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February 18, 2009, 10:23 AM ET
$$$, Assessment, Etc.
Earlier this week the Chronicle published a new column from yrs. truly about assessment in higher education. In a nutshell: the general intransigence / lack of enthusiasm for producing public, comparable assessment measures has put higher education in a tight spot, because college leaders now have to make the case for funding in an incredibly difficult budget environment without any credible evidence of what the money will do for students from a learning perspective. “Trust me and give me more money” has never been a winning argument to make to the state lawmakers who hold the purse strings (I know, I used to work for them), as recent decades of public disinvestment in higher education can attest. And as more and more information about nearly everything becomes available, the near-total lack of reliable institution-level learning data stands in increasingly marked contrast.
Clearly, many people disagree with me on this subject. (Fellow Brainstorm blogger Laurie Fendrich wrote a lengthy post on the topic just last week.) To elaborate on a few things that I touched on in the column: I understand that assessments have unavoidable costs, limitations, and inaccuracies, and that colleges have many incredibly valuable and worthy goals for students that cannot be quantified. But perfect and total information can’t be the enemy of the good. Some things aren’t measurable, but others are. Some assessments are unreliable, others work very well, particularly when the goal is only to produce an institution-level estimate of learning. Why not start with the skills, subjects, and domains that are most appropriate for comparison and public reporting? More than anything, it’s the complete absence of such information that makes me skeptical of claims that this all a problem of methods and practice, as opposed to an unreasonable aversion to accountability and comparison.
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