What Isn't Learned: Simple Addition Doesn't Equal Complex Insight

Last Sunday’s Washington Post (August 15, 2010) carried an opinion piece by Kathleen Parker commenting on data from a study recently released by The American Council of Trustees and Alumni. In that essay, Ms. Parker states that the data provide information about "the value of a college education."  Implicit in her remarks is the notion that consumers can judge academic quality based on, as Ms. Parker says, "universities' commitment to core subjects deemed essential to a well-rounded, competitive education." 

In fact, however, the Web site that contains the information from the study basically grades some 700 institutions on the courses they offer in certain subject areas and their policies related to course requirements—without considering the larger, more important issues related to measuring and improving educational value and student learning.

The question of what courses should be offered and required is worth asking, but it doesn’t get at the central challenges related to academic quality that are now confronting our institutions. By referring to the site’s data, Ms. Parker implies support of the study's contention that the presence or absence of a handful of courses is the marker of academic quality. Without reference to learning outcomes, pedagogy, or assessment, the site’s checklist of subjects required in general education is a far cry from useful information on the quality of the education a student receives.

Over the last several years, AGB has been working with its member institutions and their boards to address issues associated with academic quality, graduation rates, and how institutions use their financial resources to support their mission. The premise of our work has been that presidents and academic officers should engage their governing bodies and faculty in these issues at a strategic level.  The focus should not just be on the number and exact choice of courses, although in some institutions that might be a concern, but rather the broader theme of the creation of educational value through the relation of cost and quality.  The current debate about productivity and cost efficiency in higher education heightens the need for internal conversations among institutions’ academic policy makers—presidents, academic administrators, and board members—about how well students are learning, how successfully they are being prepared for the future, and how institutions can convey student-learning outcomes to the public.

Boards have a policy role (increasingly so today) to ensure that their institution’s academic programs are of the highest quality, that those programs support the institution’s mission, and that students are successfully meeting academic expectations.  Such institutional challenges don’t necessarily lend themselves to numerical rankings, and AGB's work with governing boards on academic quality recognizes that fact.  Our publications on the subject (Making the Grade: How Boards Can Ensure Academic Quality by Peter T. Ewell and Strategic Leadership in Academic Affairs: Clarifying the Board’s Responsibilities by Richard L. Morrill), and a soon-to-be-released report of a survey of board engagement in the oversight of academic quality are much more analytical than the cursory look provided by the data that Ms. Parker cites.

The effort to grade institutions based on courses and requirements is timed to coincide with this year's U.S. News & World Report rankings issue and framed as an additional resource for use in considering various institutions' performance. Yet what is needed is more strategic work on assessments of student learning and meaningful improvements based on those assessments.  Boards and institution leaders should be appropriately skeptical in viewing the data as a proxy for academic quality.