In a deliberate and thoughtful article in The Upshot (a New York Times blog)
Kevin Carey has once and for all defined the costs and consequences associated
with the way we “rank” colleges in the United States and globally. Using
first-time data from new OECD research called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), Carey builds a careful analysis that exposes
a glaring and dangerous problem with the way we determine quality in higher
education.
Carey’s main point is that unlike K-12, where we are
compared internationally on what our students actually know and are able to do
(PISA Report from OECD), in higher education we rank colleges and universities
based on perceived status. Whether it is the US News and World Report rankings,
or President Obama himself in his State of the Union message, the reference to
US higher education as “the best in the world” refers to our top institutions,
not the entire enterprise. Carey goes on to point out that our relatively poor
performance with regards to adult learners (up to age 29) has dire economic and
social implications as we look towards an increasingly competitive global
marketplace in the years ahead.
He is quite right. But this OECD disruption underscores
another big problem as well. Yes, like the fearsome Wizard of Oz being unmasked
as the little man behind the curtain, we are brought down to earth with this
data. But stopping there brings up the next issue: the OECD research exposes
the fact that we do not currently have good data or appropriate comparisons
among institutional types and sectors that fully represent the diversity within
our student populations and the extent to which we succeed with them.
The proposals for college rankings that we have seen
either perpetuate the old “Wizard of Oz” approach or fail to assess college and
learner performance by institutional category or learners’ risk factors to
achieve an “apples to apples” comparison. In fact, they penalize institutions
that serve marginalized and low-income learners — the very people with which we
need to have more success.
That failure, in turn, leads to the deeper and more
significant inability to know how effective our institutions are and what it
will take to improve their effectiveness with the students they are electing to
serve.
Instead of a reasoned discussion about improvement, we
continue to be treated to a spectacle that more closely approximates a
mud-wrestling match with multiple teams. Thank you OECD and Kevin Carey for
framing the reasons why the discussion about quality in American higher
education needs to be re-framed.
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