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The Root of the Problem
June 20, 2008
Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute
I have spent a good deal of time in the last few weeks working on various international projects and also attending a fantastic meeting on international trends in education put together by the Lumina Foundation. And one of the conclusions I have come to is that one of the most important differences between Europe and North America with respect to higher education lies not in the institutions but in governments. European governments are engaged in learning issues; North American ones, bluntly, are not.
Just glance over any of the issues pre-occupying governments in Europe (and I`d recommend you start with Cliff Adelman’s recent work on the Bologna process): credit mobility, or quality assurance, for instance – and you’ll see a great concern with looking at outcomes. The Tuning process is about setting common outcomes for courses of study (e.g. Chemistry and Accounting) across the European Union. The European Credit Transfer System is about equivalizing “quanta” of learning not on time spent in the classroom but on total effort involved to master the intended learning outcomes. Even the quality assessment and accreditation mechanisms of Europe are starting to pay attention to outcomes rather than inputs.
North Americans, by contrast, don’t do learning outcomes. We’re scared of them. Individual courses have learning outcomes, but degree programs rarely do (which is why the periodic curriculum debates at the Ivies are the focus of so much interest – they actually care that students have mastered a corpus of knowledge at the end of a degree, whereas most institutions basically take a smorgasboard approach by allowing students to choose relatively freely among courses on the way to a degree). In Canada, not a single Canadian provincial government measures learning outcomes in any meaningful way. In the US, the idea of measuring institutional learning outcomes provokes such horror that the ACE now basically says that any way of measuring outcomes that is not entirely campus-based is not just meaningless but wrong.
(Silly me, I thought improving students’ cognitive abilities and their reading, writing, and critical thinking skills were universal goals in higher education. According to their recent open letter to the OECD, my kind of thinking is just “reductionist”).
In North America, we delude ourselves that NSSE is some kind of proxy for learning outcomes, but it’s not. It’s a proxy for satisfaction measures and likelihood of completion. Why? Because when George Kuh and others involved in NSSE were looking for correlates of “good outcomes”, the only outcome anyone had bothered to measure was completion – and so that is, in effect, the outcome that NSSE proxies for. Completion is all well and good, of course, but it helps to know that people have learned something along the way, and simply put we don’t have that.
It’s the same at the state level. Almost all US states have some kind of performance indicator system but almost none of them have any outcome measures other than completion. Indeed, most indicator systems are heavily focussed on input measures, which is simply ludicrous because it leaves policy makers without any sensible knowledge of what institutions are doing with public and tuition dollars.
In east-central Europe especially, there is an increasing amount of experimentation with output-based funding formulae: these are not entirely unknown in North America but there’s little experimentation in funding going on here. The two last big waves of funding innovation were vouchers (100% input-based) and KPI (Key Performance Indicators) funding, which was ostensibly output-based but in reality, because we don’t collect any outcomes measures, usually tended to be input measures in disguise (Ontario’s system of KPIs based partially on loan default stats was perhaps the most extreme case of policy dimness).
It’s a tale of two cultures, really. Europeans seem less hung up about measurement in education and are more interested in process. In North America, process is for wimps: we like to measure things. But we’re not very good at measuring what matters. The real problem is that no one seems to care that we’re not good at measurement. What’s lacking most of all in North America is a sense that improving measurement of outcomes is actually a key way to improve policy. We have endless debates about funding, but almost none about outcomes.
I submit that the reason for this is that the public servants in the states and provinces responsible for the oversight of higher education are simply unequipped to deal with this issue. State and provincial governments tend to be quite small and have less policy capacity than national ones. The education departments are designed first and foremost to hand over cash to individuals or institutions, their role as policy development shops is highly limited. In Canada, we more or less destroyed our policy capacity in the early 90s through civil service cutbacks and the closure of various arms-length organizations overseeing higher education. In the US, especially in the smaller states, it’s not clear to me that this policy has ever existed outside of the various Boards of Regents.
One simply couldn’t imagine North American state and provincial governments indulging in something like the European Credit Transfer System or the new Vocational Education Credit Transfer System – not because governments might not want these things, but because the government machinery in many places simply isn’t equipped to deal with issues of that complexity. And without that policy push from state and provincial government, real change in terms of outcomes and quality management simply isn’t going to happen. The federal governments in Washington and Ottawa simply lack the will and desire to push these issues on their own.
In short, states and provincial higher ed departments need an upgrade. They need to change from being funders to being thinkers. They need to start thinking beyond the status quo (and, for our BC readers, that means more than just slapping a university label on an existing polytechnic). They need to worry about outcomes. In a world where bachelors degrees are a commodity, simply increasing access isn’t good enough anymore: we need to compete on quality.
The Europeans, to varying degrees, get it. For some reason, we don’t. That has to change, or we are all in trouble 20 years down the line.
Enjoy the weekend.
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