The Measure of Learning
Can you test what colleges teach? Academics are appalled that the government wants to try
In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, the grandson of the sixth president delivered the American school system one of its most memorable intellectual smackdowns. His treatise on the value of experiential learning concluded that his alma mater, Harvard University, "as far as it educated at all ... sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens. Leaders of men it never tried to make." His schooling, replete with drunken revelry and privileged classmates, didn't prepare him for a world of radical change: the birth of radio, X-rays, automobiles. "[Harvard] taught little," he said, "and that little, ill."
Today's undergraduate education, of course, is far more than just the canon of classics that Adams studied. And with heavy investments in technology, it's hard to argue that colleges don't prepare students for the job market or the emerging digital world. But the question remains: What shoulda student learn in college? And whatever that is, which colleges teach it most effectively? With the average cost of private college soaring—and with studies consistently showing American students falling behind their peers internationally—it's a question being asked more and more. And it's one that colleges are at a loss to fully answer. "Every college tries to do what it says in the brochures: 'to help students reach their full potential,'" says Derek Bok, former Harvard president and the author of Our Underachieving Colleges. But, he says, "most schools don't know what that means. Nor do they know who is failing to achieve that full potential."
It's called "value added," an elusive measurement of the thinking skills and the body of knowledge that students acquire between their freshman and senior years. In other words, how much smarter are students when they leave college than when they got there? Trying to quantify that value—and assessing how effective each of the nation's 4,200 colleges is at delivering it—is at the heart of one of the most ambitious and controversial higher-education reforms in recent history.
Later this month, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will meet with college leaders to discuss the findings of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education and its plan to assess college learning through one or a number of standardized tests. "For years the colleges in this country have said, 'We're the best in the world; give us money and leave us alone,'" says Charles Miller, the chairman of the commission. "The higher-ed community needs to fess up to the public's concerns."
Along with the parents footing the bills, the federal government has a vested interest in knowing how the nation's colleges are doing their jobs. Although the government provides only 10 percent of the funding for all K-12 schools, it is responsible for 24 percent of all money spent on higher education. Despite this inflow of public money, colleges have largely escaped the accountability movement that has been shaping policy and curricula in the early grades.
One size. Not surprisingly, colleges abhor the idea of government-imposed testing, insisting that they are reforming themselves and that government oversight is not the answer in any case. A one-size-fits-all solution is grossly impractical, they argue, given the variety of American colleges, and it undermines the prized independence of the institutions, widely regarded as among the finest in the world. "No one wants standardized No Child Left Behind-style testing in colleges—not parents, not students, not colleges," says David Ward, president of the American Council of Education. Adds Lloyd Thacker, author of College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy, "The danger is that the soul of education will be crushed in the rush to quantify the unquantifiable."
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