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Needed: New Metrics
June 6, 2008
Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute
All over the world, institutions are increasingly worried about whether or not they are “world class”. In Malaysia, rectors get fired if their institution falls too far down the world rankings. In France, institutions are choosing to merge in order to boost their rankings. Ireland’s government has promised to have one university in the Shanghai top 20 in the next few years. In Taiwan, the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council has created its own new bibliometric ranking system to spur some of that country’s institutions into the top 100. In Canada and the United States, the clamour over World Rankings may be somewhat less, but that’s only because we drank the kool-aid on the centrality of research universities so long ago we barely remember when it wasn’t so.
Don`t get me wrong; having a strong set of research universities is an unalloyed good for any country, state or province. Research universities have important spin-off benefits in terms of innovation and the production of highly skilled personnel. But they’re also incredibly expensive. And to expect every institution to behave like a research institution is a recipe for disaster, not just because they are tremendously expensive to run but because proper higher education systems need to be about much more than research.
The problem here, as I’ve written on a few previous occasions, is that the university’s research mission carries far more prestige than its other missions of teaching and service, for the relatively simple reason that successful researchers can have a global profile, while successful teacher`s profiles can almost never be anything other than local (institutions with good service records can to an extent have a reputation that transcends the local, but it’s rare).
Moreover, we`ve found easy ways to measure research production, through bibliometrics and the like. We have yet to find good metrics for teaching (mostly we rely on bone-headed staff-student ratios) or service. It’s not just that we don’t value teaching and service: we wouldn’t know how to value it even if we did.
This inability to measure service and teaching is hurting education the world over. As everyone piles on in the race for “world-classness”, higher education is in danger of becoming seriously unidimensional. “World-classness” is and always will be about research. But there are plenty of ways to be a good or even an excellent university without being world-class. What we need are some ways in which to provide these institutions with the recognition they deserve. What we need are some new metrics.
First: teaching. We are getting closer to being able to produce valid and reliable measures of cognitive development in higher education, exemplified most obviously by the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Now, CLA almost certainly isn’t the last word on the subject, but it’s a good first step. Any institution that values teaching and wants to show how well it does in teaching should be piloting this program now. And over the next ten years governments should get serious about forcing institutions to produce some common measurement of cognitive development. Institutional arguments about why this approach is dangerous – that it would compromise the different missions of different institutions –hold water only if this is the *sole* measurement to be undertaken. Clearly it wouldn’t be. No matter what a higher education institution’s mission is, promoting the cognitive development of students is a major intended outcome. And so, regardless of the whatever the folks at One Dupont Circle say, we should start measuring it.
Second: service. Though service is a fairly broad and fuzzy concept, I don’t think it’s impossible to measure. It’s possible to measure the number of research projects which are rooted in the local community. Its possible to put a dollar figure on the value of services to the community. It’s possible to count the economic impact of spin-off corporations on the economy. It’s possible to quantify the scientific and social science work a university does for local government. So why not do it?
Yes, these kinds of measurement are tough. They are complicated. They will take years to get right.
But the alternative is a rising uniformity among institutions. If we only measure what is easy to measure, we will be stuck with indicators which are a mix of the banal (e.g. stuent-staff ratios) and the uni-dimensional (e.g. bibliometrics). Only multi-dimensional metrics can give us the multi-dimensional higher education systems we need.
Enjoy the weekend.
Post-Script: You may remember two weeks ago my venting about the Government of Canada’s inability to host a simple student aid calculator. Eagle-eyed EPI associate Ryan Dunn has noticed that with exactly no fanfare, the CanLearn website has quietly re-launched its calculator with an accurate algorithm and a place for both federal and provincial aid to be reported. So, bravo to the folks at HRSD for getting it right...and you’re welcome.
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