June 26, 2007

Private-Colleges Group Proposes Template to Foster Comparisons of Members

The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities has rolled out a sample template that will allow participating colleges to make available data on a number of measures, including academic programs, graduation rates, and financial-aid awards, in a more comparable, user-friendly format.

The online tool, which the private-college group hopes will go live at the start of the academic year, is the result of focus groups, polling, and conversations with policy makers. The proposed design includes information about admissions, financial aid, student demographics, faculty background, and campus life. The voluntary system also would allow prospective students and their parents to click on hyperlinks that would take them to more-detailed information on a participating college’s own Web site.

But, unlike a template released on Monday by two major public-university groups, the accountability model proposed by the private-college association, which is also known as Naicu, does not include results from specific assessments of student-learning outcomes. David L. Warren, president of Naicu, said in an interview today that the association’s member colleges objected to efforts that “attempt to funnel all institutions into a narrow set of variables of acceptable learning outcomes.”

The association plans to continue to test the template over the summer and hopes that about 500 colleges, roughly half its membership, will sign on this fall.

The voluntary accountability efforts have emerged in response to calls for transparency in higher education and as alternatives to a government-mandated system to measure student learning that was being considered by the secretary of education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

Another group, the Association of American Universities, which represents about 60 leading research universities in the United States and Canada, announced last month that its members were starting a new effort to collect and distribute their basic performance data in areas such as graduation rates, the time required to complete a degree, and careers pursued following graduation. —Karin Fischer

Comments

1. I would much rather have the Common Data Set than this simplistic template. Do they think that students and their families are stupid and cannot deal with loads of information? The colleges don’t even want to indicate the percent of students who are accepted. There is also no information on early decision nor the size of the endowment.

   — JS    Jun 27, 10:13 PM    #

2. This is much better. Giving parents a lot of useless information assumes that they are stupid and can’t make their own decisions. Endowment has nothing to do with education, and early decision has more to do with college competition than student benefits.

   — AP    Jul 3, 04:34 PM    #

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