Right for all the wrong reasons

Few folks have been as vocal as I have regarding the deteriorating status of higher education in the United States. I have long maintained that the escalating tuition and poor outcomes owe as much to the federal government’s lending and funding policies as anything else. That combined with breathtaking administrative bloat has made U.S. colleges and universities a great deal…for aspiring deans and chancellors. For students and faculty, however, the value proposition of learning and teaching is not as clear as it was a generation ago. If one dropped onto campus from Mars, one could be forgiven if you were to think that a university’s core mission is to field a football team, launch an unending series of capital projects, and hire on an army of overpaid, underworked administrators.

At times I have felt alone in the wilderness, but now it seems people are cottoning on to the dysfunction. For instance, The Wall Street Journal has launched a continuing series (The Price of Admission) focused on higher education, and there have been a spate of other articles and op/ed pieces lamenting the soaring costs of college and the out-of-touch administrators and politicians who prop up a failing system.

So it seems strange to voice some discomfort at the substance of some of these diatribes. After all, these folks should be natural allies in any effort to reform the system. But after having read several of these complaints of late, I can’t help but feel that many people are rather missing the point. A great example can be found in today’s Investor’s Business Daily (“Time for Higher Ed To Prove It’s Worth”). I should say upfront that I find IBD’s point of view to be far too stridently conservative for my tastes, although I often agree in principle with the general tenor of its coverage. On the subject of higher education, however, I found this that recent article repeats a theme I find troubling. In lending support to the “scorecard” argument – that is, that universities should be mandated to publish jobs and earnings data for their graduates – IBD joins a chorus of politicians and policymakers who feel that such a policy will introduce more accountability into the higher ed industry.

I can’t help but feel that the last thing universities need is yet another ranking. While it would be nice if parents and students had hard, standardized data about how certain courses of study translate into future employment, this is not a solution to runaway costs. It strikes me more as a diversion.

I also have a philosophical quibble with the idea. Universities are not vocational schools, yet employing a “scorecard” implicitly runs in the opposite direction. Suddenly, a school’s “performance” is directly tied to the employment patterns of its graduates, which to me borders on lunacy. Besides, it’s not like the data are not already available. Do we really need another onerous layer of administrative red tape to tell us that the earnings potential/employability of a Cultural Studies or Film Studies major is limited?

Focusing on scorecards in this manner is an evasion of what should be the primary issue in the discussion, which is the across-the-board inflation of student tuition. Cutting through the BS and getting to the root causes of this inflation will challenge many of our assumptions about higher education and the way we fund it. In other words, it will be hard enough to have the necessary conversation without chasing after the chimera of scorecards.