A Learning Experience

Colleges can make themselves more accountable to parents, students and taxpayers.

LAST WEEK the Annapolis Group, a consortium of 121 liberal arts colleges, announced that a majority of its members had decided to stop participating in U.S. News & World Report's annual college rankings system. Representatives of these colleges have taken issue with the methodology, spirit and use of the popular rankings. They complain that the rankings favor rich schools; that they focus too much on inputs (such as the quality of matriculating students) rather than outcomes (such as how much each student has learned by graduation); and that they reduce the precious experience of postsecondary education to a mass-produced, oversimplified consumer product.

At times the rankings do seem disproportionately influential, with the tail wagging the dog on some schools' policy decisions -- such as when the Arizona Board of Regents agreed to award Arizona State University's president a $10,000 bonus if he could raise the school's U.S. News ranking. But these schools' disagreements with the magazine relate to a more fundamental debate: how to hold postsecondary schools accountable. Many liberal arts schools have kicked up a fuss about recommendations from the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education to hold colleges more accountable to taxpayers, parents and students -- who face tuition increases that far outpace inflation and who often have little means of judging the worthiness of their investments. The commission recommended, among other actions, that the federal government encourage institutions to assess student learning, through such measures as voluntary standardized testing. Deans and presidents immediately objected that the value of higher education is immeasurable and that applying any new standards for assessing schools' quality would lead to an ill-fitting No College Left Behind approach.

Part of the value of the college experience may be intangible, but surely there are commonalities and standards that can be compared. Several states, such as Texas, have already developed systems that try to gauge student retention, satisfaction and achievement. The Education Department is developing a Web site that will allow users to sort, compare and rank schools by their own prioritized criteria, based on data that schools report to the federal government (data that are also used in U.S. News's calculations). The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges is creating a voluntary accountability system, which would measure many of the "outputs" used by systems such as Texas's, that it will recommend to public institutions in the fall.

Maybe U.S. News isn't the answer, and maybe the commission's report isn't, either. But parents and students need some way of sorting through reams of college information in order to make rational investments, and taxpayers need to know that their money is being spent wisely on institutions (public and private) that accept federal and state funds. Colleges should develop consumer-friendly means of demonstrating to Americans that they're getting their money's worth.