|
Short Takes
August 15, 2008
Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute
New Forbes Ranking
So, US News and World Report have some competition. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock this week, you’ll know the Forbes magazine has put out a new ranking. It will of course get pilloried by the usual suspects, but I think it’s a positive step for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s a reasonably simple ranking, with only five indicators: alumni appearing in who’s who (25%), student evaluation of professors (25%), 4 year-graduation rates (16.66%), Students and faculty winning awards (16.66%) and accumulated student debt (16.66%). That’s good. Second, it tries – albeit somewhat clumsily - to ask the key questions that students ask: how good are the student success rates, how much does it cost, how good are the teachers and what happens to graduates?
Ok, the indicators are imperfect. Using “who’s who” as a barometer of graduates’ success is to massively overvalue the contribution of the top 0.01% of society, and conflating student and faculty awards strikes me as somewhat bizarre. Using data from ratemyprofessor.com is a sub-optimal way of looking at teacher quality, and will no doubt provoke howls of derision from academic staff who don’t like the site – but there has been enough evidence produced in the past year or so correlating in-school course evaluations and ratemyprofessor.com scores that the use of this as a data-source is not totally insane. And, unlike any of the indicators in US News, it actually gets at the heart of the educational process by trying to look at student experiences (as the EPI-Globe and Mail Navigatordoes)rather than simply financial statistics.
Imperfect? Of course. But given the scarcity of available data sources, the Forbes rankings are about as good as could reasonably be expected. If American colleges want more sensible rankings, they’ll need to start producing more sensible data. Anyone institutional types not happy with these new rankings needs to look in a mirror. A short and simple national student survey, mandated at every college in America (maybe by linking it to Title IV funds?), asking perhaps 20 questions about student satisfaction and student experiences, would go a long way to ending the use of bad indicators in rankings.
Certifications, Not Degrees?
There was an absolutely fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal this week, which raises some interesting points about the distinctions between certifications and qualifications and suggests that if we had a decent system of certifications, the vast explosion in bachelor’s enrolments that took place in the last forty years would have been unnecessary. Written by the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray, the article is well-reasoned and thought-provoking. But while interesting, it’s ultimately beside the point.
Certifications as Murray described them are an interesting idea, but not one suited to the post-modern age. First of all, occupational standards are not easy to develop; you have to define a universe of relevant employers and get them to sit down and agree what standards are required across the industry (no mean feat: most employers are looking for job-specific skills, not industry-specific skills, because the latter make employees more likely to be poached). Second of all, there are simply too many jobs out there, too many industries evolving too quickly, for the necessary occupational standards to be developed.
Murray seems to imply that the expansion of bachelor’s degrees was a con perpetrated on the America public by a wily educational industry. He fails to consider the other possibility: that American industry is so uninterested in training that it was happy to dump both the costs and the responsibilities for general training on the public sector; the alternative - active training of their own – was simply too costly and too prone to free rider problems (i.e. some companies would game the system by not paying for training but still snatching trained employees) for them to consider.
And even if all that weren’t true: It’s too late for an alternative. The bachelor’s degree horse has already left the barn. Still, it was a useful contribution to the overall debate.
The Effects of the Biggest Tuition Increase in History
Cast your mind back to early 2005. Tony Blair’s government was on the brink of collapse as it neared a crucial vote on the introduction of legislation that permitted universities to raise their tuition from $2000 to $6000 per year. The outrage was palpable. Participation gaps would widen, critics solemnly averred, loudly deriding the idea that a system of improved loans and grants could possibly make-up for the increase in tuition. It was inevitable, they said, in the face of the largest tuition increase in world history.
According to the latest study on the effects of the tuition fee hike, the opponents of the tuition fee legislation were one hundred percent wrong. Overall enrolment is up by more than six percent, and there has been no change in the social and ethnic composition of the student body.
The critics should have known better. Many of the equity issues they raised in 2004 were red herrings, because students from poor backgrounds were not being asked to pay a cent more in tuition under the new plan. The poorest third of students in the UK did not pay tuition under the old regime, and they don’t pay any (net) tuition now, either, as they receive grants that offset the tuition completely.
Once again, solid evidence (if any more were needed) that student aid, properly deployed, can successfully counteract the negative effects of tuition increases.
Enjoy the weekend.
|
