Holding Higher Education Accountable

From Time:

Kevin Carey, policy director at the Washington think tank Education Sector, believes that many colleges do a bad job of

1) teaching students and

2) getting them to graduate.

An essay he wrote for the December issue of Democracy is making waves in the higher-ed world because it describes how a lot of colleges are keeping student-assessment data confidential. He spoke with TIME education correspondent Gilbert Cruz about why parents — and public officials — should demand more accountability from colleges.

Virtually no college assesses how much students learn in any subject and publishes data in a way that would allow you to compare it with other colleges. That information simply does not exist.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a column about the University of Nebraska at Omaha — there's the University of Nebraska, which is the one with the football team, and Omaha is the commuter campus. The Omaha campus administered the Collegiate Learning Assessment, and when they issued a press release saying, "We did really, really well," they were yelled at and condemned by a lot of people in higher ed for doing something that was inappropriate.

The argument is basically "If I'm unique, I'm incomparable. And if I'm incomparable, I'm not accountable, because no one can judge me." Colleges have a vested interest in being in a position where no one can judge them, because then they can do whatever they want.

Universities definitely get too much of a free pass. We have not gotten in the habit of asking hard questions about whether or not universities are doing a good job of teaching their students.

Listen to the way that we talk to students about the admissions process. Even as they compete for the best students, schools say, "It's all about fit. It's not about finding the best university. It's about finding the university that's right for you." And so there's this polite fiction that every university is right for some student, and every student is right for some university. Well, that's just not true.

I think we should start with the easy things. You should be accountable for graduating a reasonable percentage of your students compared with other universities that have similar students. Harvard has the highest graduation rate in the country, at 98%. Not all colleges could reasonably be expected to have a 98% graduation rate. However, if you have a 40% graduation rate and your peers have a 60% graduation rate, it's reasonable to hold you accountable for improvement.

A tricky thing about higher-ed policy formation is that for a long time, the Federal Government did nothing. States are the ones that actually pay for the operating costs of universities, and states are the ones that legally have authority over them. They really have to play a much stronger role in holding colleges and universities accountable.

Higher education is way behind K-12 in terms of public awareness. You can start almost any conversation in K-12 education policy with the premise that our schools aren't as good as they could be and need to get better. People will argue the method, but they won't really argue the point.

They won't say, "Oh, there's nothing wrong with our K-12 schools. They're awesome. We just need to keep giving them more money and stay out of their business."

But that's what a lot of people think about colleges. And colleges do more than anyone to perpetuate that myth. But it is a myth.