The annual college rankings from U.S. News & World Report were released Tuesday, and you'll find plenty of news coverage and commentary here and here about the influence (or hype) of this annual guide.
The rankings are on my mind these days as I embark on a reporting project about the college of the future, and specifically about the hurdles to change in higher ed.
Rankings play a potentially large role in stifling innovation on college campuses. As some lower-ranked colleges try to game the system in order to improve their scores, they essentially try to follow a roadmap driven by the magazine's methodology. The U.S. News rankings have "become the tail that wags the dog," The Chronicle of Higher Education noted in a special report on the rankings in 2007. "The magazine's annual college guide does not merely compile data on what colleges are doing. It has changed the way many college officials determine their institutional priorities."
The long-term effect is that colleges begin to look more alike than different as they chase the same "input measures" valued by U.S. News: student selectivity, faculty-student ratio, average retention of freshmen, and financial measures, like financial resources per student, alumni-giving rate, and faculty salaries. As The Chronicle noted in its 2007 report (and The Washington Post in an article just this month), the U.S. News methodology has really hurt the rankings of public colleges.
But even if an alternative rankings system were to suddenly take hold among the public, it's unlikely that we'd suddenly see most universities change the fundamentals of how they operate. Plenty of other barriers to innovation exist in higher ed. Here are some other hurdles, in no particular order. Please use the comment section to disagree or to add your own.
Tradition. A tight grip on how things were done in the past exists in almost every industry, but in higher ed the link is particularly strong among the consumers--students who want the prototypical undergraduate experience and parents who fondly recall their own college days. In other industries, it's the consumers who usually force innovation by changing their habits. Take the innovation of online courses. That delivery method has gained broad acceptance among college presidents, but the public is far more skeptical about its quality, according to new survey data released by the Pew Research Center, in association with The Chronicle. Perhaps the only thing that will loosen that grip to the past is the rising price of a traditional college education in the face of a continued bad economy.
Federal and state dollars. Few of those dollars come with incentives to change (unlike the Obama administration's Race to the Top funds in K-12, which some argue have prompted change). In higher ed, a few states tie a small slice of their appropriations to the performance of public colleges, but again, like the U.S. News rankings, most of that performance is based on well-known input measures. The vast majority of government dollars, of course, go to students, and none of those dollars encourage them to think differently, except for those who run up against the government's limits on undergraduate debt ($31,000, but some borrowers can go above that by dipping into the private loan market).
Oversight. In the name of consumer protection, the federal government has established an elaborate system of oversight, both directly and indirectly through accreditors. Some entrants, like Burck Smith of StraighterLine, which offers entry-level college courses for $99 a month or an entire freshman year for $999, argue that such controls curb innovation. For example, StraighterLine students are not eligible for federal financial aid because the company is not accredited, a requirement to get federal dollars. But StraighterLine can't be accredited because it offers only classes, not degrees.
Shared governance. Higher education operates like few other industries, where the governance of the enterprise is shared by the employers and the employees. Yet there seems to be as much distrust of the "other side" in higher education as there is in any worker-management relationship. College leaders blame the faculty for resisting needed change or dragging it out; faculty members blame administrators for unwise decisions and misguided priorities. Is there any campus in the United States where shared governance is strong and the college is seen as innovative?
Higher-education associations. As a reporter and editor, I am constantly in touch with the various higher-education associations about their concerns, but I never really thought about them as a barrier to change until I read an essay by Dominic J. Brewer and William G. Tierney in a new book about innovation in higher ed, Reinventing Higher Education. They argue that the associations are in the business of "preservation." They cite publications from the American Council on Education, the main higher-education association, that do not suggest that "significant changes are either imperative or even necessary." They write that "the underlying assumption is that the system works relatively well, and innovation is relatively unimportant compared to the ability to expand the current structures that characterize the status quo."
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Let's never stop rating colleges, what we need instead is to invest in a more meaningful bag of ratings tools for higher education as a whole.
We need rankings that are transparent and that measure specific factors of higher education that correlate to what policy makers and consumers want, need, and are entitled to know. Cost, Outcomes and Employment Credibility.
We need ratings that measure clear, factual items and outcomes -- as opposed to the old school inputs and irrelevant measures historically used by US News.
Stop reading old school rankings and start engaging with and blogging on innovative sites like Transparency by Design - College Choices for Adults, http://www.collegechoicesforadults.org/.
Colleges Choices is an amazing project that rates universities on outcomes like student engagement, completion and satisfaction. This small site lets students compare schools on these crucial output factors. It's the future of meaningful ratings.
GetEducated.com, http://www.geteducated.com, is another tiny site that lets consumers objectively rank online degree programs and colleges by cost, public perception (which affects value) and real verified online student satisfaction.
Make the rating indices transparent, then give consumers the tools to sort it in many meaningful ways. By meaningful I mean measures of cost and credibility as opposed to measures of the size of endowments.
Let's go new school on this issue.
Lifelong continuous learning is now the rule with the great pace of advancement in science and technology in every field. Probably the most important field of study in the long run is history because a knowledge of history will tell every thinking person on Earth where we are all now headed on this planet of ignoramuses.
For the financial class, advanced degrees have been to achieve even more and better criminal behavior.
GEORGE CARLIN ON EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYIC0eZYEtI
If most people could afford their own apartment without getting a college degree, then people who have no higher goal in life wouldn't bother and the education would be more readily available to people who do.
The one exception is the State of New Mexico. They have allocated lottery money and oil revenues to provide a four year college education to any in state student who keeps their grades up.
"This is the second No. 1 recruiter ranking for Penn State in the past six months. In September, the University earned the top spot in The Wall Street Journal. For that ranking, the newspaper surveyed 479 recruiters and asked them to identify the schools "whose bachelor degree graduates were the best-trained and educated, and best able to succeed once hired."
Also, in R1 schools, we're under a lot of pressure to "publish or perish" which promotes a certain hierarchy of values attractive to certain types of scholars. As one friend puts it: "We're here to mass produce diplomas. It's what people are paying for and any complaints could compromise our jobs."
Despite these realities, I work hard to teach skills applicable outside the classroom along with the subject material. These students are not just the workers of tomorrow, but our fellow citizens with whom we need to work with to build strong communities. Together, we're working together on ways to make our time together as mutually beneficial and productive as possible. Hopefully it's effective. Without the "customer" demanding more from the institution, it's doubtful administrators will support significant change.
Undoubtedly true. On the other hand, without the contributions of our research universities over the past few 50 years, we would be a third-rate power.
http://scholarshipsforwomenonline.com/graduate-school-scholarships-for-women
My first ancestor (that I know about) came to the colonies as an indentured servant to William Penn. My indentured servanthood was shorter than his. But my brother-in-law did his doctorate in American Literature at Berkeley. I think he was at it over 9 years. The opportunity cost of that much study is enormous.
In the next dew years, many state colleges will close because the fact is we have too many education centers with too many administration leeches plus today the failure of the American dream means larger schools, larger classes and fewer public colleges scattered around each state.
Now as you shake your head consider an individual starting from the bottom and working up over twenty years to the top of her occupation. She knows the job in and out, she can politic and grow with the times but is held back by people who have never been out in main stream but have that three star degree. Perhaps it is time to understand that the degree is only equal to experience not the other way around.
met a fellow yesterday that was living with his parents, had a four year college degree and working for 7 dollars an hour as a security guard at a chase bank outlet.
met recently a fellow with an MBA working at radio shack for peanuts in wages.
it is amazing what greed and arrogance and ignorance can do to a society. history gives us examples of this over and over and over yet we hear it not.
in a nation that calls corporations persons, money free speech, and a medical system that has pre existing medical conditions to deny the sick coverage to max out corp profits and CEO bonuses is a nation on the fast track to third world status and all the education in the world will not stop that decline.
it is a paradigm of a capitalist system of survival of the fittest and the 2%ers and global corporations will win that one every time. dont teach you that in higher education do they?
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm