<p>^ alex, i think you might be giving the gov't a little too much credit... they can definitely come up with worse IMO</p>
<p>Don't get me wrong, I am not saying it would be better...but it really cannot be worse.</p>
<p>I am not so aware of the issue here but a central and hopefully unbiased system is a good idea....</p>
<p>There is a lot to be said for expanding and improving on the common data set.</p>
<p>If the government doesn't rank the schools, but does a good job of collecting data in uniform categories, makes sure that schools give out complete info, and then disseminates that info in a form that parents can easily use to make up their own rankings, that will be a very good thing. Scholars and private agencies could also use the data to make their own rankings or to perform a variety of studies.</p>
<p>I also think that there is a lot to be said for getting accurate measures of both inputs and outputs. e.g. Schools should reveal the full range of SAT scores -- not just 25th/75th but at the minimum the full distribution by deciles. It would also be good to know how many apply to prof or grad school and get in, etc.</p>
<p>It would also be great to have some sort of postgrad achievement test. But the latter would be a bit more intrusive and easier to politicize.</p>
<p>Alexandre and Rick Tyler-
regarding the idea that college students must teach themselves...
Of course, students are the ones who have to actively study and learn but you are ignoring the part about the money.</p>
<p>Why do students pay so much in tuition? Where does the money go? Should we have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for teaching ourselves? Where is the academic support from faculty? from technology? Does all this money really buy only three hours per week per course? It is ridiculous. Most students have a natural tendency to avoid teachers and hang out with friends. Faculty should make an effort to provide review sessions, one-to-one contact for question/answer, lecture notes on the web, lectures relavant to the exams and text, motivate and encourage, and so on.</p>
<p>To the extent that faculty fail to make an effort to follow good educational practices and actively, proactively engage and support student learning they become dispensible. Why not have one superstar professor record lectures for a course on camera and make them available on the web for a few dollars? Where is the added value in having a professor engaging students in person?</p>
<p>Sadly, the majority of tuition money is spent on fluff that does not enhance student learning. Why not hire more and better faculty? Increase the amount of attention and academic support for students. </p>
<p>There is a lot more that colleges can do for the money. On the other hand, many colleges are saddled with unmotivated students. This has to be demoralizing for faculty. Most of the responsibility for poor academic performance at the college level stems from bad parenting and from all the distractions in our society and competition for student time and attention from time-wasting, feel-good activities promoted by the media.</p>
<p>Oh, and one more thing....college accreditation is ineffective. A group of strangers comes to campus once every decade and the college gets to show them all the good stuff they are doing. Not enough challenges, not enough probing.</p>
<p>No. Just no.</p>
<p>I think the US higher-education system is a marvel. There is a home waiting in college for nearly anyone who wants to attend, and colleges have madly specialized in search of specific target markets. I think this is great. How many tens of thousands of young Americans leave to go to college overseas? How many come here?</p>
<p>OK, but how does this tie into the thread title? Once you standardize measurement, consumers focus on that measurement. Before USN&WR started ranking colleges was there a single strong comparative measurement? I don't think so -- and I think there was a lot of value in not pretending that Caltech, Harvard, New Mexico Tech, and the University of Oklahoma somehow have enough common axes of comparison to even belong on the same scale. </p>
<p>We now have a generation of Type A hoop-jumping overachieving high school students who "know" that Princeton is more highly rated than Stanford -- I mean it's right there on the Website, right? The fact that a student who was interested in engineering would probably have to have suffered a minor head injurty to prefer Princeton's engineering program over Stanford's gets swallowed up by The Ratings. (College ratings in general cause a wide variety of unproductive behavior, but at least USN&WR and Princeton and &c are private sources competing in the free market with their own money.)</p>
<p>My concern is that a "federally approved government rating" would dumb down the college choice process just like the MPG rating from the EPA has made us stupider in selecting vehicles. Did you know that the MPG rating was a secondary artifact of a test that was designed to test exhaust emissions, and that it was never intended to represent anything realistic about fuel economy? Did you know that auto makers now tune their vehicles to produce good numbers on the test, regardless of the fuel efficiency of that same vehicle in real-world driving? Just like the EPA MPG ratings have perverted the auto makers into focusing on a secondary effect -- a laboratory test -- instead of real performance, government measurements will do just what USN&WR ratings do -- substitute test performance for real performance.</p>
<p>And let's not even get into, "Well if the government just picks the right measurements..." The education business is a multi-billion dollar industry of vast sweep and incredible complexity. The idea that some government agency will ascend to a mountain top, find the pure answer to the ratings question, and then descend to share it with us mortals is ludicrous. The process will be full of special interest pressure, lobbying, political tweaking, legislative pressure, and general log-rolling, cigar-smoking, and deal-making. The idea that we would trust that the same folks who haven't won the War on Poverty after spending trillions of dollars over a 40-year period are now going to credibly tell us which school is best leaves me speechless.</p>
<p>Just. Say. No.</p>
<p>
[quote]
My concern is that a "federally approved government rating" would dumb down the college choice process just like the MPG rating from the EPA has made us stupider in selecting vehicles. Did you know that the MPG rating was a secondary artifact of a test that was designed to test exhaust emissions, and that it was never intended to represent anything realistic about fuel economy? Did you know that auto makers now tune their vehicles to produce good numbers on the test, regardless of the fuel efficiency of that same vehicle in real-world driving? Just like the EPA MPG ratings have perverted the auto makers into focusing on a secondary effect -- a laboratory test -- instead of real performance, government measurements will do just what USN&WR ratings do -- substitute test performance for real performance.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This is exactly what I'm talking about... (pls refer to my very first post on this thread).</p>
<p>
[quote]
We now have a generation of Type A hoop-jumping overachieving high school students who "know" that Princeton is more highly rated than Stanford -- I mean it's right there on the Website, right? The fact that a student who was interested in engineering would probably have to have suffered a minor head injurty to prefer Princeton's engineering program over Stanford's gets swallowed up by The Ratings. (College ratings in general cause a wide variety of unproductive behavior, but at least USN&WR and Princeton and &c are private sources competing in the free market with their own money.)</p>
<p>My concern is that a "federally approved government rating" would dumb down the college choice process just like the MPG rating from the EPA has made us stupider in selecting vehicles. Did you know that the MPG rating was a secondary artifact of a test that was designed to test exhaust emissions, and that it was never intended to represent anything realistic about fuel economy? Did you know that auto makers now tune their vehicles to produce good numbers on the test, regardless of the fuel efficiency of that same vehicle in real-world driving? Just like the EPA MPG ratings have perverted the auto makers into focusing on a secondary effect -- a laboratory test -- instead of real performance, government measurements will do just what USN&WR ratings do -- substitute test performance for real performance.</p>
<p>And let's not even get into, "Well if the government just picks the right measurements..." The education business is a multi-billion dollar industry of vast sweep and incredible complexity. The idea that some government agency will ascend to a mountain top, find the pure answer to the ratings question, and then descend to share it with us mortals is ludicrous. The process will be full of special interest pressure, lobbying, political tweaking, legislative pressure, and general log-rolling, cigar-smoking, and deal-making. The idea that we would trust that the same folks who haven't won the War on Poverty after spending trillions of dollars over a 40-year period are now going to credibly tell us which school is best leaves me speechless.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I love you</p>
<p>Rick Tyler-</p>
<p>I am sure the colleges love your way of thinking.</p>
<p>You are in effect saying that ignorance is better than knowledge because knowledge might be misunderstood. I don't buy it. Let's get the information out, take the risk that errors might be made, debate it, critique it, and eventually the public might have a better basis for making their 80K investment. Full disclosure. Consumers of higher education deserve the same access to information that car buyers have.</p>
<p>How could having more information to consider possibly dumb down the college selection process? Before US News came out with their rankings, shopping for colleges was much more subjective, based on vague impressions and reputations.</p>
<p>You are actually playing into the hands of marketers and political-types who thrive on appearances rather than substance. You would deny consumers a potentially useful tool. You would make it easier for colleges to thrive on ignorance, images, and obfuscation.</p>
<p>Give the public's intelligence some credit.</p>
<p>this is a thread that every parent should be reading. Whether and how the government gets involved is less important in my mind than the observations of Collegehelp and others re: how colleges and universities manage themselves. Colleges rarely reflect upon how they manage their organization. They spend lots of $$ on consultants to better brand and market their institution, but little time and $$$ is allocated to reflect upon how they - specifically faculty and administrators - work. Even in small LACs there is increasing pressure to publish. Some of this research is good, but so much of it is not (new Journals are created every year to publish all this stuff). When publication output becomes the primary road to promotion and merit pay, teaching, advising, and just being in the office becomes a lower priority. When research output becomes the principle measure of performance, education and 'community-building' is put on the back burner. This is not only a problem in the large (typically public) research universities, but, as the Carnegie Commission reported a number of years ago, even small LACs are advancing faculty based upon research productivity. Faculty course-loads are reduced (i.e., from 3/3 to 3/2) to provide more time for research, with the consequence that the total number of course offerings decreases. Class sizes increase, and on and on.</p>
<p>No one, including myself, would pay any attention to government ratings of colleges because the process invariably will be diluted by provincial politics; as in, do you really believe that the chairman of House committee on Education will be happy if the federal Education Department ranking of his state's public colleges are below his constituents' perceptions of said colleges?</p>
<p>LakeWashington-
There is a lot of data on the web already about colleges on the IPEDS website. Some of it is unflattering to colleges yet it is still out there. The colleges know what they give to the US Dept of Ed. so they could tell if something was amiss. But, I understand what you are saying. The process depends on honesty.</p>
<p>
[quote]
From the referenced article: Also, one reason Spellings wants a federal database that tracks individual student progress — privacy-protected, she stresses — is because the current tools used to gauge an institution's graduation rates are outmoded.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I don't know if we need yet another government agency tracking what we do, either.</p>
<p>I'd settle for some private researcher getting a federal grant once in a while to update the revealed preferences study with a larger, current dataset.</p>
<p>nope. the US higher education system is arguably among the best in the world, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.</p>
<p>By contrast, I believe in continually improving every system to meet the new challenges of the future.</p>
<p>At selective, private universities faculty salaries are about 18% of total expenses and about 40% of the total amount spent on salaries. About 33% of total expenses is devoted to things that are related to instruction. So, it looks like most of the money goes to things that are not directly related to teaching. This is from IPEDS data 2004.</p>
<p>Furthermore, I would estimate that, at most, 50% of faculty time is spent on teaching.</p>
<p>At selective, PUBLIC universities faculty salaries are also about 18% of total expenses. Faculty salaries are about 36% of total salaries. About 25% of total expenses are devoted to things related to instruction.</p>
<p>I think this is a case where another layer of government bureaucracy isn't needed and won't solve any problems :-/</p>
<p>I'm not sure if I trust the US gov to get involved with the higher education system. Look at NCLB....what a mess that's made.</p>