Making PSE Accountability Work

December 7 , 2007

Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute 

If there is one aspect of the current US debate on accountability in higher education that drives me to distraction it is the way that some members of the university community insist that common performance measurement schemes are a bad idea because it will lead to a reduction in the diversity of insitutional missions. This is a really weak argument, for two main reasons.

The first is that the "diversity of missions" argument is realy only a half-truth.  It is true that different types of institutions have different missions and need to have their performance judged accordingly.  But let's be serious: in the North American system of higher education, there are not that many different types of missions. Most instuitional missions are fundamentally riffs on about a half dozen main themes.  So even if you accept this argument, it's really only an argument for a half-dozen standard measurement schemes instead of one.  It's emphatically not an argument for abandoning common measurment altogether.

The second is that just because all institutions would be required to collect data on a common basis doesn't mean that the success conditions for each institution need to be the same.  Clearly "success" in a category such as "attracting research funding" is going to be different for Liberal Arts institutions than it is for Research I institutions.  But that's not a reason for Liberal Arts institutions to collect statistics on their research activity - it's just a reason to set the bar at different levels for different institution.  Conversely, NSSE scores are almost always going to be better at smaller universties than at bigger ones. That's not a reason not to report NSSE scores - it's a reason to make sure that they are read in context.

I'm not close enough to the US debate to really understand what's driving these arguments.  It's possible that these arguments are really just the community's way of saying: "we don't think governments are smart enough to make different yardsticks to institutions based on instutional missions."  It's also possible that the people making these arguments are just staggeringly disingenuous and are just trying to avoid having their perfomance measured.  I suspect it's a bit of both.

But just to provide a little bit of "northern wisdom" on this: In Canada, the province of British Columbia has an approach to institutional performance measurment (recently copied by Ontario) which puts most of the continent to shame and deserves to be more widely recognized as a best practice. 

In BC, institutions are required to report on about two dozen common indicators, the results of which are plainly available for everyone to see.   However, when it comes time for each institution to deal with the government on accountability arrangements, the benchmarks for each university on each of these two dozen indicators are tailored to each institution's mission.  In other words, the system provides both transparency and comparability without turning accountability into a one-size-fits-all exercise.  This system. which I call "common measurement and tailored accountability" (CMTA) provides the best of both worlds.

This is not to say that the BC system is perfect.  Some of the individual indicators are frankly inane (student loan defaults - groan), and more work should be done to make the indicators reflect value-added measurements rather than simple outputs.  But the basic idea is far superior to any other system of performance measurement in use in North America, most of which are in fact one-size-fits-all (I'll make an exception here for Maryland, whose approach to indicators and accountability in many resembles the BC approach).

The no-common-measurment crowd in the US is just plain wrong: tailored accountability does not require tailored measurement.  British Columbia has done us all a favour in showing us that a better way is possible.  Instead of putting their faith in a "we-shouldn't-be-measured-because-we're-all-unique" argument which is almost cerain to be met by withering contempt from government, America's colleges need to actively champion a CMTA approach.  It is by far the most productive way forward in the new era of accountability.

The Educational Policy Institute is an international non-profit think tank dedicated to the study of educational opportunity. The Week in Review is a weekly publication that highlights the top news stories, reports and statistics related to academic preparation and access and success in the US, Canada, and beyond. The publication also features a commentary written by either President Watson Scott Swail, EdD or Vice-President Alex Usher.

To submit comments, news releases, or submissions, please email Dr. Watson Scott Swail at wswail@educationalpolicy.org or call (757) 430-2200 .