Discussions of the need for increased accountability in higher education are mostly mindless. There is a presumption on the part of what I have come to call the “accountability police” that colleges and universities today are not accountable — paired with a reluctance to specify by whom and for what colleges and universities ought to be held accountable. There is just a sense that a college education today is too expensive and not worth the money given that college students are not learning enough. Finally there is the assumption that if the public had more data, accrediting agencies more power, and state governments more gumption the nation’s colleges and universities could finally be held accountable.
I keep trying to make sense of this argument. My current gambit is to imagine an accountability process that actually tests the quality of higher educational products — both courses and degree programs. What would happen if there were something like a U.S. Higher Education Administration modeled after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — a federal agency that currently promotes itself as the consumer protection agency of the U.S. government? To insure safe and effective pharmaceuticals, the FDA conducts clinical tests of new drugs before they are released to the market and then insists that their manufacturers continue to test and report on their safety and efficacy. A higher education look-alike would be expected to do the same thing — test products and monitor their continued efficacy. This proposal differs from other calls for increased accountability by focusing specifically on educational products, by insisting that they be rigorously tested, and by establishing an external mechanism for post-test monitoring. Thinking about the problem of accountability from this perspective makes clear that simply having more data and tests won’t work unless there is an external agency doing the testing and monitoring the data collection.
If nothing else, I hope my imaginary, admittedly impractical proposal makes clear that a search for accountability ought to be about more than sloganeering. Those who think colleges and universities need to be more accountable, or accountable to something other than a fickle market, have an obligation to specify in considerable detail how products are to be tested and monitored, how data is to be collected and used, and how the process is to be paid for.
My further hope is that those currently pushing the accountability agenda would, if actually called upon to provide the details of a practical accountability system, soon conclude that there are other, less disruptive, less expensive ways to improve the nation’s colleges and universities. What won’t work are more helter-skelter calls for increased accountability that tar all institutions by implication.
