Stalled at Launch

In K-12 education we have long debates about the purposes of public schooling, whether the focus should be on the basics or 21st century skills or if that's even a useful distinction, the best ways to assess student learning, how to contruct accountability systems that do more harm than good, etc. But underyling that discussion is a general consensus that it's possible to arrive at a reasonably accurate estimate of what students know, and that it's useful to compare students who attend one educational institution to students who attend other educational institution in this regard--or, at the very least, make the information public in a way that the people who attend the institutions and pay for the institutions can understand. In higher education, by contrast, no such agreement exists and indeed there are plenty of folks out there who find the whole idea puzzling and inappropriate. As such, higher education finds itself in a difficult spot: desperate for more public resources, but unable to marshall any convinving evidence of what those resources will produce in terms of how much college students learn. This is the subject of my new column in the Chronicle of Higher Education.