— The projected four-year cost of attendance minus the amount of cash financial aid and broken down by family income and assets. Colleges were required by the federal government to post net price calculators by the fall of 2011. But they are not required to be posted off of the college or university’s homepage.
— Freshman-to-senior growth in written and oral communication, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, and information literacy broken down by major and by student high school record. To reduce the burden on an institution, only a random sample of students need be tested. The results would be posted on students’ transcripts to ensure they give their best effort.
— Four, six, and eight-year graduation rates, broken down by major and student’s high-school record.
— The results of the institution’s most recent student satisfaction survey.
— The most recent accreditation agency’s action and summary of its visiting team report.
— The percent of graduates that, within one year of graduation, hold a job requiring a college degree, broken down by major and by high school record.
Students would enter their high school grades, SAT/ACT score, and planned major, click, and their personalized version of the college’s report card grades would appear.
To ensure integrity, an outside entity would randomly audit the reported data.
The College Report Card is different from, for example, U.S. News & World Report’s rating system. The latter focuses heavily on a college’s reputation, which is affected by an institution’s research productivity, size, and even age. The U.S. News ranking pays little attention to the quality of the undergraduate experience. U.S. News also heavily weighs colleges’ self-reported class size and faculty-student ratio. Those are often misleading because they include professors who rarely teach undergraduates and classes that few students take, such as Intermediate Sanskrit, which may have five students while commonly taken intro courses like Intro to Biology have hundreds.
U.S. News also considers faculty salary, which is often based on how much research money the faculty member brings in, not on their ability to be transformational teachers of undergraduates. Research productivity is often inversely correlated with commitment to and excellence in teaching undergraduates. Student selectivity is also weighted heavily, while the value-added component, that is, how much students grow compared with similar students that attend similar institutions is ignored.
Shining a light on how little value many colleges add for all that time, money, and opportunity cost would — if only so colleges can better compete for students — encourage colleges to reallocate resources. They would be incentivized to spend less on non-critical administrative and infrastructure costs and non-essential faculty and research and more on a transformational teaching faculty, mentoring, advising, and a more helpful career center.
That bright light might even finally push colleges to stand up to the faculty senates with such cost-saving and student-learning-enhancing innovations as online classes team-taught by world-class instructors.
Some have argued that such a Report Card should arise from the accreditation process. But each college pays the accrediting agency, which means colleges have, for the most part, been able to resist being required to post a substantive report card on their Web site. One agency, the Senior College Commission of the Western Association has made small steps in this direction but, as a member of its task force on accountability and transparency, I am not convinced it will do enough quickly enough. I believe this is a job for the government.
Before we blithely support yet more increases in taxpayer-funded college financial aid, which too often merely allows colleges to continue to raise their sticker price beyond the inflation rate, shouldn’t we hold colleges at least as accountable as we do tire manufacturers?
Do you think colleges should be required to prominently post a College Report Card on their Web site?
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