Higher Ed Revolution From the Lower Ranks?

A NYTimes front-page story earlier this week focused on the strenuous efforts of the University of Florida's flagship Gainesville campus to ascend in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. A few days earlier, the Charleston Daily Mail reported on how a growing number of West Virginia colleges and universities are trying to figure out how well they're teaching students and how much those students actually learn. Of the two, I'm guessing the Times article attracted a lot more attention. But West Virginia is where the really interesting and important story lies.

For an institution like the University of Florida, climbing the U.S. News rankings creates all kinds of conflicts and contradictions with their obligation as a public university to provide an accessible, affordable education to a broad array of students. That said, it's a fundamentally rational thing for them to do. They're 13th in the rankings now, so getting to the Top 10 isn't out of the question. In the elitist, status-driven context that governs the way people think about higher education quality, it would undoubtedly help them.

Public universities in West Virginia, by contrast, are never going to be in the upper echelons of the U.S. News hierarchy. Unlike the University of Florida, it wouldn't make sense for Glenville State College, where 59% of students receive Pell grants and the median incoming SAT score is 905, to launch a huge effort to become wealthy, famous, and exclusive, which is what it takes to look better according to U.S. News.

For an institution like Glenville, and the hundreds of other public and private universities like them, the only way to truly distinguish yourself is to add value, to show that you do a really good job teaching the students you enroll, and that they learn a lot between the time they arrive and the time they leave (hopefully with a degree). That's exactly the kind of information that National Survey of Student Engagement and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which are referenced in the article, provide.

At the moment, most of the NSSE and CLA results are kept close to the vest. Universities use them for internal evaluative purposes, but don't release them the general public. Insitutions are nervous about how they data might be interpreted, particularly if it indicates that they need to improve in some areas.

But in the long, I think the Glenvilles of the world are going to figure out that it's in their best interests to release this information, to create new terms of competition and status in higher education. If you can't beat the likes of the University of Florida at the current game, then change the game. Tell people that you're good at doing the job you're meant to do. Challenge the institutions that have a monopoly on all the money, status, and acclaim in higher education to prove that their reputations hold up when it comes to educating students.

There are a lot more Glenvilles than Gainesvilles in higher education. Eventually, they're going to figure out what's good for them. Then the institutions that have worked so hard to get to the top of the U.S. News rankings may find that they picked the wrong mountain to climb.