Three things are needed for market forces and consumer choice to ensure quality in undergraduate education:

• Students and their family members and other advisers must know what to look for to accurately evaluate learning environments.
• They must be able to find the information fairly easily.
• And students should select a college that, in an acceptable price range, provides the most challenging academic program and diverse, yet supportive personal-social environment.

I know of no evidence to suggest that this is happening. Although most students say they choose their institution primarily because of its “academic quality,” they base their decisions on something other than valid, reliable quality indicators, because those indicators available today are sparse and uneven across institutions. Magazine rankings of institutions claim to fill this vacuum, but the most popular are proxies for institutional selectivity, revealing nothing about what students really experience.

So far, the best of the nascent openness efforts (which I applaud), like the Voluntary System of Accountability, allow institutions to select from among several measures that yield incomplete data, making it next to impossible for prospective students to draw informed conclusions about the relative educational quality of the colleges they are considering. Most of what is available does not represent essential 21st-century learning outcomes, as delineated by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, nor is it clear if the public understands or is using the available information appropriately. At worst, market forces are deleterious when institutions starve academic programs and services to build lavish student residences and climbing walls because they are convinced that their students must have them as part of a well-rounded collegiate experience.

George D. Kuh is one of the principal investigators of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, based at Indiana University at Bloomington and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.