT score bands.

I’ve been pleased that the article has generated national interest: It has been republished in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Dallas Morning News, and I was interviewed about it on a number of shows including National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. I’ve received so many supportive emails from professors, administrators, students, and former students.

The article has also generated many responses in the Chronicle’s Forum, not all positive. In this blog post, I list the major criticisms of my call for a required college report card and my response to each criticism:

Criticism #1: “Surely teaching isn’t poor at teaching-oriented institutions, of which there are thousands. In my R1 department, the quality of teaching by top-notch research profs is amazingly (emphasis mine) good, with a few glaring exceptions.”

My Response
Here are my criteria for “amazing” teaching. How many faculty members could honestly describe themselves as “amazing?”

— Providing instruction that will cause significant growth in the critical competencies:

— thinking skills

— writing skills

— responsible citizenship

— information literacy (for example, competent use of libraries, Google, etc)

— an understanding of the scientific method

— the ability to think probabilistically

— the ability to estimate accurately

— an appreciation of iconic music and art through the ages

— an appreciation of the universal themes in literature and the major definitions and tensions within, for example, love, jealousy, ambition, greed, alienation, the meaning of life, fear, prejudice, death, etc.

— Often using immersive activities such as simulations, role plays, and debates, which increase the likelihood of growth in those competencies.

— The willingness to be truly available, one-on-one, to students as intellectual and emotional mentors. That means the clichéd but invaluable long talks, walks, coffees, and dinners with students, asking them questions, for example, about their search for meaning, career, responsible citizenship, wisdom, etc.

From where I sit, that is the standard to which we should aspire. And if teaching faculty members don’t have the time or ability to be “amazing,” colleges need to change the bases on which teaching faculty are hired, provided tutelage, and promoted.

Criticism #2: “Is it colleges’ fault if students are bored? Shouldn’t they be taking more responsibility for their educations?” (My article cited the Higher Education Research Institute national study that found that 44.6% of freshmen at four-year colleges were frequently bored in class.)

My response
It is the admissions committee’s fault for admitting severely underprepared students, who are far more likely to be bored. (Wouldn’t you be bored as a student in a class for which you were severely underprepared?)

And faculty must take responsibility for not boring the fully qualified. Faculty has an obligation to choose content that reasonably qualified undergraduate students would find valuable, presented in interactive, engaging ways to ensure that they, at least, retain the critical learnings listed above.

Criticism #3: Requiring colleges to administer a test of value-added is a bad idea: It wouldn’t measure the important things and/or would cost too much to administer.

My Response
The Collegiate Learning Assessment, a non-multiple-choice, computer-administered test of reasoning, problem solving, and writing, has been widely recommended by higher education reform commissions and cogently defended in “Collegiate Learning Assessment: Facts and Fantasy,” Evaluation Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2007, pp 415-439.

Of course, no test measures everything, but each institution’s administering an exam such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment to a random sample of freshmen and then again to those students as seniors would provide a cost-effective index of a college’s value-added. Of course, the sample quality would be diminished by the fact that colleges will vary in the percentage and characteristics of the tested freshmen who left the college before their senior year. Nonetheless, it would be a most useful tool for comparing colleges and for helping a college to evaluate its effectiveness.

Should 4-Year Colleges Admit Underprepared Students?

My Chronicle of Higher Education article, America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree argued that four-year colleges should not admit underprepared students.

A number of posters to the Chronicle Forum disagree. Here are their arguments and my responses:

Criticism #1: Marginal students struggle even with a college degree. Why would you discourage them from getting even that?

My Response
As my article documented, every year, four-year colleges enroll hundreds of thousands of students who graduated in the bottom half of their high-school class, the large majority of whom learn little, acquire much debt, and have only a 1/3 chance of graduating even if given 8 1/2 years.

Those students will likely learn more and have a brighter career future if they choose an option other than four-year college: an apprenticeship program, community college, career college, the military, or a launchpad job at the elbow of a fund raiser, ethical small-business owner, electrician, etc. Because colleges are turning out ever more college graduates at the same time as employers are offshoring, part-timing, and automating ever more white-collar jobs, even if those weak students manage to beat the large odds and get their degree, they are likely to be among the weakest college graduates and thus more career-at-risk than if they had chosen one of the aforementioned paths.

I felt compelled to write America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree in part, because I’ve seen countless students who struggled in high school pushed to college where they dropped out or managed to — six to 10 years later — finish their degree, only to find themselves unable to get a better job than they could have gotten as a mere high-school graduate. And, importantly, most of them lack the thinking and communication skills one would expect even of a marginal college graduate. Meanwhile, they see their peers happier and more successful in a career such as the aforementioned.

Criticism #2: Some students did badly in high school but blossomed in college.

My Response
The evidence is dispositive: For every late-blooming success, there are many who fail, and for whom a non-college path would have been wiser.

Most physicians wouldn’t prescribe a treatment that took four to eight years, cost a fortune, and had a high risk of failure. And if a physician did so without fully informing the patient, the patient would likely sue and win in any court in the land. Yet every year, four-year colleges administer such a treatment — providing nowhere near full disclosure — to hundreds of thousands of underprepared students, the large majority of whom end up dropping out having acquired little learning, much debt, and damaged self-esteem.

And not only are the colleges not sued, government rewards them with ever-increased financial aid, which allows the colleges to continue to raise tuition beyond the cost of inflation.

Criticism #3: Don’t just blame the colleges for admitting underprepared students. High school counselors have a responsibility too.

My Response
I agree, but colleges must first provide counselors with the data on average learning gains, graduation rates, and employment for students, disaggregated by SAT score bands. That would greatly help high-school counselors assist students in weighing the cost-benefit of four-year college versus the aforementioned options.

The Problem with Meritocracy

Readers of this blog know that I believe strongly in meritocracy, but all ideologies have weaknesses.

The weakness of meritocracy is that a significant percentage of people lose in a meritocracy, largely due to factors beyond their control: their genes, which parents and what community they were born into, etc.

I believe that citizens, the government, and nonprofits have a moral obligation to attempt to mitigate some of that random unfairness.

The controversy comes in how much to distribute from those with the greatest potential to contribute to society to those with the least.

Controversy also comes from the dishonest Leftists who play the race, class, and gender cards to arm-twist for support for social programs. Nearly all those programs have shown little benefit, even the vaunted Head Start, and certainly not enough benefit to justify taking tax dollars from the ever-more strapped middle and working class to pay for them.

As someone with a social science Ph.D. from Berkeley, specializing in the evaluation of such programs, I am convinced that almost no education or other such programs yet exist that yield sufficient benefit to force taxpayers to pay for it. One possible exception would be top-quality, one-on-one mentoring/tutoring programs.

What I would fund are bold research initiatives aimed at finding truly new and more promising sorts of interventions.

Amazing Resume Software

I just got a copy of the latest version (version 15) of ResumeMaker. ($29.95) In addition to being a superior tool for creating or revising your resume, it

• helps you create cover letters
• automatically posts your resume on 80 major job sites
• blasts your resume to a zillion employers (Actually, very occasionally, you can get a job that way--and because the risk is so low, why not try--unless you need to keep your employer or others from knowing you're job searching.)
• Prepares you for your interviews with a video tutorial in which you can record and listen to your practice answers.
  

Candidly, I have not yet had time to try this latest version out and am swamped, but I'd bet anything, it's well worth the $29.95.

If you've tried ResumeMaker, feel free to post your reviews as a comment here.

I'm Now the Guest Blogger at the Chronicle of Higher Education

Through June, 2008, I am the Guest Blogger in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I'm blogging about two things:

• Improving higher education: Why we must, and how.
• Career advice for college professors and administrators.
  

I've already made three posts there.

Because of my blogging there, I'll won't post here as often, through the end of June. But in addition to seeing my posts there, I'll try to copy them here a day or two later. (My contract with them requires that delay.)

An Article That Made Me Want to Cry and Hug Its Author

What a smart, hard-working, and superbrave woman is Christina Hoff Sommers. Her dispositive article on the substitution of gender equity for merit in science careers is so worth reading, whether you're a feminist, an angry male, or simply someone interested is seeing how America's future is being derailed by gender (and race) victimization politics. I urge you to read it.

While I'm no John McCain fan , (I'll be voting Libertarian although I so wish they had a better candidate than Bob Barr?!) I believe that the election of Obama or Clinton will result in ever more replacement of meritocracy with reverse discrimination.

Hail to YouTube/Google and Men

I, again and again, watch and listen, on YouTube, to Glenn Gould's amazing performance of Bach's sublime Goldberg Variations.

What a miracle: to be able to revivify Gould and his amazing performance for us all to hear whenever we want, for free. I am filled with gratitude to the geniuses at Google/YouTube who make it possible.

Two points:

-- In an era in which we take great pains to praise women for their contributions to the world, may I point out that it is highly likely that most of the people that allow us to experience the wonders of Google and YouTube are men. And of course, so are Gould and Bach, not to mention Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, indeed nearly all great composers, even the leading contemporary classical composers, long after the women's movement created opportunities for women composers.

-- As the Internet gets ever more congested, viewing and listening to most sound- and graphic-intensive files including YouTube is getting more difficult. For example, every few seconds, Bach's/Gould's genius is interrupted by "buffering." Would you bet that the persons who develop a solution will be mostly men or mostly women?