University ratings are easy to hate. For decades, the media-produced ratings like the US News and World Report evoked both scorn and hype. They were easy to ignore, until the federal government stepped in. There is now a semi-plan, of rather a report on a progress of developing a rating of colleges. Because there will be some financial strings attached, the new rating will be consequential, and it will for sure distort universities’ practices. As we know well from the Campbell’s Law, any numeric indicator, if it is taken seriously, will corrupt the very practice it intends to measure. So, all you critics, you’re all right.
But it appears we do not have an alternative. And by “we” I mean the entire global higher education community, not just the Americans or the Russians. The essential dilemma we all face is the same. Without some way of measuring universities’ effectiveness, the ever-expanding mass higher education will lead any country to economic ruin. Governments foot the bill of the college dreams. This happens either directly – like in Russia and many European countries, or indirectly, in the form of student financial aid in the US. Moreover, as 2008 has shown, in case of serious economic calamity all governments use the “too big to fail” logic, and in essence, become socialist. So, there is also an implied public insurance of the private student loans – both the sensible and the extravagant. We simply must make sure public finances flow into something that will bring economic benefit to the graduates and to the countries that subsidize them. You can talk about the personal growth or the public good until you’re blue in the face. But unless you’re willing to face another super-bubble like in 2007-2008, start counting the public money. Or else, why don’t you personally lend 100K to a kid who goes to a chef school, and is likely to end up as a line cook at 10 bucks an hour. That is if he graduates at all, which is far from certain. No, this is serious stuff: the cost of higher education goes up, the percentage of population who attempts college does the same, and the public budgets cannot keep up. Add to this ever increasing anxiety about the uncertainty of the future labor markets. We simply do not know which professions will be needed in 20 years. We don’t even know if most people still will be needed in new economies.
And we do not really have much in a way of measuring the value-added by higher education. The accreditation regimes did an OK job for more or less elitist higher education systems. Once a country enters the era of mass higher education, any accreditation system fails. If you set your requirements too high, you shut entire populations off higher education, and thus shutter any hopes for the knowledge economy. If you set them too low, your higher education is instantly flooded with crappy colleges. Accreditation is entirely input-based, and just does not guarantee much of anything in terms of quality. So some kind of a rating is inevitable, and the US Federal Government is doing the right thing by taking the process slowly and deliberately. I don’t envy whoever is in charge of the project.
But it appears we do not have an alternative. And by “we” I mean the entire global higher education community, not just the Americans or the Russians. The essential dilemma we all face is the same. Without some way of measuring universities’ effectiveness, the ever-expanding mass higher education will lead any country to economic ruin. Governments foot the bill of the college dreams. This happens either directly – like in Russia and many European countries, or indirectly, in the form of student financial aid in the US. Moreover, as 2008 has shown, in case of serious economic calamity all governments use the “too big to fail” logic, and in essence, become socialist. So, there is also an implied public insurance of the private student loans – both the sensible and the extravagant. We simply must make sure public finances flow into something that will bring economic benefit to the graduates and to the countries that subsidize them. You can talk about the personal growth or the public good until you’re blue in the face. But unless you’re willing to face another super-bubble like in 2007-2008, start counting the public money. Or else, why don’t you personally lend 100K to a kid who goes to a chef school, and is likely to end up as a line cook at 10 bucks an hour. That is if he graduates at all, which is far from certain. No, this is serious stuff: the cost of higher education goes up, the percentage of population who attempts college does the same, and the public budgets cannot keep up. Add to this ever increasing anxiety about the uncertainty of the future labor markets. We simply do not know which professions will be needed in 20 years. We don’t even know if most people still will be needed in new economies.
And we do not really have much in a way of measuring the value-added by higher education. The accreditation regimes did an OK job for more or less elitist higher education systems. Once a country enters the era of mass higher education, any accreditation system fails. If you set your requirements too high, you shut entire populations off higher education, and thus shutter any hopes for the knowledge economy. If you set them too low, your higher education is instantly flooded with crappy colleges. Accreditation is entirely input-based, and just does not guarantee much of anything in terms of quality. So some kind of a rating is inevitable, and the US Federal Government is doing the right thing by taking the process slowly and deliberately. I don’t envy whoever is in charge of the project.
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