Legend has it that six score and eight years ago, railroad baron William Vanderbilt said, “The public be damned.” That thought came back to me as I perused the information displayed on an interesting new (to me at least) Web site, MyPlan.com. Students evaluate some 592 schools on a variety of criteria, including a “bottom line” question 15 that asks student to indicate their overall satisfacation with their school. If, as McDonald’s, Coca Cola and Apple Computer so clearly demonstrate, having satisfied customers is key to business success, you might expect the nation’s “best” colleges to be the ones where students are, roughly speaking, the happiest.
It is interesting to compare the perceptions of college and university leaders of the “best” colleges, as indicated on the peer-assessment component of the 2009 US News & World Report rankings with student perceptions of what schools they like the most. For several schools that school administrators love—Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins are great examples—students show, at best, so-so feelings. Yet other schools—Wake Forest, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Notre Dame, are standout examples—are ranked so-so at best in the peer assessment with college administrators, but very highly in terms of student satisfaction. Among flagship state universities, the students love Penn State, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Florida vastly more than the adult “experts,” who, in turn like the Universities of Michigan and Illinois far more than their students do.
If you look at overall student satisfaction independent of school size, Carnegie classification, etc., the top schools are a distinctly different list than what the college administrators believe. The list of the top 10 is below:
1. Ohio University
2. Williams College
3. Elon University
4. Stanford University
5. Notre Dame
6. Smith College
7. Appalachian State University
8. Carleton College
9. Vassar College
10. Yale University
To put it mildly, top-ranked Ohio University, third-ranked Elon University, and seventh-ranked Appalachian State University do not rank particularly highly in the peer assessment by US News. As a professor at Ohio U. who has been on the faculty at several higher US News ranked schools (e.g., Washington University in St. Louis, Claremont McKenna College), I sense the MyPlan rankings are roughly accurate. I think students at Ohio University, for example, are more satisfied than ones attending my much more peer-acceptable alma mater, Northwestern. To be sure, some schools (e.g. Stanford, Yale, and Williams College) rank highly with both groups, but the differences are more glaring than the similarities.
Usually top (or nearly top) ranked Princeton does not make the top 50 on the MyPlan list, and Washington U. in St. Louis, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and Northwestern don’t make the top 150, or quartile, of schools examined. Kids at Northwest Missouri State University seem more satisfied with their schooling than kids at Duke, for example.
The objections to all of this will go along the following lines:
1. This is a crummy, unscientific assessment, based on relatively few student evaluations (in all the cases above, however, a minimum of 10 students offerred their opinion).
2. Undergraduate education is a relatively small part of what determines greatness and excellence, at least in the larger research universities.
3. Popularity and excellence are different concepts. A school can be popular even while it snubs the academic verities.
There is some truth to all of those assertions.
Yet students and their parents write large checks that fund a significant part of activities at most of these schools. State subsidies are largely rationalized on grounds of increasing access and economic opportunity. And, let’s face it, there is a consumption or socialization dimension of higher education that for many is at least as important as the academic. University administrators view the satisfaction of their undergraduate customers with a good bit of indifference at many schools. Schools like my own Ohio University and Appalachian State, which offer a highly satisfying experience at a relatively low price, deserve more kudos than what they’re given by the academic administrators who have never visited most of the campuses they rank.
11 Responses to The Administrator-Student Disconnect
ovpstaff - July 2, 2010 at 7:49 am
Where is the evidence to support your statement that “University administrators view the satisfaction of their undergraduate customers with a good bit of indifference at many schools?” The U.S. News peer assessment and the MyPlan assessment ask their (distinctly different) participants (distinctly different) questions. Mind you, I don’t care for either one for any number of reasons, but the fact that Ohio U ends up in ranked differently doesn’t mean that those dreaded administrators don’t care about undergraduates. Who’s to say that I don’t consider undergraduate satisfaction when rating my competitors in the U.S. News survey? And who’s to say that faculty members “don’t view the satisfaction of their undergraduate customers with a good bit of indifference…” Stop fanning the flames of the purported administrator/student or administrator/faculty “divide” with unsupported statements.
mbelvadi - July 2, 2010 at 8:37 am
Your list of types of objections completely missed mine: since most undergrad students have experience with only a single institution, asking them to rate their satisfaction (a totally subjective concept) on an objective (numeric) scale only ends up measuring the success of the institution at managing expectations, not delivering any particular level of quality. If students expect very little (which I think is more likely of students going to Ohio than Harvard, for instance), and get barely more than that, they’ll be more satisfied than students who are expecting the world, and get a little less than that.
mbelvadi - July 2, 2010 at 8:48 am
One other objection I just thought of: another thing “satisfaction” measures is the extent to which the student is subject to the effects of cognitive dissonance. For instance, a hypothetical student who was accepted to both Harvard and Yale, and chooses to go to Yale, would have a great subconscious problem if they admitted to themselves that they weren’t happy at Yale. So they’ll tend to convince themselves that they are more satisfied than they might have been if they hadn’t been accepted to Harvard. Figuring out which institutions are positioned relative to their competition and their students in ways that will or won’t cause this effect is probably incredibly complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a huge factor in this study. In fact, if you wanted to deliberately design a study to measure the relative cognitive dissonance students feel about their university choices, you’d probably end up with a study like this one. You could even consider the possibility that different institutions’ recruiting methods select for admits that will or won’t have these kinds of conflicts in their decision-making or are more/less likely to have “buyer’s remorse” vs. “never look back on past decisions” philosophies.
22228715 - July 2, 2010 at 11:01 am
I’m not too surprised to see Ohio U. high, but based on 25 years of reputation and knowing a 19-year-old who is in the process of transferring from a more highly-ranked U to OU, a big factor in this is fun. Ohio U is known to have better parties, more social life, cooler sports from the athlete perspective, and a lot more alcohol than many top-ranked programs. I’m guessing that “adult” raters are not including availability of beer and available partners as factors in USNWR report rankings. That’s not to say OU doesn’t have some great programs, or even that being socially stimulated isn’t a legitimate choice factor for college – just that most traditional-age student rankings are judging the quality of 360 degree late-adolescent immersion experiences, and “adult” rankings are judging academic merit or reputation or faculty resources, or… Well, totally different topics. It is administrative/faculty fantasy that most undergraduates are choosing colleges based on educational content.So, I propose adding the following to Vedder’s anticipated objections:4. Unlike McDonalds or Apple, the time horizon on judging the quality of what you get is years, not minutes, so that alumni surveys are better indicators.5. Few universities provide only one product. They surveys above might very well all be correct and congruent, but measuring different outcomes, or different constellations of outcomes (education, sophisticated thinking, career success, resources available, cheerfulness of front-line service staff, housing or food, advising, ease of meeting a spouse or partner, social life, self-expression… only some of which are legitimate things to expect of a U, only some of which are things the U can control.)6. At the core, many undergraduate students don’t realize until they finish (if ever) that the main thing they are buying is DISCOMFORT. If their experience is smooth, happy, easy, no-sweat, then chances are pretty good they didn’t learning anything. The key is to spend the time and energy being uncomfortable about things that make you learn and grow, not annoyance or danger things. Using the imperfect analogy of the health club, you build muscles and become more healthy when you sweat and feel the burn, but pain alone is not a good measure of whether it is working.
jack_cade - July 2, 2010 at 11:48 am
Every time someone refers to undergraduates as customers I want to hit myself in the head with a brick.They are the freaking product people. Not the customer.A college education is not like ordering a sub at subway. You cannot say, “I’ll take my education without reading a book (at least at real universities you cannot) and I would like that delivered.” The values of the relatively stupid, that is the uneducated, immature, overly-marketed-too, 18-23 year old, are hardly the values that should drive a plan for higher education.The customers of the university are humanity, society, and the student after they graduate; these are clients served through time, not in a brief moment of consumption–this is yet another example of why the economic exchange model fails as a metaphor when applied to higher education.The values of those customers matter, but giving too much attention to undergraduate concerns is like asking lettuce how to make the sandwich it is going to be a part of.The rankings on MyPlan are totally anecdotal, totally subjective, and totally useless. Taking them seriously is foolish and only serves whomever owns the website.
optimysticynic - July 2, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Completely agree with #5. However, in the constant demand for measurement and accountability, we measure what we can, not what matters (the drunk under the lamppost). Satisfaction is easily maasured; critical thinking, career success, civic leadership in the decades post-degree are not. What is not measured is not discussed; what is not discussed can become under-valued. Who in our university administration is speaking for these hard-to-measure values and outcomes?
mawickline - July 2, 2010 at 1:18 pm
I too agree with Jack Cade. And would add that objection #1 in the article is not something to discard so off-handedly. Knowing the opinions of an extremely small sample of self-selected respondents is worthless. It doesn’t tell us anything. The economist needs to enlist the help of some more serious sciences like communication or psychology to get real information. But then, maybe that’s why our country’s economy is in the tank–this is the kind of data economists use?
yavneh - July 2, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Snarkmeisters, did any of you notice that at least half of the above institutions are highly-ranked liberal arts colleges — i.e., small institutions that place a high value on student-faculty interaction, teaching excellence and undergraduate research, as well as faculty research? As a director of undergraduate research, I’ve had the opportunity to meet hundreds of undergraduates from institutions all over the country who I would hardly recognize as “the relatively stupid, that is the uneducated, immature, overly-marketed-too, 18-23 year old,” one of my colleagues, above describes.
upallnight - July 2, 2010 at 11:43 pm
America is becoming a third world country. Because of the customer-service orientation of colleges and universities, our students are trained to cut corners and to make the grade, rather than actually learn something. They do not discover themselves as people; they learn how to play the game. “They pretend to learn and we pretend to teach.” The classroom is not a place of ideas, but a place to find out what will be on the test. Unfortunately, real life has no tests, just challenges. For example, the spewing oil in the gulf is a problem that could use a creative solution. But we have “tested” the creativity right out of our students. My students don’t like to think. I get hammered on the evaluations if my course requires actual thinking. Where I teach, the students are extremely happy with their school. For most classes, they don’t have to buy the book and they can still get an A. Should we be surprised that medical personnel in this country (with nursing and medical degrees) reuse needles, exposing patients to deadly diseases. There have been at least 3 large cases of this in the last five years. There is something truly wrong with our educational system/culture. Last week, the VA revealed that veterans were exposed to disease because of improperly cleaned instruments. College is more of an amusement ride than a place where people are transformed by the life of the mind. Then a career is just the next step to play the game, cut corners, do the least amount of work possible, and take home the money. People who care about the quality of education or the quality of work or integrity of an institution are marginalized/demonized because they are not “team players.”
rogmar - July 6, 2010 at 9:36 am
Ignore what current students think and go straight to graduates and employers. The job of post secondary education should be to prepare students for employability, life success and life satisfaction. We don’t know how well schools do on these measures until later on. Investment (whether government or personal) in education should be gauged by ROI.
geoz32 - July 6, 2010 at 11:08 am
Is the Chronicle seeking provocative over quality? Weak article. Not well supported. Not well defined terms. Just one example (others above): Who are these “administrators” and how do they know much more than students about the quality (or any quality) of the institutions they rank? Maybe they know one or two from working there or from a friend in the field… and how reliable is that?