Marty Nemko on the overrated Bachelor's Degree

[atalanta]

This article is... ah, "interesting".

http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i34/34b01701.htm

Parts of it ring true, and provide food for thought:

Today ... a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later.

...most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education.

This part makes me angry:

So, no surprise, in the latest annual national survey of freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, 44.6 percent said they were not satisfied with the quality of instruction they received. Imagine if that many people were dissatisfied with a brand of car: It would quickly go off the market. Colleges should be held to a much higher standard, as a higher education costs so much more, requires years of time, and has so much potential impact on your life. Meanwhile, 43.5 percent of freshmen also reported "frequently" feeling bored in class, the survey found.

And I had to laugh out loud at this:

I believe that colleges should be required to prominently report the following data on their Web sites and in recruitment materials:

    * Value added. A national test, which could be developed by the major testing companies, should measure skills important for responsible citizenship and career success. Some of the test should be in career contexts: the ability to draft a persuasive memo, analyze an employer's financial report, or use online research tools to develop content for a report.

      Just as the No Child Left Behind Act mandates strict accountability of elementary and secondary schools, all colleges should be required to administer the value-added test I propose to all entering freshmen and to students about to graduate, and to report the mean value added, broken out by precollege SAT scores, race, and gender. That would strongly encourage institutions to improve their undergraduate education and to admit only students likely to derive enough benefit to justify the time, tuition, and opportunity costs. Societal bonus: Employers could request that job applicants submit the test results, leading to more-valid hiring decisions.

I do think the following is a real problem in higher education. BUT. Surely it's not true at teaching-oriented institutions (of which there are thousands)? And isn't it being exaggerated? In my R1 department, the quality of teaching by top-notch research profs is amazingly good, with a few glaring exceptions.

Colleges and universities are businesses, and students are a cost item, while research is a profit center. As a result, many institutions tend to educate students in the cheapest way possible: large lecture classes, with necessary small classes staffed by rock-bottom-cost graduate students. ...

That's not to say that professor-taught classes are so worthwhile. The more prestigious the institution, the more likely that faculty members are hired and promoted much more for their research than for their teaching. Professors who bring in big research dollars are almost always rewarded more highly than a fine teacher who doesn't bring in the research bucks.

Thoughts or comments, forumites?

[fiona]

It's our fault if students are bored?

Shouldn't they be taking more responsibility for their educations?

The Fiona, obviously a dummy

[samoa55]

While I may agree that some universities do allow students to graduate that do not have the problem solving skills to compete in today's job market, there are a couple of things that I do not agree with from the article.  I happen to be one of those professionals that took 9 years to finish his bachelors degree. 

I was not partying and living the "Animal House" lifestyle.  Actually, I was working full-time to pay for my education while attending school part-time to obtain a bachelors degree.  With that said, it should be a testament that I was not spending my family's life savings because my family did not have one. 

Furthermore, the perception that I got from from Mr. Nemko's tone in the article is that all college students are on a level playing field when it comes to the access and equity of educational resources.  Yet, not all college students are. 

I happen to be one of those students who, also, came from a low-income, inner city background.  And, I know that it was a struggle just to get the education that I did get.

So, my thoughts are that he should not generalize his articles, and look further into the situation.  While he may have been a consultant to 15 university president and wrote 4 books, that does not make him an expert on university outcomes.

(What does "broken out" mean?  Why can't he say "disaggregated?")

[csguy]

Unhappily the article is correct in all too many cases. Too many college students are simply not well prepared and are wasting their time and money in pursuit of degrees that have little value on the job market (and I do recognize that there are other benefits to a quality university education).

But: a national value added test developed by the major testing companies -- NCLB for colleges! A general value-added test is not going to tell employers whether are not our graduates are actually competent in their field of study (computing). It is those skills that command the (relatively) big $'s that makes their education pay off.

We market our students by program reputation (primarily locally) and by criteria the individual employers set (the employers may test or interview them).

[mnemko]

Thank you for your comments on my article.  A few rejoinders:

-- Alas, poor quality instruction extends well beyond the prestigious research universities. At many, if not most four year colleges, hiring, promotion, tenure, and prestige of faculty is driven significantly by research expertise, which is at least moderately inversely correlated with ability to and desire to teach well. Instruction is generally superior, for example, in the corporate sector: for example, immersive simulations, on topics of compelling interest, taught by a higher percentage of crystalline and/or inspirational instructors.

-- My first draft used "disaggregated" rather than "broken out" but my goal is always to have 100% of my readers understand what I'm writing, so I figured it was safer to use "broken out."  I think most of us would be well served if we made sure that our readers  could--without having to take undue time--understand what we've written.

-- Of course, a national test will not assess competency in a specific field, such as computer science. It could, however, assess competencies that are valuable across a wide range of pursuits: the ability to write a persuasive memo, make a solid oral argument, as well as non-career-specific goals such as information literacy (for the example, the ability to make full use of search engines.)

-- Of course, some percentage of low-achieving high school students will find it worth trying college, even if they drop out or even if they require 9 years to graduate. But our admission policies must aim to do the most good for the most people and for society. And the abundant evidence I cite in the article suggests that we will have done the most good if we encouraged students who are graduating in the bottom 40% of their high school class to consider options other than four-year colleges: two-year degree programs, short community college career-prep programs, on-the-job training at the elbow of a successful person, an apprenticeship, or training within the military.

-- Of course, you will never please all students. But when almost half of students at four-year institutions complain of being bored in class and the freshman-to-senior value added in terms of reading, thinking, math reasoning etc., is so frighteningly bad, especially given the amount of time and money is required to obtain a bachelor's degree, we should not mainly blame the students. We should look hard at ourselves.

[yemaya]

Mr. Nemko, I don't dispute your assertion that some colleges are exploiting woefully underprepared students or that some are graduating without having mastered important skills.  I also agree that students in the bottom 40% of their class, in many cases, should either consider another route to a career or perhaps taking some time off to take continuing ed courses and get themselves up to speed academically before moving on.  (Assuming they have the resources.)  That said, I think that your article misses the boat on a few points:

(1) The reliance on standardized tests.  There have been many cases where curiculum has been dumbed down to met underperforming students.   How can we  prevent that from happening at the college level?   The NCLB also tends to financially punish the underperforming schools that are most likely underperforming because they just don't have the resources that they need to hire good teachers, have good libraries and computer labs, etc.   Moreover, as CSGuy said, who's going to be responsible for designing these tests?  A bunch of non-specialists who don't actually know anything about the fields?  There weren't even educators involved in the design of the NCLB - are they going to have another bunch of politicians and MBAs trying to examine students on college-level skills when they generally lack the proficiency to do so? 

(2) Boredom.  With all due respect, if a student has been raised to expect instant gratification and not to be able to pay attention for more than 5 minutes unless they're being entertained, then they will have far more problems than doing well in school.  Part of adulthood is that you have to take the boring stuff with the fun stuff.  Adult responsibilities are not always "fun" and the sooner they learn that they cannot ignore things just because they are "boring," the better they will be.

(3) A college education is not a commodity.  Standardized tests and "consumer reviews" do not a better education make.  More than that, reliance on evaluations makes some really big assumptions that an 18-22 year old really knows what they need to succeed in life.  There are some truisims - a professor should be professional in their interactions with students, they should arrive in class promptly to prepared to teach, they should be willing to help students outside of class, etc.  But the students are not in a position to judge a lot of the things that evaluations have them address.  Example:  I routinely receive complaints on evaluations for my history survey course that I expect them to demonstrate proficiency in grammar in their papers.  Until they get to the job market, they may have a hard time realizing that if they submit cover letters and CVs to an employer that are full of careless mistakes or make it obvious that they don't know how to use verb tenses correctly or the difference between plural and possessive, what reputable employer will want to hire them?  Or what big name firm is going to hire them for that big engineering project if they project an image of carelessness and/or ignorance?  More often than not, they will not understand why all of this is important until they have "done time" in the real world.  I'm not saying don't solicit student feedback on courses.  Rather, I'm saying that there are quite a few useless questions on such things.  For instance, "Is the professor fair?"  "Fair" means something very different to an immature 19-year-old than it might to a 30-year-old.  One student whined to me that it wasn't "fair" that her roommate managed better grades with (apparently) less work.  Roommate was simply a better reader and writing and much more disciplined in her studies and so, attained better grades in half the time.  Moreover, my complainer said that it wasn't "fair" that she was confused, but (as I pointed out to her), did she ask questions in class?  Did she email for help or come by office hours? 

(4) What are career and h.s. guidance counselors doing to learn and education about alternative career paths that do not require a college degree?  I'm seeing a lot of guidance counselors particularly who push traditional students who are either unprepared for or uninterested in college on to us instead of helping these kids learn about all of their options.  I suspect that much of this is because the "you MUST go to college" mantra is imbedded into their brains as well.  (Though I will acknowledge a fear of parental complaints.) 

(5) A lot of the skills identified as part of the standardized testing scheme are skills that these students should have learned WELL before we ever see them.  Things like reading for main idea - I don't know about the rest of the fora, but I learned that in elementary school in a not-particularly-good public school system.  I think the real money and energy should go into catching unprepared students and addressing problems considerably earlier in their education.  College professors should be prepared to undertake *some* remedial work, but the bigger question is, why are students even graduating from high school without knowing how to construct a sentence?  Why do they struggle with reading so much?  How did they get to college without having some pretty basic math skills?  I'm not a math whiz by any means, but I can out-calculate many of my upperclassmen engineering majors and that shouldn't be the case because I lasted exactly 2 weeks in an advanced calculus course.

[spork]

For each university and college at which students receive federal grants or federally-subsidized student loans, data should be collected and published pertaining to:

- the percentage of students who attend the institution that actually graduate, and in how many years

- job placement rate within 12 months of graduation

- debt load of students upon graduation

- average salaries earned by graduates

- reviews of graduates' work skills by employers

[betterslac]

Instruction is generally superior, for example, in the corporate sector: for example, immersive simulations, on topics of compelling interest, taught by a higher percentage of crystalline and/or inspirational instructors.

I've seen corporate trainers.

Inspirational is hardly the term to apply to them. Dunderheads who work off of pre-digested worksheets to "train" people in particular, dumbed down processes is a better description of those I have seen.

And when do corporate trainers ever teach anything to do with critical thinking and reading skills, constructing or understanding an argument, evaluating data, or constructing hypotheses that seek to explain phenomena?

This, folks, is where this is leading-- not necessarily to a college NCLB debacle, but the corporate training model applied to higher education and an equally appalling, or even worse, debacle.

And by the way, what is a "crystalline" instructor?  One you can read a newspaper through?

[tangy_rakish_babe]

In order to implement the kind of "value added" input/outcome testing Nemko advocates, you'd have to do two things:

1. figure out empirically valid ways of testing the kinds of critical thinking skills that colleges and universities are supposed to teach

and

2. figure out a way to implement such testing economically at a national scale.

If Nemko's testing regimen is to achieve his goals, multiple choice scantron exams aren't going to cut it. For many, and perhaps most of the questions that college teachers present to their students, there is no single correct answer. Part of what we try to help students learn, and one of the aspects of a college education that employers most value, is the ability to (as the corporate trainers put it) "think outside the box" and come up with creative solutions that no one else has thought of before. You can't assess whether college graduates can do this without having them do some creative analytical work. Assessing that kind of work in a standardized way won't be easy or cheap.

Say you choose (along the lines that Remko suggests) to have students interpret a sales report and draft a memo summarizing the key results. To implement such a test nationwide, you'd need thousands of readers trained to systematically assess not only the quality and professionalism of the memo, but also to weigh the merits of the many different ways in which quite competent individuals might reasonably interpret the same data (and of course the countless additional ways in which less competent individuals might partly or wholly misinterpret it). And that is only one single problem on a test that would have to use a large number of similarly complex but quite varied problems if it would be of any use. We're talking about a test that would have to be substantially more varied and complex than, say, the AP exams or the GRE, and that would be implemented on a far broader scale.

Rather than investing the substantial resources necessary to do this well, it's quite likely that our wise legislators, bureaucrats, and administrators would instead opt to do it on the cheap. In that case, we'll end up with piles of data that don't measure anything useful and create strong incentives to dumb down (or narrow down) curriculum to fit the demands of the test (exactly the problem with NCLB).

If someone can figure out how to assess the skills that colleges actually aim to teach in a way that can be implemented universally at a cost the legislators/bureaucrats/administrators will accept, then I'll be all for it. But until I see such a solution, I'll be skeptical that the push for universal testing will actually take us anywhere useful.

[watermarkup]

What a load of tripe. The power to test is the power to dictate curriculum, and people like Nemko should be kept as far from the steering wheel as possible. Why do we assume that all college students should be learning the same skills? They're not in high school. They're adults, and a B.A. is their first chance to specialize. Why would we compare an Oberlin cellist to a Caltech aerospace engineer using the same test? That's madness. If, say, the APA wanted to establish a national exam for psychology, or if the other APA wanted to establish an exam for classics, why not? But one exam for all students everywhere is insane.

[ab1997by]

According to his (bloviating) web site, Nemko "Was senior author of California's public schools accreditation procedures."  Guess he's to blame for poor performance in public schools in that state.  Or perhaps he takes credit only for the good schools.

I realize I've committed  a logical fallacy above, but just couldn't help myself.

[csguy]

For each university and college at which students receive federal grants or federally-subsidized student loans, data should be collected and published pertaining to:

- the percentage of students who attend the institution that actually graduate, and in how many years

- job placement rate within 12 months of graduation

- debt load of students upon graduation

- average salaries earned by graduates

- reviews of graduates' work skills by employers

All but the last should be relatively straightforward. The "reviews of graduates' work skills by employers" might be a bit more expensive to collect.

And if you're a religious school you should include the number of students making it to heaven.

[mountainguy]

And if you're a religious school you should include the number of students making it to heaven.

That's awesome, csguy! You just made me snort Diet Pepsi on my keyboard.

[mountainguy]

Mr. Nemko is wrong for the right reasons, if that makes any sense. The idea that standardized testing will fix the problems he (correctly) observes is ideological fiction of the worst sort. NCLB has done nothing to produce "accountability" in K-12 education. If anything, it's worsened the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" and has stunted student ability to think critically in college-level classes. Most of my first-year students perform well on rote-level memorization of vocabulary and concepts, but probably 70% of them don't know how to write a critical essay. The average SAT score at my school is close to 1200, which makes me wonder (a) what the hell are students learning in high school these days? and (b) is the SAT or ACT really an accurate predictor of performance in college-level classes?

The solution to all this is not standardized testing, nor should we blame instructors for what students perceive as the "poor quality" of college teaching. Instead, I think the solution is two-fold:

First, colleges need to be more honest with prospective students about their institutional mission. This means distinguishing more clearly between vocational and liberal arts programs. Although it pains me to say this as someone who teaches in the humanities, students who are looking strictly for job credentials probably don't need to be in my classes. In recent years, several of my former students at my large R1 university end up transferring to a branch campus (connected to a community college) and perceive the classes there as "easier." Although "easier" probably isn't the right adjective, I suspect that students mean the classes are more vocationally-oriented. I'm all for producing well-rounded citizens who can read, write, and reason critically, but if students really just want vocational training, my sense is that we should let them get it sooner rather than later in their college careers.

Second, if we want to improve the quality of college-level teaching, colleges should end their absurd reliance on student evaluations to make judgments about instructional effectiveness. Such evaluations encourage instructors to teach to the lowest common denominator to "keep the customers happy" and lead to social promotion of unqualified students. And I don't buy into the quantitative social-scientific voodoo studies that say student perceptions of instructor effectiveness have nothing to do with grades. It defies common logic and I can point to other studies that have reached the exact opposite conclusions.

[ab1997by]

First, colleges need to be more honest with prospective students about their institutional mission. This means distinguishing more clearly between vocational and liberal arts programs. Although it pains me to say this as someone who teaches in the humanities, students who are looking strictly for job credentials probably don't need to be in my classes. In recent years, several of my former students at my large R1 university end up transferring to a branch campus (connected to a community college) and perceive theclasses there as "easier." Although "easier" probably isn't the rightadjective, I suspect that students mean the classes are more vocationally-oriented. I'm all for producing well-rounded citizens who can read, write, and reason critically, but if students really just want vocational training, my sense is that we should let them get it sooner rather than later in their college careers.

Unfortunately, today's "vocational" courses require reading skills, and many require at least basic writing. 
For example:
Food/Beverage management and EMT prereqs include:  reading, writing, and math.  Hotel management,  automotive technology;
 require reading/writing.  Landscape technology has a reading prereq.

Vocational students may not need the liberal arts but these students must have strong basic skills, even at the  certificate level.  At my CC, I think the question should be whether certificate/vocational  students should be in the same reading/writing/math courses as students whose goal is a two-year or four-year degree.  Our college has decided that such students receive the same courses as any other student, in case they want to pursue a degree in the future; it gives them options.