The Higher Education Lobby 1, Students 0

When special interests subvert good public policy, they usually try to cover their tracks. While people in the know can guess what really happened, both the influencers and the influencees usually create enough plausible deniability to escape blame.

But sometimes it all happens right out in the open, and that in itself tells you a lot about the lobby and the issue at hand. So it was yesterday with the announcement--first reported yesterday in the Chronicle of Higher Education and also this morning in Inside Higher Education-- that the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) will be pulling back on an initiative to gather better education statistics about higher education.

Here's what happened: Over the last five years or so, many colleges have begun to collect information about how well they teach their students and how much their students learn, through survey instruments like the National Survey of Student Engagment (NSSE) and tests like the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). While most institutions keep the results confidential, some make them publicly available. NCES proposed that those institutions submit the link to the Web page containing the results. That way NCES could include that link on it's free College Opportunities On-Line Web page, so that high school students choosing colleges could see the information.

In a response, the higher education lobby had a cow.

And so it was depressing but unsurprising to hear Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, director of the Institute for Education Sciences, say, in so many words, "The people who made this decision were just trying to do the right thing and fulfill the NCES mission of gathering education information in the best interests of the public. They didn't realize that sometimes people in positions of greater authority within the government have to compromise the public interest in order to placate special interests." Thus, the requirement to submit links to the already-public teaching and learning data will be removed.

Just to be clear: The Department of Education wasn't requiring any institution to participate in NSSE, the CLA, or any other survey or assessment process. Nor was it requiring institutions that participate but choose to keep the results confidential to disclose their results. All it said was that if you do disclose them, let us know where, so students choosing colleges can see them.

Why is higher education acting like it has something to hide? Because it does. The plain truth is that a great many institutions are doing a mediocre or worse job of educating undergraduate students. Everyone knows this, but nobody wants to say so, because fixing that problem would require a lot of hard choices. Thus, any attempt to raise the issue--or to disclose data about the issue--is quickly squashed. Or, as Whitehurst said (this is an actual quote):

“We understand in the current environment that people see this as a foot in the door for a potential move some time in the future to require some kind of student learning outcome, by providing strong incentives to collect that. We think that’s a state or association role to move in that direction. It exceeds the response of a federal authority or control to be incentivizing that kind of collection.”

The federal government provides higher education with tens of billions of dollars in the form of tax preferences, research grants, and student aid, but it "exceeds the response of a federal authority" to even create incentives for institutions to possibly disclose information that would indicate whether or not they're using all of that money to help the students and families who are paying those taxes.

That says it all.