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About the Author
Bob Zemsky describes himself as being old and round enough to be mistaken for a pooh-bah. He was a member of the Spellings Commission and, as an author and researcher, has focused on making colleges and universities mission-centered and market-smart. He has focused on what globalism might really mean for higher education, on what technology has not accomplished, and how to make learning important to the higher education market. Bob currently serves as professor and chair of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Recent Posts
Lessons From the Cost-Quality Curve | Comment [2]
Quality -- Reform's Fourth Horseman | Comment [4]
Access to Success | Comment [2]
Is Access Still the Question? | Comment [3]
Affordability: Devil in the Details | Comment [2]
Featured Articles By the Author
Does Higher Ed Need to Be More Accountable?
Being accountable ranks right up there with being nice and responsible. Not being accountable is the same as being selfish or out-of-control or irresponsible. Simply raising the subject is enough to put higher education on the defensive and its principal institutions on edge.
The implication is that higher education is not accountable to anything or anybody outside the academy itself — a charge that simply won’t hold water. What the critics who pursue the accountability agenda really mean is “higher education is not accountable to me!” What they don’t like is that colleges and universities are instead accountable to a market that favors selectivity, brand names, national visibility, winning sports teams, and, in the case of the nation’s medallion universities, major research portfolios.
Professional programs are also accountable to their cognizant accrediting agencies. In the fields of law, medicine, dental medicine, veterinary medicine, business, and engineering, in particular, those agencies regularly exercise the real power they know they have. On the other hand, for undergraduate education writ large accreditation remains a hodgepodge of regional agencies that talk tough but in the end don’t make enough of a difference. The inevitable result is that the kind of accountability the market exacts becomes ever more important.
Given these circumstances, there remain just two avenues for making undergraduate education accountable to someone else or something other than those attributes the market currently rewards. One could join with Lloyd Thacker and his Educational Conservancy to create a consumer movement that understands and has the means and stamina to make educational values more of a factor in the college-choice process. Such a movement would be akin to the kind of consumers’ movement that changed the cars Americans bought and, in the process, made Consumer Reports a national buying guide. That kind of process, however, takes time and so frustrates the reformers who expect to change higher education now and forever.
Product regulation represents the other path to a different kind of accountability. Governments do have the power to regulate products whether they help pay the cost of acquiring them or not. Here it helps to imagine what a higher education FDA might look like — a subject I will take up on Tuesday.
Posted at 12:00:23 PM on May 2, 2008 | All postings by Bob ZemskyComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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Higher education is “accountable to a market….”
That’s kind-of “it” in a nutshell, isn’t it?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 2, 12:41 PM · #
Accountability in Higher Ed can be defined in many ways. Please note that we in Higher Ed do not have production lines. Unlike Industry and Market we get our ingrediants from K-12. Our Colleges and Universities do not Operate under a centralized ministry of Education. This does not mean that we can not control for quality assurance in our institutions. We sure can. Leave the control of quality to educated professionals.
— Aghajan Mohammadi · May 4, 06:43 PM · #
It is generally the poorly educated near barbarians who most want accountability (to them and their casual narrow local bigoted values). They are fed up with sending blindly loyal believer kids into colleges and getting skeptical investigatory adults out the other end. They want narrow local bigotries in and narrow local “empowered” bigotries out. The best way for the rest of us to destroy them is to allow them to do exactly that (to themselves and their own children, not to mine, thank you). In this context you could understand someone in favor of special religious, republican only, hate-filled, dumb-ass colleges where the bad minded can ruin their own children’s lives with the bad values they have tortured themselves and others with all life long.
— Richard Tabor Greene · May 5, 05:16 AM · #
Richard, your caricature is incredibly bigoted and offensive. I am educated (ivy-caliber undegrad, two master’s degrees, and Ph.D.) in the humanities and I work in university planning and assessment. I do so for a number of reasons:
1) I believer that learning betters students and better lives.
2) I believe that learning is greater when instructors explain clearly and students understand what they are expected to learn.
3) I believe that any instructor and any faculty department should be able to explain simply and clearly (in laymen’s terms) to parents, prospective students, legislators, and donor what knowledge and skills students should have at the completion of their program.
4) I believe that it is our obligation to examine (with evidence) the extent to which our hopes for students are realized, and where they are not, to make changes.
5) I believe that this is not an intrusion into our work but the responsibility we owe to those whose money we take (students, parents, legislators, donors).
This is not to say that every idea that has been proposed for institutional accountability is good or worthwhile. Let’s not appeal to ad hominems, reductios, or examples of abuse to invalidate principles.
In my own work, I’m happy to help instructors and departments develop and gather evidence about their learning outcomes, whether they conform to my own primary values (educational, social, political) or not.
For my part, I wonder why the capacity for critical thinking seems so often absent when many faculty think about this. In what other area of life do faculty accept a claim of the form “we’re experts; just trust us.” Foreign policy? Food and drug safety? Administrative decisions in university governance? If we demand evidence and accountability from others in our disciplines and in society, we must also require it of ourselves in the work of educating a nation’s students.
— drj50 · May 5, 12:02 PM · #
We have a problem with accountability as long as we persist in using possession of a degree as a surrogate for being educated. There are a lot of people looking to get their tickets punched rather than to learn anything, and there are a lot of institutions ready and willing to engage in a race to the bottom to make the ticket punching as painless and convenient as possible. What are the measures of quality in this market?
— Dave · May 5, 12:53 PM · #
It has been said that “If everyone is thinking the same thing, then nobody is thinking.” Unfortunately, folks like Richard Tabor Greene cannot tolerate any deviation from their own world view, and so the academy has been weakened by their ilk. There is no such thing as discussing multiple points of view on a topic with such folks. Their idea of academic discussion is to call those who disagree with them vile names, the search for truth never even comes into play. I pity their students.
— Michael · May 5, 01:59 PM · #
While RTG’s language may be over the top (and, naturally, quite offensive to its targets), he’s right on concerning the heart of the matter: OA administered top-down from yet another bureaucratic layerof vice-presidents and vice-provosts and vice-deans, according to little charts, punch lists, and mandatory “the student will…” verbs that place every college course on a procrustean bed of “accountability.” And OA very quickly becomes IM (Input Mandate)—I have seen it happen—whereby a professor is required, against all precepts of academic freedom, to make his or her syllabus (that is, class content) conform to a single, across-the-curriculum OA matrix. No amount of “ivy-caliber undergrad” (whatever the fig that is), multiple Ph.D.s, and profestations of “I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows” changes that. The day that “ANY INSTRUCTOR and any faculty department should be able to explain simply and clearly (in laymen’s terms) to parents, prospective students, LEGISLATORS, AND DONORS what knowledge and skills students should have at the completion of their program” [emphases mine] will be a dark day for higher education. It sounds nice until you ask yourself “at what tribunal?” and “under pain of what?”
— LuckyJim · May 6, 07:44 AM · #
If the faculty are unable and unwilling to themselves hold the conversations and devise methods of assessing their work for presentation to accreditors, then they will have these “boilerplate” templates imposed on them.
For an alternative view, see Gerald Graff (current president of the MLA) and Cathy Birkenstein’s “How Not to Respond to the Spellings Report”, http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2008/MJ/Feat/graf.htm
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 14, 08:16 PM · #