The other day I floated the idea that the best antidote to the US News and World Report college rankings nonsense would be if the higher education world provided some kind of more meaningful account of school quality on its own. Kevin Carey from Education Sector has done a lot of work in this area. You can see his long paper on reforming college rankings, or else a shorter take for The Washington Monthly if you're interested in pursuing these issues further.
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Better College Rankings
22 May 2007 08:53 am
Comments (11)
Glad to be of help.
What do colleges actually sell, what do they seek to produce, and what do students think they are buying?
Research universities, professional schools, and top ranked schools all focus on research in faculty selection. Hideous teaching will rarely sink a professor, great teaching will not salvage one. Teaching ability is considered as a tiebreaker.
So, this empirical evidence suggests these institutions mostly focus on producing research. They are willing to sacrifice the educational function to achieve that research.
Meanwhile, students often select more prestigious schools because they believe they will help them in the job market. Students seek to buy credentials.
Students buy the credentials, and schools sell them. The schools use the money to fund their research goals.
Employers like the credentials because they believe that admissions office plays a good screening function. They think they get talented students. It is possible that they also like that the screening function disproportionately benefits whites and wealthy kids. It may allow them to engage in discrimination that would be illegal if performed by the employer themselves (few employers could use the SAT in hiring, because they would risk violating Title VII).
So, why should the rankings focus on education? None of the institutional players seem most interested in education at all.
I think you may have mentioned once or twice that you went to Harvard. How much do you think the quality of your educational experience there was a function of the faculty, facilities, and what-not available and how much was a function of being around folks who got into Harvard?
My guess is that there are probably about 100 or so nearly-fungible places that offer just about anything anyone could want in an undergraduate education, connections aside, (there are a few special cases: if you're the type for MIT or CalTech, that's where you ought to go), including a high-quality student body, if not quite as rigorously selective as the Harvards of the world. People would be much happier if they realized this.
What do colleges actually sell, what do they seek to produce, and what do students think they are buying?
If you look at colleges as a business in a market (as sadly the model has been for the last few decades) the answers are in order: credentials, alumni, and job training. Colleges have no way of actually "selling" education -- the best that they can do is sell a set of credentials to a student. They can do their best to make sure that those credentials are as widely respected as possible, and they do that through their research/publication requirements on faculty. That and getting "phat research grant money" are the reasons why colleges put so much emphasis on research and publication -- prestige and money.
The only thing that colleges actually produce are alumni. Alumni with better jobs give better donations back to the colleges. Alumni who are happy with their college experience will encourage their children and other relatives to go to their college. Alumni beget more alumni, which beget more donations.
Students THINK they're getting job training. Except for students who attend Community Colleges or who are in professional programs (e.g. Education, Medicine, Law, Accounting) they are almost always wrong. The undergraduate college process is to certify that you can tackle a difficult, long term project that requires varying amounts of strenuous academic activity. Once you've done that you get your credentials and can go on to get job training (generally on a real job) -- for most students college is to prove to an employer that you are teachable and that you can commit to a long-term goal and follow-through with it.
Notice that actual education in all of this is only important to the degree that it proves that you're worth the credentials you're given at the end. No one (especially employers) really cares whether you learn about Shakespeare or Comparative Politics or anything else when you're in college except to the degree that you can prove that you've learned "enough" to be teachable in the job they're hiring you for.
I think very little of what NonyNony observes above applies to degrees in the sciences and engineering. I'm in computer science, and I don't really care whether the graduate I'm talking to has studied comparative politics, but I do care whether they understand something about algorithms, data structures, theory, and all the other basics of the field.
I somewhat agree with NonyNony, though as RSA points out, the sciences are fairly distinct. At the same time, credentials remain important in the sciences - the better the school's name, the more credit the applicant will be given on faith.
I would add a serious qualifier - getting through a prestigious school is not very difficult (except from a money perspective). Most top schools are very hard to get into, and very hard to fail out of. Completing a degree indicates some ability to be organized and committed, but I would argue that the employers are mostly excited about the fact that the student got admitted to the school, not that the student completed the degree.
Completing one of these schools generally shows that one comes from a certain background (i.e. middle class or higher) or is immensely driven.
As an MIT grad I feel barely qualified to participate in this discussion. As with RSA, I think coursework is pretty important when considering which new grads to hire in my field (EE). And college attended and GPA received are a pretty valuable credential system.
It might be worth noting that the Engineering schools within the Ivy League are rated very low -- much lower than, say, Michigan, Georgia Tech, Univ of Illnois or Carnegie Mellon. While Cornell and Princeton are at least decent, Harvard is way down there.
One result of the Harvard "old boy network" and "honors for everyone" is that the Manhattan Project had to be staffed with a lot of scientists and engineers from Europe --mostly Jews fleeing from Hitler. Oppenheimer was a Harvard man, but had found it necessary to study further at Cambridge and in Germany before the war.
The top liberal arts schools like Middlebury , of course, have no Engineering programs at all.
Y'know, WTF? What are we supposed to do, bow and scrape to the person who went to the "higher ranked" school for the rest of eternity?
If you don't know whether a college or university is for you, well, pick up a book or something. Figure out what you want to learn, figure out who teaches it, because, believe me, if you don't know that, it really doesn't matter to you.
Going to a brand-name school sells you to brand-name people. If you think the brand name is more important than what's in the bottle, well, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out which is the most prominent brand name.
If you're good at something, the people who matter won't care what school you went to. Because if you're that good, you won't be reading Newsweek to decide what school to attend.
What are we supposed to do, bow and scrape to the person who went to the "higher ranked" school for the rest of eternity?
We Americans would find it much more difficult to make invidious class distinctions if it weren't for high- and low-status colleges (with a hat tip to Paul Fussell).
Comments closed June 05, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Come on, The Atlantic pays for the new digs at least mention the 2003 Confessore article.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200311/confessore
Posted by crack | May 22, 2007 10:24 AM