The country bumpkin among the four horsemen of reform is quality — a term so bereft of practical meaning today that it is now commonplace to talk about high quality, higher quality, and highest quality as a means of distinguishing among nearly equal claims to excellence.
No one is against quality. Almost everyone is ready to concede that American higher education, whatever its faults and shortcomings, is the envy of the rest of the world and in that sense truly world class, perhaps even in a class by itself. Not so fast, says Jonathan Grayer, the former Newsweek marketing executive Washington Post picked to run its Kaplan subsidiary and who was in many ways the most interesting as well as the most unusual member of the Spellings Commission. Grayer’s role was principally to explain and where necessary defend the interests of the growing for-proftit educational sector. But periodically the Harvard graduate (Harvard College then Harvard Business School) would let loose, challenging the rest of us to think differently. At one point he suggested an alternative way to think about quality. Having been reminded by a recent declaration in The Economist that American universities were the best in the world, Jonathan said he thought such statements did not apply to the bulk of American higher education but only to its most selective institutions.
Instead, Grayer suggested that American colleges and universities are like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead. When they are good, they are very, very good — and when they are not, well, they are just sort of mediocre. It is an observation that, among other things, helps explain why the U.S. ranks in the middle rather than at the top of so many international comparisons focusing on the quality of national systems of higher education.
The comparative scale on which American higher education clearly ranks at the top is expenditures. In American higher education, those institutions with the highest expenditures per student are the same institutions with the most selective admissions and hence the most competitive students. Whether these students rise to the top because they are among the “best and brightest” to begin with or because the institutions in which they enroll have more resources to invest in their educations is a question worth pondering, particularly if the question before the house is whether or not money buys quality. Most observers of American higher education would argue that the quality of student inputs remains more important than the quality of the educational process — in part, at least, because the educational processes employed vary so little across the range of baccalaureate institutions.
To be continued …
