College accountability?

Kevin Carey, in the NYTimes, makes another case for standardizing college academic standards: "The lack of meaningful academic standards in higher education drags down the entire system. Grade inflation, even (or especially) at the most elite institutions, is rampant. A landmark book published last year, “Academically Adrift,” found that many students at traditional colleges showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing, and spent their time socializing, working or wasting time instead of studying. (And that’s not even considering the problem of low graduation rates.)"

The use of the book Academically adrift is problematic for two reasons, both speculative (on my part, based on their data).  First, the number of students not having learned much of value in the author's most recent research equals the number of students more that attended college than the comparison year (2010 v. 1970).  In other words, the same number of students are learning now as their were students before (the total number of students v. a percentage of students).  Alone, that statistic could mean that for over a generation, we have been sending students to college that lack the basic qualifications to be there.  It would make sense that schools lowered the expectations in order to accommodate this influx.

Second, there are no meaningful measures of what percentage of students were learning things of value (or their level of effort) back in the earlier years.  Do the groups being compared merit comparison?  We do not know.  Without knowing a similar set of statistics, the socio-economic context from which these students attended college, the comparison between 2010 and 1970 is moot.

Carey offers a remedy to what he perceives as a problem: "But the most promising solution would be to replace the anachronistic credit hour with common standards for what college students actually need to know and to be able to do. There are many routes to doing this. In the arts and sciences, scholarly associations could define and update what it means to be proficient in a field. So could professional organizations and employers in vocational and technical fields."

Proficiency is the solution to avoid making college degrees "ultimately worthless."  His idea shares the foundational theory of the Bologna Process in Europe.  If all universities aligned in their outcome expectations of skills, knowledge and performance, then comparisons between graduates (for graduate schools and employment, among others) would be much easier.  A standard of what a college degree means, regardless of the college, would provide a clear, objective understanding to the students' degrees.

Learning is not a commodity, a consumable capable of being measured by quantity. No matter how well we formulate what a degree (or major) means, what the student learned and can later apply is a different question, one without a method of standardization, much less objective, empirical and quantitative meaning.  The purpose of higher education should be questioned, and its expense justified. But aiming for a single set of responses is folly, for the set of hoped for proficiencies are never-ending; who gets to decide what a graduate should know?  Better, from the democratic perspective, who is better able to determine what their graduates should know and do but colleges themselves, their faculty, board of trustees and alumni?

Standards of proficiency come from cost-benefit analyses of investing in education. Fair enough, just not sensible enough for an education that has meaning.