A new proposal to the Higher Education Act may require colleges to submit an annual “institutional report card” that would measure a college’s performance. The Career College Association, the major lobbying group representing for-profit colleges, is asking Congress to force colleges to publish a report assessing their successes in retaining and graduating students and in preparing students for life beyond the campus.
The organization also says the report cards would give students and parents a new guide to colleges when going through the application process.
The information would be slightly more than the data already found in college guidebooks by providing “tangible” information about a particular school, its mission, goals, and objectives, what it purports to do, and its success in doing that. Colleges would also have to present “outcome measures,” which would list factors such as job-placement rates, average starting salaries, graduate- and professional-school admissions data, passage rates of students on competency tests, student and alumni satisfaction surveys and employer-satisfaction surveys.
University of Wisconsin sophomore Amy Snyder had mixed feelings about the overall value of a more concrete grading system for college applicants.
“It would probably be a good thing for colleges to have to self-evaluate themselves,” Snyder said. “But, overall, things like that didn’t make much of a difference to me. I think you’re going to go where you want to go regardless.”
The emphasis on accountability has alarmed higher-education lobbyists and leaders who suspect the Bush administration intends to crank up the government’s oversight of colleges. While the leading higher-education associations say they would support efforts by the government to make data more widely available to students, they do not offer their own proposals to answer concerns from the administration and some lawmakers about the quality of their institutions.
College officials and lobbyists’ reactions to the association’s proposal have been tepid. Some say they are not concerned about the plan because it would not impose major new reporting requirements on colleges. Others object to the notion of the federal government’s ranking or grading colleges, especially when its judgments would be based on a small set of variables that officials say fail to capture the true strengths of their institutions.
Snyder agrees, saying she worries about how such specific information could be distorted.
“A bad year could skew the performance of a school that really does have a good reputation,” Snyder said.
Jacob Stampen, UW professor of educational administration, said the general concept is good, but the way it stands now can lead to several dangers for higher-education institutions. He fears the proposal is too narrow and could be counter-productive.
“A narrow interpretation of this stuff is a rigid definition of what it means, and can do more harm than good for everyone,” Stampen said. “It puts arbitrary expectations on institutions that they will behave that way when that would be the wrong way to behave. Flexibility is important to delivering good outcomes and this proposal removes flexibility.”
Stampen thinks the grading system will have minimal effect on UW and could have good or bad implications, dependant on how it is implemented.
