<p>
[quote]
By contrast, I believe in continually improving every system to meet the new challenges of the future.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Except, the current system is going a pretty good job of that already. It doesn't need government bureaucracy trying to "fix" things.</p>
<p>I don't get any financial aid from the government and go to a private school - why should the feds poke their noses around my academic record for purposes of "improving" the university system?</p>
<p>Are you sure there are no federal payments to the school you attend? That's an extremely rare situation.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Are you sure there are no federal payments to the school you attend? That's an extremely rare situation.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Hmm, sure there are. There are lots of federal research grants, and other students get fin aid, but nothing that directly finances my education, ergo, why should I be in a federal student database if I don't want to.</p>
<p>Well, it's true that you could found a new college that is entirely independent of all forms of federal funding, as a few before you have done.</p>
<p>At selective liberal arts colleges, faculty salaries make up 19% of total expenses. Faculty salaries make up 46% of total salaries. Instructional expenses make up 36% of total expenses.</p>
<p>So, faculty salaries make up less than a fifth of a school's budget and, if about half their time is devoted to teaching, that means only 10% of the budget is paid toward teaching, which is the primary mission. That seems low to me. Our tuition dollars subsidize a lot of stuff that does not directly benefit education.</p>
<p>But, there are of course necessary expenses for supporting education: classroom buildings, dorms, food. I am sure an expert in higher ed finance could come up with the right figures but I would not be surprised if 50% of our tuition dollars goes towards things that are frivolous.</p>
<p>I am not a big fan of government but, in this case, I think government's regulatory function and public information function would be useful to consumers of higher education.</p>
<p>If the US has the best system of higher ed and only has a 50% success rate, that's pretty sad. For the 50% who drop out, it is a pretty expensive failure.</p>
<p>If schools took some of the money they spend on travel, buffets, consultants, intercollegiate sports, ineffective fad programs, top-heavy administration, and so on and redirected it toward motivating and supporting academic performance, students would learn more and graduate at a higher rate.</p>
<p>Has anyone mentioned the Education Trust's College Results Online site yet in this thread? It's a beginning at gathering data to compare colleges, a nonprofit organization posting data gathered by the federal government. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.collegeresults.org/default.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegeresults.org/default.htm</a></p>
<p>My public policy/economic analysis of the proposed poliicy</p>
<p>There are four possible market failures that can justify government intervention: imperfect information, monopoly, public good, and market externality. In this case, the imperfect information failure applies. Such a market failure might skew the market equilibrium price or may cause the good to have an unintended result on the consumer.</p>
<p>Lemon example:
When you buy a used car, you don't really know whether it's a lemon or not. Thus, you search for information that could reveal to you whether it is in fact a lemon. You test drive the car. Now you've decreased the risk of buying a lemon car, but most of the time one can't tell whether the car is a lemon or not just by test driving it. So there are two common solutions to this:
1) As done at many dealerships, the used car is sold under a limited warranty/certification.
2) One takes the car to a mechanic to get an inspection and opinion on whether it's a lemon.
Going back to the effect of throwing the price out of equilibrium:
Since there is a chance that any car is a lemon, you take that fact into account and become willing to pay less for any particular car (since you run the risk of buying a lemon). These two solutions greatly reduce the risk of buying a lemon by "pefecting" the information, but you have to pay a cost (a warranty or a mechanic's fee).</p>
<p>So if colleges were unwilling to release such information as student-faculty ratios, class size, median SAT, suicides per year, etc., a similar problem would arise. There are tons of other examples one can bring up. This is why medicines, tobacco products, alcohol, meat, and many other products are required to have warning labels on the bottle, packaging, lawnmower, etc.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, imperfect information exists in many markets. If you go by the principle that ANY imperfect information justifies government regulation, you will have the government testing, certifying, and labeling plastic cups, Post-It notes, q-tips, etc.</p>
<p>Thus, there exist criteria for regulation:
1) How much is the cost of the search for information (carrying out your own experiment in the basement to see if your ground beef is safe, taking the car to mechanic, looking up college suicide stats, buying a copy of US News)?
2) How often is the product bought? (Fridges and college degrees are bought once every few years while a bottle of Coke is bought once every day/week.)
3) How much will the lack of information potentially cost the consumer? (Buying a medicine over the counter without advice from doctor/pharmacits and dying from the side effects, or buying some plactic cups that leak and having to throw them away.)</p>
<p>A college degree is not bought very often, and the consequences may have a great cost if you don't have adequate information. However, the cost of the search for information is quite small. You can compare brochures (free), talk to a counselor/admissions dept. (maybe a long distance charge on phone bill), buy US News ($15ish), search internet for suicide statistics and student reviews (free). Hence, I would not support the creation of such an agency to provide Americans with "more perfect" information since the cost of obtaining it is pretty low, especially when a tax increase (or, the way it's currently looking in US, a further deficit) is taken into consideration.</p>
<p>"If it works, don't fix it" doesn't always hold. Your hair worked (kept your head warm), but you still got a hair cut or died it. The economy works well (I mean US is pretty damn rich), but we still attempt to make it better by stemming inflation and increasing growth, productivity, and exports. A better version: "If it's not perfect, improve it."</p>
<p>Politics don't necessarily have to affect a government agency. It just takes a well-crafted policy to prevent the agency from being influenced by interest groups and members of Congress. The Fed is an example.</p>
<p>In an article published in the October 6 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is quoted:</p>
<p>She challenged the notion that "things are going just fine" in higher education, asking: "Is it fine that college tuition has outpaced inflation, family income, even doubling the cost of health care? Is it fine that only half our students graduate on time? Is it fine that students graduate from college so saddled with debt that they can't buy a home or start a family?"</p>
<p>Her action plan:
(1) Expand "the effective principles" of the No Child Left Behind Act to high schools, while continuing "efforts to align high school standards with college work" and increasing "access to college-prep classes such as Advanced Placement</p>
<p>(2) Streamline the process of applying for federal student aid, to "cut the application time in half" and notify students of their eligibility "earlier than the spring of their senior year, to help families plan."</p>
<p>(3) Create a federal database to track students' academic progress. [the "unit record system" </p>
<p>(4) Provide matching funds to colleges, universities, and states that collect and publicly report student "learning outcomes".</p>
<p>(5) Convene members of accrediting groups in November "to move toward measures that place more emphasis on learning".</p>
<p>By the way, Spellings is talking about a process and a dialogue, not aggressive intervention by the federal government.</p>
<p>Arthur Rothkopf, President Emeritus of Lafayette College and now vice president of the US Chamber of Commerce, said Spellings plan was "absolutely on target", moving slowly and judiciously.</p>
<p>Here is an exerpt from the executive summary of a feasibility study of the "unit record system" (UR) conducted by the US Dept of education. This system would enable the US Dept of Education to provide more useful, accurate information about colleges to consumers. The full report is kind of technical, mostly computer systems and data management issues, but it can be found at:</p>
<p><a href="http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005160a.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005160a.pdf</a></p>
<p>At IES/NCES, the Integrated
Postsecondary Education Data System
(IPEDS) is the core postsecondary
education data collection program,
designed and implemented to meet its
mission to report on the condition of
postsecondary education in the United
States. IPEDS is a single, comprehensive
system that encompasses over 10,000
institutions whose primary purpose is to
provide postsecondary education
(including roughly 6,700 institutions that
have Program Participation Agreements
with ED for Title IV federal student
financial aid programs and are required
by statute to report to IPEDS). The
IPEDS system collects institutionlevel
Executive Summary
iv
data in the areas of enrollment, program
completions, graduation rates, faculty,
staff, finances, institutional prices, and
student financial aid. The use of
aggregate data has some limitations in
comparison with UR data, such as the
inability to track the academic progress
and experiences of individual students,
and therefore to study the longitudinal
enrollment of different types of students.
Despite its comprehensiveness, the
IPEDS system cannot measure many of
the evolving trends in postsecondary
education that are necessary for sound
policy decisions. The current IPEDS
framework cannot accurately capture
changing enrollment and completions
patterns in the postsecondary education
sector, especially given increasing
numbers of nontraditional students, and
cannot describe the prices various types
of students face after financial aid is
taken into account. To do so, it would be
necessary to collect accurate student
level information on persistence
systemwide (i.e., regardless of institution
and nationwide), multiple enrollment,
parttime enrollment, transfer, and
attainment. It would also be necessary to
collect studentlevel information on
prices and financial aid, in order to
calculate net prices that take into account
the individual circumstances of each
student. By its very nature, a UR system
would enable the collection of data that
would lead to more accurate estimates of
these variables. In addition, a UR system
would allow the development of a whole
range of new measures, such as net
prices for specific groups of students,
graduation rates that take into account
institutional missions, persistence rates
that consider student mobility and a
systemwide perspective, measures of
enrollment patterns for nontraditional
students, and time to degree by field of
study.</p>
<p>copied and pasted from MSN Encarta</p>
<p>No Adult Left Behind?
by Tamim Ansary
I recently received a defensive letter from my alma mater setting forth statistical proof that its students actually learn something. Why, I wondered, would a liberal arts school famous for its intellectual rigor need to make this case? </p>
<p>Reed College, it turns out, was reacting to recent speeches by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, in which she subjects colleges and universities to the same kind of scrutiny with which the school-reform movement has focused on K-12 schools.</p>
<p>School reform, I should note, no longer means just any enthusiastic effort to improve schools. It refers to a particular approach. It's a movement rooted in the 1980s and culminating in the No Child Left Behind Act, which relentlessly pushes three intertwined elements as keys to educational salvation: codified standards, standardized testing, and accountability. </p>
<p>Spellings begins her reformist attack on higher education by posing a crucial question: Why is the cost of higher education skyrocketing so catastrophically?</p>
<p>However, she doesn't answer the question, or really explore it, or offer any way to drive the cost down. What she does offer is a way to help consumers shop for the best bargain--through testing and accountability. But should the government be helping consumers find the best bargains in higher education, or should it make college education a better bargain for more people?</p>
<p>Make 'em prove it
What Secretary Spellings means by accountability is forcing colleges to prove they offer a quality product in order to receive federal funding. (And since higher education gets one-third of its money from federal sources, she has some real leverage here.) </p>
<p>Mind you, it's not that colleges lack all accountability now. But, as matters stand, accountability currently boils down to the pass-fail system called accreditation*. A committee of expert academics evaluates a given school and decides if it's good enough. A shoddy college loses its accreditation, and although it may legally stay in business, the value of its degree plummets. That's the theory anyway. </p>
<p>But accreditation agencies are voluntary associations of the colleges and universities themselves. Actually, any group of schools can form an association and confer accreditation upon themselves. Even at its best, accreditation simply sorts colleges into winners and losers. It doesn't rank them further. </p>
<p>To choose between any two accredited colleges, prospective students and their parents must do their own sifting through a wealth of information, such as the "buzz on the street" reviews by publications such as U.S.News & World Report, The Princeton Review demographic statistics, and the like. And they must use their own judgment to weigh the various factors. </p>
<p>Spellings objects to this whole system largely because it measures colleges and universities in terms of "inputs," or information offered by the institutions themselves. Accreditation committees, for example, look at factors such as the size of the college's library, the quality of its collection, the ratio of professors to students, and the degrees those professors hold.</p>
<p>Spellings would scrap all this in favor of measuring "outputs." She wants students tested going into college and again coming out to quantify how much they've learned and thus score the college's value-added quotient.</p>
<p>Show me the money
And there's more! Spellings would require colleges to chart how their alumni do monetarily and feed this information into a national database. For each major, how much do its alumni make after one year, five years, ten? A companion proposal would oblige colleges to reveal their true costs: all tuition charges, student fees, books, and adjustments for projected inflation.</p>
<p>Once the whole system is in place, choosing a college would simply be a matter of plugging numbers into an algorithm and calculating the rate of return on investment. Schools with a poor rate would lose investors (a.k.a. students and parents) and go out of business. The surviving colleges--the few, the proud, the best--would be ones that reliably generate high income producing professionals.</p>
<p>There is much to be said for knowing how the cost of an education, particularly a vocational one, stacks up with the income it can generate. But this information is already available to the extent that it's knowable: You can look up how much engineers make on average and what four years at an engineering school will cost. But you can't completely predict whether your education is going to "pay back" the money you spend on it, because the education doesn't automatically generate the money. You still have to put something into it--some effort, some ambition.</p>
<p>Unintended consequences
The trouble with the Spellings approach is that college differs from kindergarten. College is not simply about cramming existing knowledge into empty heads. It's about turning students into grown-ups who can think for themselves and forge new knowledge.</p>
<p>A hundred thousand years ago, kids could step into grown-up shoes by learning as much as their parents. Today, learning the already-known just isn't good enough. Students must also learn to grapple with the unknown and to deal with an ever-less-predictable future. I'm reminded of Corey Rosen, a former professor of political science at Ripon College, who told me that he didn't get students to master a particular body of facts. His job, he said, was training them to "think as political scientists."</p>
<p>Of course, professors should give tests and evaluate students. They do, and always will. The question is, should bureaucrats give tests and use them to shape what professors do? </p>
<p>Down that road may lie grave unintended consequences, because what is tested ends up being what is taught, especially if the test results determine whether a teacher will still have a job next semester.</p>
<p>And test results that enable a distant bureaucrat (or the public at large) to instantly compare one college to any college nationwide, taking judgment out of it, inevitably means numerical scores--which means standardized testing. </p>
<p>The big squeeze
Some types of knowledge--literal content, for example--lend themselves to such testing. Other types, like creativity, judgment, analytical and synthetic skills, and leadership, do not. A nationwide, high-stakes testing program in higher education will therefore nourish certain programs and undermine others. Vocational education that produces technocrats will prosper. Liberal arts programs that produce well-rounded, well-educated citizens will lose steam.</p>
<p>Both are important, of course, but will both survive? It's no accident that Spellings prefaces her reformist critique of higher education by spotlighting economic factors. The cost of college is going through the roof. Financial aid is dropping through the floor. </p>
<p>In 1992, the average student came out of college owing $9,200. Today that number stands at $19,000, all too much of it private loans with variable interest rates. Students risking financial ruin for a college degree will naturally gravitate toward programs that turn into lots of dollars quickly. Some degrees do this better than others.</p>
<p>In a recent New York Times editorial, writer/actor/game show host Ben Stein excoriates college students who waste time studying "Bulgarian poetry" (his code for any course of study not directly related to business and technology). Stein lists all the rich men he knows and triumphantly proves that none of them studied Bulgarian poetry. Those who fail to get rich shouldn't whine, says Stein. They should have studied to become stockbrokers (the career he most singles out for praise).</p>
<p>The case for Bulgarian poetry
But here's the thing: The liberal arts education really is the foundation for leadership positions in American society. Yes, most politicians have law degrees, but typically, they get a B.A. from a liberal arts college first. Ditto for doctors, business executives, and top health-care administrators.</p>
<p>No matter how many institutes of technology sprout across the land, the Swarthmores, the Reeds, and the Ripons will still be with us. And the Harvard undergraduate program isn't shutting down soon. What may shut down is access to this type of education for anyone who can't pay for it out of pocket. </p>
<p>Reforming higher education along the lines laid out by No Child Left Behind may well tilt higher education toward vocational programs, but it won't address the real question--which isn't how consumers can find the best bargains in higher education, but how the whole range of higher education can become a better bargain for more people.</p>
<p>It's like food packaging labelling; the public is well served by available information, provided in standardized formats, but the FDA does not stray to sensory ratings. Gathering and publishing such college data is fine, but let's keep government out of the ratings business. The Common Data Set is a good college model for starters.</p>
<p>from the Tamim Ansary article:</p>
<p>"Spellings would scrap all this in favor of measuring "outputs." She wants students tested going into college and again coming out to quantify how much they've learned and thus score the college's value-added quotient."</p>
<p>One of the pitfalls of pre- and post- testing college students to determine "value added" is that colleges that accept the dumbest, most ignorant students will come out looking best. Why? Because thier students will have the most room for growth. The HYPSM students are all near the ceiling to begin with and have less room for growth.</p>
<p>If knowledge could be placed on a 100 point scale with 1=turnip and 100=Einstein, the students at Podunk might improve from 30 to 60 (30 points "value added") while Harvard students might improve from 75 to 95 (20 points "value added"). Increases in knowledge, understanding, skills, etc. are harder to achieve near the ceiling.</p>
<p>I think government can help consumers of higher ed by making more information available. I think Margaret Spellings has the right idea. I just hope government doesn't screw up their analysis and interpretations.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I think Margaret Spellings has the right idea.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Two ideas? Gather and present data (good), rate schools (not so good). It's the old one-size-fits-all problem that creeps into ratings.</p>
<p>***? We have too many rankings as it is. (So many rankings that we need a ranking of rankings. @_@)</p>