Academic Tryouts?

“If colleges want to operate in the “free market”” …

  Here is the problem … there are somethings that money cannot buy:  graduation, a job, loan repayments and test scores.  Tuition pays for Means – an opportunity – not ends.  We are deluding ourselves if we think we can guarantee these outcomes.  They depend on too many factors that have nothing to do with the educational experience provided.  Money talks but, concerning higher education, we are not listening to what it is saying.

There is a problem with your (and others’) preoccupation over output measures and their supposed rightful centrality in helping people make the best decisions possible about which college or university to attend, if any. The problem is precisely this: If colleges and universities are to do all the things you seem to want them to do, it places individuals seeking postsecondary education in an active role only through the choice process and then renders them as utterly passive human units to be moved through machinery in such a way that it results in certain outcomes. 

Your analogies in the final paragraph can be used to help illustrate this point. When I am in the market to buy a car, I don’t expect to be told how well I will drive it. If I crash the car, get speeding tickets with it, neglect routine maintenance so that it won’t run, etc., I can’t blame the car any more than I can give it credit for my decisions to not speed or run lights or for its continued smooth running with fluid changes, etc. Likewise, when I am in the market to buy a house, I don’t expect to be told how I will furnish it or how my personal life will unfold if I live in it. And so forth. The thing is, car dealers and real estate agents could actually generate statistics for these sorts of things – statistics to show what people typically do with X car and X house. But asking these sorts of questions would be silly because, as consumers, we recognize that what other people *do* with X car or X house is not necessarily what *I* would do with X car or X house.

Now, whether I should be loaned the money to buy X car or X house is another matter (an interesting one, what with this output measures panacea proposition, to be sure)…

Absolutely correct, Jeff.  With respect to the comments below,  the quality of a college education is not something  students can evaluate in close enough to real time to switch to another school–hence the car analogy is false. As for the point that students are not demanding information about quality, think of Steve Jobs’ insight that people are not likely to “demand” what they’ve never  experienced.

I disagree with that characterization that colleges and
universities are not willing to provide important information to
consumers.  Over 300 public colleges and
universities report essential consumer information to prospective students and
their families through the College Portrait website (www.collegeportraits.org ) and have
been doing so since 2008 as part of the Voluntary System of Accountability.  College Portraits include student learning
outcomes, student success and progress rates, and a net price calculator among
a variety of other campus information.  
This information provides a basis for prospective students to compare
their expectations and goals for the undergraduate experience to what
opportunities are offered by a particular public institution. We recognize the criteria
for selecting a college vary among students and that is why the College
Portraits provide a range of different indicators.  

Jeff has done a good job here.  There are a couple of other issues worth mentioning.  Many students don’t decide which college to attend based on “facts” as discussed here–the kind of data that education researchers consider important.  They decide based on sports teams, where their boyfriend goes, whether the school is “conservative” or  “liberal” and so on.  An acquaintance of mine chose Bowdoin over Davidson in part because of perceived cultural differences between the two schools. There are clearly hard-to-measure cultural differences between, say, Reed and St. Olaf.

Also, the problem of imperfect information is in part responsible for the success of many of the more sophisticated degree mills that operate their own accrediting offices, transcript services and the like.  They market mainly to working adults, but many working adults do not seek out even the information that does exist. 

These are old issues. Most of them go back to discussions among education leaders in the mid-80′s. Yet, few of them have been resolved, thus the continued, if tiresomely repetitive, value of Jeff’s observations. 

A mission of my organization is to create a robust and intelligently regulated market in higher education. Having worked at this for three decades, I believe we are much closer to achieving that mission, in some ways; in other ways, we have yet to begin the transformation.  

Here are a few among a dozen more issues that belong in this discussion.

- Nearly half of today’s college students are adults who work, have families, and execute on a variety of adult responsibilities. Whatever we might think about their abilities to select among competing automobiles or educational institutions, the equations pertaining to rights and responsibilities are different than they are for 17-year-old freshmen. This fact seems to be overlooked in discussions like this one.

- Intelligent regulation would align institutional and student incentives and disincentives with social policy. Today’s institutions still lack the focus on outcomes and impact necessary to support the kinds of analysis that would lead to precision social policy. Worse yet, we have allowed the education establishment to temporize and obfuscate the issue, sometimes even proffering the ridiculous – should be fired for making it – claim that what they teach cannot be measured. 

- The metrics that support intelligent decision-making are not that complicated. We need program, campus, and platform-specific metrics on cost, graduation rates, mean time to degree, cost adjusted for average delays in degree, employment ratios and salaries at 1, 3, & 5 years, ROI, and specific backward-looking assessments of program strengths and weaknesses as determined by former students who are now employing and building upon the education they received. This is the short list. It is simply false to assert that we cannot get these metrics, that they are not valid, or that they will not guide informed decisions. Make this claim to many academics, however, and you get billows of obfuscating rhetorical clouds appealing to tacit and deferred benefits. No reasonable person questions deferred benefits – we sometimes get them with an iPhone – but they cannot form the basis for the social and financial transaction.

- While the infusion of federal and state support  – combined with crude, ideologically driven, and unintelligent regulation — has corrupted market forces (as Jeff points out), I disagree with the idea that we could not get along without most of them. For the most part, we got along without federal support through some of our most prosperous and stable economic times. Runaway cost increases that exceed the annual CPI by a factor of 2-5 have been caused by un-managed infusions of capital.

- It is in the public interest to fund a variety of higher education’s activities, but in a surgically precise way. It is also in the public interest to aid the poor in securing an education, also with precision attention to need and impact. The impact of this support would be substantially more positive if we accounted for each kind of support separately instead of commingling funds and accountabilities as we do now.

There is much more but I have time only to add the observation that President’s scorecard represents a backroom sell-out to the good ol’ boy network. 

The President’s scorecard is virtually worthless (and he knows it) because it would require only institutional-level performance statistics. It is analogous to providing an MPG report not on the car you want to buy but on the average of all cars manufactured by that company. This statistic might be interesting but it is immaterial to your decision. Students enroll in specific programs, not institutions, and the between-program variance is very high for most institutions, especially public institutions. 

I use the somewhat harsh term “sell-out” because the President’s advisers understand fully what I just said. Last year, the Department of Education required essentially the same metrics of the for-profits but at the program and campus level. More politics  . . . Meanwhile, the cost of higher education races out of the reach of all but the upper and upper-middle class.

How about College Navigator from IPEDS  (http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ )?

When my daughter was selecting a school last year, we used the site as our starting point and downloaded all of the metrics into a spreadsheet that we could then use to include other items our family cared about (for example, the depth of information provided on the Disability Support website of the school).  For me, It served more as a confirmation that she was looking at similar schools, something I already felt given my involvement in higher ed.

I often suggest College Navigator as a starting point – it contains basic, comparable information on all institutions providing federal financial aid. 

We have invested considerable resources in this valuable tool and it is sad that it is so often forgotten.  Time spent by institutions who
compile the data and time spent by NCES to develop a user friendly
site.  Perhaps we need to spend some time promoting its use as a source for some of this consumer information?

11272784,

On your first point, it will help you to review a few of the many models — some of them going quite deep in the identification of variables — that determine taxpayer support from all sources for various types of control. The figures these models produce vary some according to whether they consider loan default costs by type of control (which tend to be higher for for-profits) and how deeply they go into forgone taxation costs (which apply to non-profits but not for-profits and can be exceptionally high among elite independents), etc. However, the figures produced by various models cluster close enough to get a decent idea. Elite independents are underwritten by taxpayers in the amount of $35-45K per student per year. Public universities average around half that, a little less. 

Similarly, your claim, “This is a strange and rather political argument.  Price increases at public institutions have come about NOT because consumers have little information, but because federal and state support has been reduced . . .”is uninformed by the facts. In perhaps 20 minutes time, and from widely available sources, you can create a spreadsheet that will allow you to compare the variables of interest. The budgets of higher education have outstripped the CPI by a factor of 2-5 every year since the 1980′s. Most of these runaway increases came during a period when federal and state support was increasing. On balance, the dramatic decreases came about during the recent recession and, in some states, are beginning to reverse.

These issues and the discussions surrounding them do not take place in an informational vacuum. The academic values with which I grew up said that one did his homework before offering opinions on complicated matters.

Not only do those heading to college need information about college, they also need information about finances. Many of those most at risk do not understand loans, financial aid options and policies, or how to be sure to keep financial aid once you have it. So these are the most likely to “drop” courses by walking away not knowing they will be held responsible for the bill. They will drop in and out not knowing that they only have 8 terms of Pell and that they have to show “normal progress to a degree” to hold financial aid. They will seek loans for schools that have high tuition but low rates of employment outcomes and loans that don’t make sense for salaries in the fields that will be pursued afterwards. Where is this information coming from — again who assures that the low-income, first generation and minority students get all the information they need to pull themselves out of poverty using education, rather than digging themselves in more deeply.

Marcia Y. Cantarella, PhD, Author, I CAN Finish College: The Overcome Any Obstacle and Get Your Degree Guide

“ The final irony is how we use Profile and FAFSA to Xray every financial aspect of a family, but we hide the tenuous financial prospects of the college budget soundness: will cutbacks prevent graduation on time or threaten the future existence of the college itself?”

Bravo. As betterschool pointed out above, these delay costs can exceed the cost of the education.

One new dodge from accountability is investing heavily in “toy” metrics. Lots of big aggregated numbers about enrollments, degrees granted, testimonials, etc. The same stuff we warn against in our research courses.

well stated and one of the most egregious issues (in my opinion) in higher education today

darccity,

  Nothing I wrote suggested that “we can’t make a difference.”   We do make a difference.  We see it most days and hear about if from grateful students and parents who are glad that we took the time to take a special interest in them.  So, I agree with you, any teacher who would complain as you described above should hang up their powerpoint and look for another field of endeavor.

   You wonderfully stated that, “Rather than free markets we give students and their families marketing.”  I would be the first to reduce the massive efforts and costs that are put into “marketing”.  The problem is that this IS how “free markets” work.  One producer tries to show that their product is better than another.  (And you know how crazy that can get in a marketplace of similar products …  buy a power drill … there are some really bad ones and some top of the line ones and then a whole bunch in the middle that are for all practical purposes the same.  This is where the marketing takes over … claims, glitz, pretty girls …)   I guess my point is that educational institutions might be less likely to fill your mail box with marketing material (claims and glitz), if we would not require them to operate on a free market model.  It is a bad model for education.  So many wasted resources.

       There are some really poor schools and some top of the line ones, as well, and a whole lot of solid institutions in between that do a fine job (we can do better, and work at that every day).  We need to find a way to support these schools in the middle so that they spend more of their resources on educating students and improving what we do and less on competing to survive in the market place that makes little sense in the context of education to start with.

In general there is still a wage premium for baccalaureate degrees.  But today the premium is restricted to those who use advanced skills in careers where jobs are not easily replaceable — for example, dental hygienists and computer programmers rather than bank tellers and clerical workers.  There’s enough truth in the platitude to keep it going.  Reality is always more complicated than a simple “it’s always worth paying any price” or “it’s never worth paying a single dollar.”

davidfalcone, You sound like a conscientious teacher. As such, you may be assuming too much about our industry. Go to the websites of a half-dozen colleges and universities. Look at the detailed support specific programs and tell me how much objective consumer decision-support data you can find on each program. Examples might be: all-in costs, on-time graduation rates, mean time to graduation (with cost and opportunity cost adjustments for those delays), job placement rates (by 90 day period for the first year), starting salaries, pass rates for professional certification or licencing, objective learner satisfaction data (not testimonials), employer ratings of the school’s program (again, objective), and how all these data rank in relation to competing programs (visualize the energy graphic on the new refrigerator or the average cost of repair graphic). Ours is a 16th century guild, closed to outsiders. Even inside our profession, how easy is it to secure objective information about how well someone teaches or even how often they fail to show up for class or show up halfway prepared? Yes, the conscientious among us are guided by our students and, failing that, by our professional sensibilities, but that does not roll up to the institutional or even the departmental level where transparency is resisted in the name of “intellectual freedom” and similar shibboleths.

Education is not a “mystical process” per se but it is hard to measure just like trying to operationalize and measure “how free” you are compared to someone who lives in France or Indonesia. Quantitative measures are not sufficient and therefore, questions of value, norms, history and personal beliefs come into play. Education is not sullied by measurement, the question is whether it is actually improved by standardized measurements. Probaby not.

 Personally, I would be considered about going to a college
or university that was not up front with their information.  However, if this decision is as big as
buying a home (which I think that is a good example), then just like buying a
home, a lot of research must be done to make this decision.  If the rankings are what a decision is
made by then that is what a person receives for trusting a ranking.  However, if the ranking sparks an
interest (which in many ways that is what these now do; they are used for
marketing and exposure) then extra research should be done by the student and
family to determine if 1) the ranking is true and 2) if this degree is going to
fit with the particular goals set by the person attending. 

I am fine with President Obama seeking to bring about
important information for students making a very important decision.  However, it is a sad state when it
takes a national speech and a government incentive or discipline for
information to come out.