Seriously, if you spend enough time attending conferences, reading op-eds, etc., you come to realize that that climbing walls have somehow come to symbolize all that ails post-secondary education in America today. People are constantly denouncing their proliferation, or loudly noting that their institution refuses to install one, or otherwise employing them as a symbol of consumerism run amok. Students today demand all manner of creature comforts, the thinking goes, forcing colleges to kow-tow to their every whim, which is why college is so expensive and academic standards are in decline and the academy in general is a pale shadow of its former, greater self, back when students were students and professors were professors and higher learning happened how and where it was meant to happen, that is, in unheated, dimly-lit buildings constructed entirely of large granite blocks quarried no later than the 16th century.
This puzzles me.
First, because of all the things to be upset about, climbing walls don't seem that bad. Are they really that expensive? At least students are getting some exercise. How about dorms that cost nearly $400,000 per unit? That's extravagance.
Second, because colleges act as if they have no influence over the consumer preferences of students. Which is ridiculous. For example, some time in the near future I'm going to drive to the Best Buy on Route 1 in Alexandria, Virginia, and buy a flat-screen television, The store offers something like a hundred different models to choose from. In making my selection, I'll be asking a number of questions. How big is it, measured diagonally, in inches? How many HDMI inputs? Ethernet connection? Plasma, LCD, or LED? Are there 1080 lines of resolution? 120 Hz or the more powerful 240hz? And so on.
How do I know to ask these questions? And why is every similar customer, regardless of where they live and where they're shopping, asking the same questions? Because that's how flat-screen televisions are advertised. I also consulted independent reports like this article in the New York Times, which advises that LEDs are really just backlit LCDs and I only need 240hz if I'm going to spend a lot time watching fast-motion programming like pro football. (I won't be; I'm more of an HBO and Showtime guy.) So there's some marketing b.s. to wade through. But it's safe to say that there are no crucial elements of flat-screen televisions that aren't readily available for me to understand.
By contrast, let's say I was trying to choose the right college for my (non-existent) 17-year old daughter. And let's say I'm the perfect higher education consumer from the academy's perspective--I don't care at all about climbing walls or fitness centers or luxury dorms or any of that stuff. I care about all the truly important things I'm supposed to care about: the quality of the teaching, scholarship, and academic environment, how the school will help my daughter become an enlightened, ethical, fair-minded public citizen.
How would I choose? Where would I get that information, in a way that would allow me to decide among hundreds of alternatives? Answer: nowhere, because it doesn't exist. Colleges may complain about having to market themselves based on dorm-based pilates studios and whatnot, but it's not like they have some other secret brochure in a filing cabinet somewhere, filled with all the real information about the true meaning of higher education, materials that they would gladly distribute far and wide if only students weren't so coddled by their helicopter parents and addled by the rap music and the video games.
In fact most colleges don't systematically gather this kind of information, or if they do--via the National Survey of Student Engagement or something similar--they don't release it to the public. Yes, yes, colleges are lot more complicated than televisions. But nobody can say with a straight face that colleges are doing nearly as much as they could to provide consumers with information about teaching and learning that's useful for making consumer choices--that is, presented in a way that allows for institutional comparisons.
Even the data that colleges do gather, like graduation rates, are usually buried on the IR department Web page somewhere. Why? Because graduation rate are frequently terrible. And that's the real climbing wall scandal: they're cheap, compared to the cost of improving the quality of instruction that many undergraduates receive. If colleges want consumers to make choices differently, then colleges have take the lead in creating, promoting and standing behind different terms of consumer choice.
8 comments:
Here are some metrics; I spent forty years as a university professor (of English), ten or so as a department head and dean. University administrations are lazy and incompetent, and it will be difficult to winkle out some of this information, but try these, which admittedly are more relevant to the humanities than the hard sciences.
1. Percentage of student credit hours generated (SCH, in the lingo) that are taught by TAs and adjuncts. For finer-grained detail, percentage of SCH taught by rank. If the TA/adjunct number is high, or the full professor number is low, beware.
2. Average class size by year (1st-year, sophomore, etc.). This number should be lowest for first-years, second-lowest for seniors.
3. Average full-time-equivalent (FTE) faculty teaching loads by rank. If there's a sharp dip in this number for full professors, you lucky parents out there are in all likelihood subsidizing a lot of faculty research, much of which, in the humanities, is of dubious value, to put it as kindly as I can.
If your 17-year-old daughter (to follow your hypothetical) is mature enough to make her own way, the best value for money is to be found in the state universities that have first-rate undergraduate programs (Michigan, Virginia, Vermont, Massachusetts). If she isn't, the best choices (in the humanities, again; I'm not sure this is equally true for the sciences) are schools that *don't* have graduate programs, which in most cases distract from the teaching mission. There are some obvious ones (Amherst, Dartmouth [no grad programs in humanities, anyway], Williams, Wesleyan) and less obvious ones (Davidson, Occidental, Coe, Grinnell).
If you trust your kid to take some risks, the most interesting places in higher ed these days are the better community colleges. If you have a late bloomer, two years in a good CC (the California system is the only one I know well) can set him/her up for two good last years and a diploma from a much better place at half the cost.
Above all, visit a half-dozen campuses with your kid before deciding, and trust your instincts. Full disclosure: I'm not in the college-advising (or any other) business. Just a retired academic.
God knows universities and colleges could do better information-gathering and self-reporting, but I think this accusation is about 10 years off.
Most public universities are up to their eyeballs in various "accountability" self-reporting projects, like for instance the VSA, which according to its website has about 325 participants nationwide.
http://www.voluntarysystem.org/index.cfm
Frankly, I wouldn't look at any single measure to evaluate an institution as complex as a university (graduation rates are important, but what about the incoming student body? etc.)
There's also the fact that significant numbers of application decisions are made on the basis of factors like affordability, accessibility, and regional oreputation, not to mention intangibles like sports teams, etc.
So, no, choosing a college is not like choosing a television, because you are not buying an object, but a multi-year process of learning.
Students make all sorts of decisions before, during, and after the process, but to blame poor information at a single stage for these decisions seems strange to me, now that students frequently move from institution to institution, for all sorts of reasons.
blue stater, your metrics don't measure value in a way a smart consumer should care about. in my senior year i dropped out of the political science program at the u of mn when my student job turned into a full-time staff job. basically i leapfrogged to the end game of a 4 year degree, driving a computer in a cubicle all day. but now i have a better perspective of college. i realize that what really matters in a liberal arts education is not that i, student, maximize face to face time with a professor per dollar spent. what matters is that i, student, find the biggest party dorm in the country because there is no program or professor that can outpace google.
the goal of a liberal education is to be able to write a persuasive essay in the thesis-body-conclusion format. lib arts students are reminded of this every time ones assigned. so your metrics blue stater are designed to help parents find schools that will teach essay-writing to their kids for the least investment. but persuasive writing is a dumb skill. ask anyone "when's the last time you wrote a 5 page essay" and the asnwer will be "in school." in fact whats rarest in my world is the person who can communicate ideas simply and directly, and leave the "persuading" to management. i mean, there are people in my office with 4-year and graduate degrees who cant write a comprehensible email. others can't install browser addons or swap printer cartridges. most of them dont feed themselves properly or they have disturbing personality tics.
all the liberal arts graduates being pumped out each year are trained to sit on committees. the only reason they work better than non-degree holders (i believe) is that there is a mound of debt motivating them. and so the rational consumer would be wise to find the exact opposite of what blue stater's metrics measure. prospective students should search for the most expensive windbag TA-ridden universities to party 24-7 for 4 years before the bank starts knocking -and cut and paste their essays from google.
Kevin, I’ll let most of your reply speak for itself, while observing that its content and logic suggest that you did indeed find the biggest party dorm at Minnesota.
If you think “persuasive writing is a dumb skill,” you might ask yourself why, if it’s true that whatever you mean by persuasive writing is a skill best left to management, folks in management have it (or have fooled enough people into thinking they have it so that they *are* management!). Somebody in the corporate hierarchy must think writing skills are important enough so that those who have them (or appear to have them) get promoted, and those who don’t, don’t.
I paid for my kids’ college with the money I made doing corporate writing programs for executives, lawyers, and financial people who hadn’t learned in college or graduate school how to make arguments and persuade readers to act favorably on their proposals or accept their views on particular legal, business, or financial issues. Maybe they, too, cut and pasted their essays from Google; if they did, they missed out on what they were paying for in college.
And let me tell you, it’s as easy to catch a student who cuts and pastes stuff from Google as it is to cut and paste the stuff in the first place.
Thank you for this interesting post. In these times of information overload, it can paradoxically be difficult to find that one particular piece (or pieces) of information you seek.
Folks might find Shaun McElroy's posted compilation of Common Data Set sites helpful.
For the moment, I'm side-stepping the question of which data I'd recommend you and your (nonexistent) daughter hone in on...
blue stater, congrats for finding a niche for persuasive writing in the market place but that just goes to prove my point. you were a professor, correct? see, school teaches students to be professors. outside of that graduates are worthless except to banks.
Kevin (if Anonymous 7:15 is you), I think we're smokin' different stuff here, so I'll leave you the field.
I'm not sure how it could be done, but the two numbers I would personally like to see when my kids are choosing a college:
#1. The grad school placement rates excluding legacies. The current numbers are artificially inflated by the almuni who follow in Daddy/Mummy's footsteps.
#2. The career placement numbers excluding those who got their jobs because of family connections.
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