A newly appointed commission will consider whether standardized testing should be implemented into two-year and four-year colleges and universities as part of an effort to prove students are learning and to provide a tool for evaluating institutional performance.
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings appointed the commission that will focus on accountability in colleges and universities. The national commission aims to improve higher education by ensuring that college graduates are prepared to meet the needs of the U.S. workforce.
"Our system of higher education must provide a world-class education that prepares students to compete in a global knowledge economy," wrote Charles Miller, the chairman of the commission, in a public memo explaining the role of the commission.
Miller cites standardized testing for comparative purposes and as an alternative to ranking systems, such as the annual U.S. News and World Report college and university rankings that "use a limited set of data, which is not necessarily relevant for measuring institutional performance or providing the public with information needed to make critical decisions."
A standardized government test is a "clumsy" way of measuring the impact of higher education on students, said Liz Hollander, executive director of Campus Compact, a national organization of approximately 1,000 college and university presidents that is committed to educating students for their social responsibility. The program was started and is currently housed at Brown.
"You would have to assume that everyone wants to get the same thing out of a college degree," Hollander said. "That's a pretty problematic assumption altogether."
"47 percent of students are in community colleges; they are doing everything from preparing themselves to go onto a four-year school and getting a liberal education to getting highly-technical training for a very specific profession," continued Hollander, who also sits on the advisory committee on the International Consortium on Higher Education.
"Higher education needs to hold itself responsible for student learning," Hollander said. She said that a "fruitful" way to ensure accountability in higher education may be to ask students to volunteer to take the National Survey of Student Engagement, which asks freshmen and seniors to answer questions about their educational experiences, including topics such as their classroom participation, time spent on homework, interaction with faculty, time spent in community service and other measures that allow colleges and universities to get a sense of what their students' experiences are like.
John Tyler, chair of the University's education department, said that much of the call for more accountability in higher education might be a result of rising tuition costs and recent assessments on adult literacy.
A recent literacy study by the American Institutes for Research found that more than 75 percent of students at two-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges do not score at a proficient level of literacy. The study also found no difference between the quantitative literacy level of this generation's college graduates compared with previous generations.
The study, titled "The National Survey of America's College Students," sampled 1,827 graduating students from 80 randomly selected two- and four-year, public and private institutions.
The study found higher literacy levels among students whose coursework placed strong emphasis on applying theories or concepts to practical problems. The study found no relationship between students' majors and their literacy ability.
Spellings' commission seeks to emphasize critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and written communications as important skills that should be refined or acquired at colleges and universities.
Tyler said that in comparison to K-12 education, higher education is not compulsory and therefore the market has the ability to hold schools accountable.
"If people are lining up at the door to get into a Brown or a Harvard, when they could go some other place and maybe pay less, then it looks like they are saying, 'We believe these places are doing their job,' " Tyler said.
He said that the real concern is that at the level of state public universities and at community colleges, people are much less mobile and have much less choice and therefore they may not be able to "vote with their feet and pocket books" when determining which institution to choose.
He added that because standardized test is "such a loaded term," the majority of people at Brown and other elite universities would probably be against it, although, if the situation was framed to be about providing more information to parents and the public about how well schools do at preparing students to enter the world, then their response may be different.
Stressing the need for better assessment measures, Tyler said: "When people ask, 'Isn't more information better?' my response is, 'Yes, as long as it's good information.' "
Miller told the New York Times that if individual institutions like the elite universities in the Ivy League did not want to gauge student learning with standardized tests, then "it would be OK with me."
Jane Glickman, a spokeswoman for the secretary of education said that at this time the commission has held only three meetings and, therefore, it is too early to speculate on how its recommendations will impact the future of higher education. She added that students at Brown who are interested in having a say in this discussion should reserve a spot at the public hearing on the future of higher education that will be held in Boston on March 20.
