Shameful, Cont’d

Matt Yglesias responds to the University of Phoenix post below:
I think the main lesson here is that traditional universities need to do a better job of getting into the niche that’s currently dominated by these poorly performing for-profits. In part, state governments would do well to shift emphasis away from trying to burnish the sheen on their “flagship” traditional universities and toward doing more in the way of providing community-college services for working and nontraditional students. But given the nature of the American system, perhaps the bigger part of this is that social and intellectual pressure needs to be brought to bear on rich people to stop donating to already-wealthy universities with huge endowments and to instead focus their efforts where they’ll do more good. Harvard and Yale have plenty of money, and their students aren’t coming from needy families. But plenty of students on the low end of the higher education system are genuinely in need, and they simply don’t have much in the way of decent educational services available to him.Exactly right. To extend the first sentence a bit further: One of the big shortcomings in the market for postsecondary credentials is the lack of meaningful differentiation in degrees bestowed by non-elite institutions. A degree from Princeton is valuable because it transmits important information about the degree holder: “I was smart enough to get into Princeton.” But most colleges and universities—well over 80 percent—admit the majority of students who apply. Many admit everyone who applies. And since few colleges provide any kind of objective, comparable, reliable information about how much students learn while they’re in college, what’s left is a huge mass of largely undifferentiated degrees from non-selective institutions. The fact that we live in an unusually large country with many higher education institutions and a high level of mobility just makes things worse. Practically speaking, there’s simply no way for an employer to understand the difference in the quality of education provided at Southeastern State University at Somewhere as compared to the Regional College of Somewhere Else. One degree from an accredited nonselective institution pretty much looks like all the rest, and this is what allows the University of Phoenix and other for-profits to thrive. If traditional institutions don’t want for-profits to eat their lunch, they can’t just assert that they’re providing a higher-quality education—they need to prove it, by providing credible evidence of student learning results and other outcomes. And everyone—donors and policy makers alike—needs to start treating nonselective institutions more fairly by not giving them pennies on the flagship institution dollar.