Higher education’s current rush to exposure has both startled and dismayed me. That organized higher education’s response to calls for greater transparency are being orchestrated by two canny insiders — NAICU’s David Warren and NASULGC’s Peter McPherson — is, I suppose, reassuring, but somehow I can’t shake the notion that the attack on higher education and hence the response is based on a pair of faulty premises.
The first is that there is a lack of information about higher education. As every first-year graduate student studying higher education quickly learns, we are awash in data about the nation’s colleges and universities. The Web site of the National Center for Education Statistics is a treasure trove of detailed institutional data from IPEDs and a host of longitudinal studies likes NPSAS and NELS. Even the Secretary of Education has learned to her dismay that much of the information she said she lacked when helping her daughter choose a college was actually available on her own department’s Web site.
A second, more pernicious premise is that the public — students, parents, business leaders, the media, even legislators — want or would know what to do with the kinds of new data higher education’s critics are currently calling for. It is a conceit on the part of those would-be reformers and policy wonks who want to remake higher education in their own image to say that our shoppers don’t know what they are buying when they choose a college or university. We may not be happy about it, but most shoppers are getting exactly what they want — prestige, reputation, a shot at a better future largely defined in terms of better job and income prospects. And that is the data that is currently available in abundance, largely in the form of the “dreaded rankings.”
