Cited: LA Times

President Barack Obama highlighted education as a primary object of his administration’s focus and that includes the area of runaway costs at our colleges and universities. The President further reinforced the message at a speech at the University of Michigan, where he hinted that perhaps federal aid to the colleges would somehow be tied to cost controls at these institutions, a notion that got the attention of many college Presidents. Their initial reaction was that any cut in funding from the feds could undermine the quality of the education in our colleges. But that leaves the question, how do we measure and evaluate the quality of the education at these schools?

The President proposed, as an incentive for received federal aid, that the colleges be graded on lower costs, graduation rates, and the ability of your graduates to find a job. However, nowhere on this metric is the quality of the education actually being graded except in it leading to a paycheck. A recent study by two professors, one at New York University, and the other from the University of Virginia found that after tracking several thousand students in twenty four universities, almost 50% of these students didn’t improve their reasoning or writing skills in the first two years of college. Four years later more than 33% had still not improved in these areas of study.

Their assessment was based on a college test called the College Learning Assessment or CLA, which tests college students for the ability to read, think, reason, and then write in a coherent, logical manner based on what the evidence and information presented in the test.  The test was given to 2,400 students in 24 colleges – a sampling from big state colleges, to selective liberal arts schools to those schools that have been historically African American and Latino based.

The students fared poorly with researchers concluding that most didn’t improve their abilities in these critical areas of education because most weren’t challenged in these subjects while in their freshman and sophomore years in school. When interviewed, many said that they study less than 12 hours per week, and that some aren’t even required to write more than 20 pages combined in all their classes.

Some colleges are already addressing the problem by requiring their students to write a series of papers in the first two years of school and those that do not meet the standards set by the school are required to seek assistance in getting up to speed. So while the rising cost of higher education is indeed a problem, perhaps the bigger problem is making sure that our children are actually benefitting, meaning getting an education, from the money being spent.

My take:

The only real way that parents looked at whether you are doing well in college is from your grades and then of course if you can get a job in your field. I never thought about continually evaluating the standards at these colleges, always assuming that they are always up to speed. After all, it is college. We’ll have to see if the college presidents warm to the idea of closer scrutiny of their programs.